This is the problem inherent in our little hobby here. As prices go higher, people want to have better investments in their purchases too. When the next best version of something is always right around the corner, it becomes harder to justify paying as much as these are starting to cost. At $100-150 for a figure, you can still feel okay about the enjoyment you get from it if you lose a few bucks in value to a new version. At $300 up a figure, you become less willing to upgrade, and less satisfied with loss of resources spent as that is also multiplied.
And let's face it, these aren't vintage toys where people will want them 30 years from now because they have some nostalgia attached to them. They are collectibles first and foremost, and will suffer the ebb and flow of that market, rather than something like vintage toys where people desire far inferior representations to modern releases, for reasons other than their edition number. And, when multiple companies are releasing figures of a character, the market compares them all together in terms of saturation, valuing not just a SSC piece to an SSC piece, but one to any other representation past and present.
I've bought a lot of figures and enjoyed a lot of releases with you guys. But, it's getting harder and harder to stay interested in the hobby, especially considering the expense and market saturation of all these characters. I can appreciate them as figures to enjoy on my shelf, and there is value in that. But, it's getting a lot more difficult to look at them as collectibles when incremental upgrades like this never really pay off in the end, and there's no shortage of selection, nor will there be in the future. The edition number on these really is infinity so long as people keep buying them.
