Quote Originally Posted by KELPIE View Post
Could that be spun positively in that they're popular and being bought by fans?

Out of curiosity, how are other robot centric properties doing in Japan?
It could be, but I also think it's due to shops getting a lesser amount of stock as well. Admittedly Takara release whole boxes of characters as opposed to waves, so a shop will buy a box of wheeljacks and a box of Wheelies. Naturally Wheeljack will be fine and snapped up, but there is a high chance the Wheelies will be left behind to stink the place up.

I've been watching other lines and and Gundam still seems popular. Super Sentai lines still do well and have plenty of presence and Takara's Shinkalion (and the new car one they have) seems very very popular. I suspect the aforementioned transforming bullet train line may well be cannibalizing any young kids who would otherwise be into Transformers.
Ever since the "Brand unification" and lack of TV placed cartoon here, TFs have stagnated. But they always seem to do that where there is a lack of media presence. For the last Bay movie, it looked like things were slowing down and the gap between the Bumblebee toy line hitting the shelves and the movie release here (over 6 months IIRC) halted any possible momentum. So I am curious to see how things will go with Rise of the Beasts.

Really though I think the market is pretty tough in Japan. You've got a diminishing amount of kids, very successful long term competitors, and new technology and modern things to deal with as well. More kids are into sgames on their phone than physical toys and whatnot and of course phone games here end up meaning huge amount of various craptacular merchandise that com with it. The palce is very much "Flavour of the month" fad-centric country.

Without constant marketing, they don't really have much sway.

Whoops, that ended up being longer than I intended. My apologies.