Play With This Too...

[Sky Shadow]

To be Kickstarted next year by former Hasbro employees - they will be releasing homages to Pretenders, Inhumanoids and now GoBots.

Not-Pretender-Starscream with Not-Fitor.

[Lord_Zed]

I like the idea of making action figures as Pretender homages, especially given they are saying they will give the artists full control and have interchangeable heads and hands. The art for their Bomburst and Skullgrin based figures looks promising.

[Sky Shadow]

I like the idea of making action figures as Pretender homages, especially given they are saying they will give the artists full control and have interchangeable heads and hands. The art for their Bomburst and Skullgrin based figures looks promising.

Yeah - there's a Cloudburst, Grimlock, Liquidator and Landmine too. And the fiction (or at least some of it) is being written by Simon Furman. Definitely one to watch.

[reillyd]

I just read WHO the former employee is - Aaron Archer. They should never have fired that dude

[Sky Shadow]

I just read WHO the former employee is - Aaron Archer. They should never have fired that dude

He resigned, allegedly, because "it was getting simply too difficult to make what he deemed a fun figure while dealing with things like rising plastic costs and price efficiency".

Hilariously that was immediately followed by, "As far as third parties are concerned, Hasbro cannot be influenced by any outside ideas for legal reasons, (he reasoned that "it wouldn't make sense to steal from someone who was stealing [from us]"). Hasbro does monitor the products for legality's sake though, Aaron said they have a binder (a big one by this point) that catalogues all the unofficial toys to monitor them in case of legal injunctions or trademark violations. On a more personal note, Archer said that the Third party companies can make some talented figures, but wishes that they would sell more original transforming toys then trying to profit off of a pre-existing franchise."

And "Aaron Archer is no longer an acting employee of Hasbro, but still does freelance toy design for the company. The latest one he said he worked on was flip and change grimlock, not even the design but just the concept of what he wanted the toy to do (I want it to go like this, then that, then zoop.) someone else designed the toy"

Also, he "really doesn't like the 3p's. calls it IP theft."

From here, just two months ago.

That said, I think Play With This Too is primarily Rik Alvarez - Archer might just be doing some design work.

[liegeprime]

hmmm. I like the Pretenders... so will these shells be poseable then? I wonder if the Starscream shell can fit the current Legends Starscream which for me is the counterpart for the CHUGUR line for Pretender starscream for it's sizing . I really like that mould (legends Screamer). So if that can indeed fit in without a prob then Wohooo. Just hope this are static bricks with fat torosos to fit the minifigure, coz really, it's 2014 already surely the toy tech has gone a long way. Sometimes concept art does not translate to the finished product.....which is a shame.

[griffin]

He has done a little bit of art for Play With This Too...

http://playwiththistoo.com/2015/01/1...ic-siebenaler/

That doesn't surprise me, since a lot of the people who worked on Transformers at the same time as him are the core of that new business venture. But I thought Eric might have been more involved in the year since he left Hasbro... unless he is busy with something else we don't know about.

Looking at the products page of PWTT... that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. The top half all look like Transformers characters, and they have a "Hero Mashers" design/play-element to them.
The 3rd-party businesses in Asia can get away with it because they are not known to be from ex-employees, and they are outside of the American legal jurisdiction of Hasbro... but since PWTT has several Hasbro TFs designers, if they became a success later, Hasbro could go after them with the claim that these were ideas they had while employed at Hasbro (which could use the Hero Mashers concept as proof), and as such, if they are being paid by Hasbro to deliver toy ideas during a certain time-frame and it can be proven these were first thrown around in that time, then those ideas are Hasbro property.
(the precedent is already there - the designer for Bratz dolls used to work for Mattel, and when he left and developed his own toyline through MGA, Mattel sued him/them for half a Billion dollars on the claim that his first ideas for the Bratz toyline was while he was being paid to produce toy ideas for Mattel, and as such they claimed to have exclusive rights to any ideas he had during that time even if Mattel didn't use them or know about them... and after many years and many millions of dollars spent in courts, the dispute is still not resolved, and the Bratz line lost an estimated 1 Billion dollars due to the loss of momentum by retailers who saw the bad press tied to the brand and the uncertainty of recalls/refunds if the impending injunctions that prevented selling them came into effect - effectively, the money and power behind Mattel was able to destroy the strongest competitor Barbie ever had, even if Mattel end up losing the lawsuit because the Bratz brand never recovered... and Hasbro has just as much power to protect its billion-dollar brand of Transformers if it needs to stall the success of a real rival, if one ever appeared in the American market)

[Deonasis]

^It does make you think about why they are flying so close to the sun. Aaron Archer and co would know better than most the IP legalities. Time will tell I guess..

[SharkyMcShark]

I'm amused by it mainly because of Archer's massive boohoo at TFCon last year about how terrible it was that third party companies are riding on Hasbro's coat tails by producing things similar to Transformers.

[prjkt]

I don't think Archer's problem was with third party figures as such, just that they were basing them on existing characters, instead of creating new ones (which seems to be what Play With This Too seems to be doing)