[Steevy Maximus]

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Originally Posted by Trivial Psychic

A large part of this feeling of being jipped by today's toys I've noticed seems to come heavily from fans of the 3.75" scale market, which to you I say that many of you have simply been spoiled by the renaissance of articulation that the scale has received over the last few years. Does the cutbacks in articulation stink? Hell yeah it does. Unfortunately, all things do peak, and eventually fade away. There was a time when Marvel Legends and G.I.Joes disappeared off of our shelves for years. But if the line was strong enough, it could eventually raise itself from the ashes and be reborn anew, and even better than before. We've seen it happen time and time again with Star Wars and TMNT, so have faith. It might take a while, but we'll get there.

I personally think what we've seen the last 6 or so years has been a much needed "market correction" spurred by changing retail habits and increasing costs in China.
For a while, toy companies were able to reach a point where they were able to provide a "collector friendly" toy at mass market/kid prices. And we all loved being able to get a super articulated 3.75 figure for $6-7.

But the big things I saw was that over that period of time, we saw action figure space (already smaller than the 90s) reach some of the lowest shelf space I've seen in my lifetime. A big part of that was the surge of costs we saw around 2009 caused, IMO, by two big factors:
1. Retailers (like Walmart) stopped treating toys as loss leaders. Toy prices were kept artificially low for DECADES by stores taking little or no real profit on toys to drive people to their stores (I remember GI Joe in 2007 saw a 30% undercut across the ENTIRE range at Walmart). Around 2009, that stopped, so that Transformers deluxe that Walmart bought for $8 and sold for $10? Well, now they wanted a healthier margin so the price kicked up to $13, which was also fueled by..
2. MASSIVE increases in production costs in China. Hasbro stated back in 2013 that the average increase PER YEAR of production costs was 20%. And since Hasbro still wants to make money, that cost got passed along to retailers who, wanting to keep their margins, passed that along to the consumer.
The increases of labor have gotten to the point Hasbro has shifted a LOT of their manufacturing to Vietnam (pretty much all of Transformers Combiner Wars is produced there instead of China)

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And on a closing note...enjoy some of this 5POA stuff. Star Wars is hitting it out of the park with a lot of it. While the Vintage, Clone Wars, and various other lines had superior amounts of articulation, remember that it wasn't long before that that Star Wars figures only had 6 points of articulation...and we all loved and devoured them from store shelves like a stack of free pancakes from iHop. I remember people PHYSICALLY FIGHTING over 6POA Qui Gon Jinn and Darth Maul figures back when "The Phantom Menace" came out. =P

And I think it is important to note that those 5 POA figures are half the price of a super articulated figure.
Kind of amusing to think that (theoretically, anyway), a current 5 POA Darth Vader would retail for $5.99. Fifteen years ago, a single carded Darth Vader was $4.99

In some ways, I think the trajectory of the action figure market echoes what happened to comics: after their bubble burst in the 90s (I'd argue the action figure bubble burst in the early 2000s), the companies doubled down on their established market (the collector), which only served to further distance the market from the mass retail that fueled its success to begin with.

I see similar thing in action figures where toy companies doubled down on collectors, only see retail space shrink and costs continue to go up. And now we're seeing that issue addressed with a much greater emphasis on cheap toys that kids can actually buy.

Because remember, many of the toys we had growing up were just cheap toys we happened to make an attachment to, and were often sold to us by branding and gimmicks than screen accuracy or articulation.