The Hasbro Star Wars brand is a dumpster fire and they let it get that way. If this fails, I don't feel sorry for them, their designers or the fans.
For $350, I'd buy a Rancor, Rancor Keeper, an all new Jedi Luke and carded versions of Gamorrean Guard and Salacious Crumb (weird choice, he belongs with Jabba, but whatever) that I already have. I don't really care about Oola or Slave Leia and wouldn't expect them in a set like this, but the others save for Crumb? They should have been featured in the beginning. At this point, this hobby relies on nostalgia. Everything that is featured on that 1983 vintage Rancor box should be redone in this new scale for 2023.
These crowd funding campaign schemes that billion dollar corporations think up are complete scams. It takes the risk out of business and puts it on the customer's shoulders. That's not right. People should know what they're getting for their money. Hasbro isn't some small DIY company that need funding to get products made, they're quite the opposite. What they ask from the consumer now is just insulting and ridiculous. The tier campaign is just laughable and it surprises me people still try to buy into it. Drop the tiers, drop the game playing and be up front with people about what they're buying. Really? Bones and a cheap backdrop are a tier that needs to be earned? GTFO with that. I'm honestly surprised they even have 1000 people willing to plop down that kind of money, let alone 9000.
This new trend of showing off digital prototypes is also getting out of hand. I see it everywhere now. Show me SAMPLES of what I'm buying, not what amounts to cartoony concept drawings. Could you imagine these toy companies going out to Toy Fair in the 90s and 2000s with DRAWINGS, expecting retail to buy them? What's worse is, they actually do have these things tooled up. CLEARLY these greedy bastards have been working on the Rancor monster for years now and want to sell it to people. It's been obvious since the beginning. To come out with images of grey, "digital sculpts" first when they clearly had a hardcopy test prototype is just insane to me and doomed this project from the get go. They try and act like these things aren't in development with actual time and money put into them when they clearly are. They pulled that tooled, articulated, painted prototype out of their ass REAL quick when people weren't showing interest. So you just know that a partially assembled Luke and Keeper are sitting on someone's desk somewhere in the office. Show people what they're getting, they want product, not pictures, not tiers. They want toys.
Rancor and Rancor Keeper would do poorly at retail, no doubt about that. But they don't need a group funding campaign to make the two of them and sell them to an audience that would actually buy them i.e. people like us. I love how open they are about Luke and the Keeper coming out later single carded too. These new guys make awful salesmen. History has shown that figures like Rancor Keeper, Yarna, etc. peg warm and don't sell so if they put him out at retail again thinking they're going to profit, they're idiots. They could have made this project something special if they weren't greedy and dropped the tier ********. Show that fully developed Rancor beast with special carded versions of the Keeper, Luke (with the bone and skull), Guard and Crumb right out of the gate and people would have eaten this up. Keep the Keeper exclusive to the set and you'd have OCD nutjobs buying multiple sets JUST to keep the shirtless fatman carded, loose and sell. Otherwise, he should never see the light of day. Throwing up a google picture of him on instagram, again, takes all the risk off their shoulders and puts that risk of subpar product directly on the consumer's shoulders. That's wrong, especially without proper refunds. They can shove their disclaimers up their ass.
On a side note, I love how these toy companies keep boasting how they're using SOFT, RUBBERY, PIECES for their toys when history has shown time and time again that these items rot, leak, and break down. Yeah, way to advertise a quality $350 product you out of touch morons.
