[Steevy Maximus]

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Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

I think that one of the huge problems that killed toys in the '90s was when Mcfarlane toys heavily enforced variant toys. What started as a paint mishap turned into "let's make thirteen of one character" and then let's mass produce them beyond demand and then people will buy stupid amounts of them because toys from the '70s are expensive now so clearly these will be too. EXTREME!!!

I actually think the "variant thing" was more endemic of the increased focus on collectors and speculators over kids in the toy market in later 90s to mid-2000s (though I think speculation largely died out by the early 2000s, with nostalgia fueled collectors becoming a factor after).
Kids don't care about variants (assuming they ever actually saw one), but variants are a great way to get collectors to buy the same figure multiple times.

I do find it amusing to look back at what was "hot for collectors" in the 90s (Star Trek, early STar Wars, Batman Total Justice, etc) be worth almost nothing today, while the actual kids toys (Transformers Beast Wars, Jurassic Park) have become rather pricey.

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I think that today's play toys are not so much disappointing as they are lapsing back to what they used to be, we were spoiled by those super articulated toys so now the return to actual play toys is an apparent decline in standards. I think it may be that those super articulated toys were the peak of what some of these toy lines could do and it got to be too much so a return to basics was in order.

Oh yeah, I've been saying over at TFW that collectors that came into the hobby in the last decade entered into a relative "golden age" and became spoiled by what was accomplished during that period (in Transformers case, largely fueled by a HUGELY successful feature film)
It's amusing to hear all the complaints about how expensive toys have gotten, only to see the same people turn around and complain how insulting toys have become (largely to address the cost issue)

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I will say that adult collectible toys are better than ever now with a much wider selection of companies and more diverse licenses than ever before. Let's just hope we don't get a '90s style collapse any time soon.

I think the prevailing issue with the 90s collapse was that companies were trying to sell "collector figures" in a mass market environment where they just didn't belong: the price point didn't allow for the level of detail collectors want, but were still too expensive or too "above the heads" of kids to sell at that level.

With the internet, we're firmly seeing the "kid market" and "collector market" split. Which has its own issues as much of the success of Star Wars and similar lines was built on both kids AND collectors buying into the same product line. And I think some of the weakening of action figures is due to the fact a LOT of collector dollars aren't there to support those sort of items, which were costed higher than impulse to give the collectors feature and deco they want.

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Originally Posted by Skoob

Interestingly, the best figure I've found in months turned out to be a bootleg (Iron Man MK43). You know the industry is due for a shake-up when bootlegs outperform the mainstream!

I still think the shifts in the industry have happened such that companies like Hasbro and Mattel just don't know what to do about it. I still believe both are guilty of "fracturing" their own kid market by making a bunch of competing items in the same price brackets. They're putting so much different stuff out there to compensate for lower volume, that the overall brand is hurt by so many different figure styles (none of which given the focus to build a complete "line")

Avengers is endemic of this problem: the big focus on marketing has been the talking Titan figures, but they've also got the 2.5 system and its tower and jet AND a slate of 3.75 figures, plus some 6" collector figures.
Maybe I'm just an old fogey, but which of those are the "primary" line? Back in the 90s, there would have been ONE core line of figures supported by vehicles, with a couple of outlier items.
And because you have all these compete styles (many repeating the same characters), I think the "world building" element is lost and kids aren't going to build the same attachment to the brand as they might have.