Quote: SlvrYou know, this has been buzzing in my mind. What if, instead of stocking retail stores, they had an online "catalog" of sorts that would offer the currently available figures. That way, instead of losing money, they only have to create a much smaller amount rather than the amount they send out to stock varying stores and they can still do figure variants and in-game variants by making certain characters limited time only and, for random inserts, just randomly replace regular characters with the random inserts... Granted, you'd probably have to use a warehouse or something to store the figures before they get shipped out, but surely there's a building like this already?
Of course, I'm sure there are a million other reasons why that wouldn't work but I think it'd be a good idea. Just my two cents I suppose.
This has been on my mind a lot over the last year. (Note that though I've been playing since just before Swap Force came out, I really only joined the "fandom" after the announcement of Imaginators last summer.) If the main issue is getting stores to carry product towards the end of the release schedule, then a) why not expedite that schedule to get everything out on the shelves by Easter, and/or b) why not sell them directly through an Activision online store to cut the costs of physical retail? Both seem like no-brainers to me.
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Quote: defpallyIf they were smart and wanted to give it a go again, ideally they would go with a new game with a very limited figure selection to warm the waters up again. You have to tease fans back into the franchise after the more recent burns, notably leaving the US hanging out to dry on the last release. SSA worked well because it was fun, new and the idea of collecting all the figures was not a unreasonable endeavor at the time with figures running $7.99 and triples/adventure packs at $19.99. I would think a new game that focuses on solid gameplay, focusing on lengthy content and less on gimmicks, with max 2 per element figures and no special/additional stuff. Make Adventure Pack Levels inexpensive DLC, instead of pricey retail packs.
Agreed, a combination physical/digital release makes a ton of sense in the current climate. They definitely need to reduce the costs of physical character toys (which I believe they should keep producing) back to $10, as that seemed to be the sweet spot for them, and then sell levels as digital DLC for $10.
Honestly, SuperChargers probably had the most to gain from this delivery method -- if they'd announced up front that they'd be adding a new track pack every few months for $10, the game probably would have been MUCH more profitable. And that's coming from someone who hated SC.
The added bonus of selling levels as DLC is that
everybody who wants them would have to pay. I've let at least 3 other people unlock levels using my physical toys, since you only need to scan them once to permanently unlock them on your profile. (This isn't as much of a problem with the character toys, since loaning someone my characters means that I can't play them
at all until they're returned to me... but I can still access the unlocked levels whether I have their toys on-hand or not.)