[Madame Warlock]

tbh Hasbro(and Mattel) have a long history of making questionable/indecipherable business decisions. people who think it must be done for some unseen reason to maximise profit have too much faith in their competency - sure they're greedy capitalists so that's what they THINK they're doing but you'd be surprised how many ridiculous obstacles there are to basic supply and demand. In particular concepts like "girl action figures don't sell" which isn't true. The toy industry is full of self fulfilling prophecies too, where people get the idea something shouldn't work so they sabotage it. I think this is the problem when you have actual nerds inputting into it, esp. wealthy ones that afford for the larger, more expensive figures so assume every other "collector" can too.

I was mad at the change to 4" when it happens but also kind of excited. 5 years later we were made to switch back if we wanted to be "Real" collectors. It's pretty obvious the market can support both scales as it has done for some time. In Mattel's case for example, do they really think having 6-7 different iterations of the same character, 4 of the same version, in the same or same-ish scale is the best idea market wise? As dodgy as the Infinite Heroes line was at least it was something. Quite why they scrapped it when Marvel Universe became a successful was bemusing. The Multiverse stuff was a good sign they were doing the MU thing, and then that disappeared. Similarly - it seemed like the 4" figs were in for a revival when they got rebranded as Legends. We were getting some awesome new out of left field figs like Spider-man Noir, Femthor, Classic Guardians, etc. that the 6 inchers weren't getting. Then we all got a Carol Danvers with a dodgy paint job and not a single new fig at Toyfair. What happened?

None of this really screams to me that these guys have a clue what they're doing. The problem is that these businesses try to operate on the idea of what their customer base SHOULD look like, which is one of the reasons why there's crazy gender segregation in toys perhaps now more than ever. They like to have set demographics to market to, and don't like when they overlap. Unfortunately more and more it's obvious that this is a terrible strategy that people are becoming more conscious of especially eg. with the reintroduction of feminism and race politics into the mainstream. Segregated marketing really needs to go away. The idea of "Smaller scale for kids, larger scale for collectors" is one particular example of that market segregation - and you can see it with the new Star Wars stuff with the 6" black series being more readily available than the 3.75" stuff. Similarly, the 4" Movie figs were largely nuked in favour of the 2.5" to make way for playsets - because smaller figs are for kids, and we can make these more cheaply that way and market to parents who don't have a ton of space for larger playsets.

Hasbro & Mattel need to accept that you can't divide up the market so easily between boy and girl, kid and adult, etc. and that you can market a lot of this stuff to pretty much anyone. As people have noted the shelfwarming patterns don't support what Hasbro & Mattel are doing. The thing with 4 inch figs(esp. the slightly larger 4 inch over 3.75 inch) is that they were the perfect versatile size to market to both kids and collectors, as they were just about large enough to show off as cool figs and small enough for kids to fit in their pocket, army build or to make small playsets for. It's probably why most trading figs in Japan are around this size. The 2.5" stuff has little appeal to collectors. You can still see a lot of Age of Ultron stuff on the pegs. Kids were already used to the 4" scale from the last few movies - switching to 2.5" from GotG onwards was a really bad decision.

I also dislike that we have no real way of communicating with the Hasbro designers whereas toybiz made themselves more readily available. I'd love to ask when wtf they're thinking.