TFCC Botcon 2016 theme - Dawn of the Predacus

[griffin]

You know who WON'T be going to BotCon this year?

But wait. A replacement guest has been announced, and ooh it's a good one.

That's so sad, for the fans who were going and wanting to see him.

In case the BotCon twitter disappears again, the first link is to an announcement that Scott McNeil will not be able to make it to BotCon this year.

The second link refers to Gregg Berger taking his place, from the recent FunPub email...

Hello Members!

We have some exciting news! On Friday afternoon, BotCon registered attendees will be treated to a script reading panel starring Judd Nelson, David Kaye, Venus Terzo, and Gregg Berger! To see this you must be a registered attendee, so make sure you have signed up for your Primus, Golden Ticket Primus, MiniCon or Protoform package. Also, for those who have already registered, if you have not yet added your Judd Nelson VIP Pass to your existing package you can do that today! Visit BotCon for the details and then if you need to register, add the VIP pass or do both, you can do that here.

As you can tell from the above paragraph, there has been a guest change. Unfortunately due to personal reasons, Scott McNeil had to cancel. However, Gregg Berger will now be coming! We will all miss Scott, but we are very excited about seeing our old friend Gregg in a few short weeks.

Registration will close on March 21st so there is not much time left to register. Currently there are only 30% of the Primus packages, 8% of the GT packages and 19% of the Iacon (non-attending) packages, left.

Please note that March 16 is the last day you can join the Transformers Collectors Club. If you are interested in receiving the discounts for BotCon, the 2016 FREE Membership Incentive figure and/or purchasing the TFSS 5.0 (to be revealed in full at BotCon 2016) you will need to be an active member as of March 16. All memberships will end December 31, 2016. Hasbro looks forward to sharing new plans for the Collector’s Club with you in the future.

We appreciate your support over the last 12 years and wish the brand well in their new endeavors.

Thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing each and every one of our Club members at BotCon 2016!

Brian

I'm actually quite surprised at how many sets are still unsold. 30% of the Primus allocation and 19% of the non-attending allocation... plus about a dozen Golden Tickets left.
Even if they didn't reduce the number of boxsets this year (from not selling out for the last four years), having about a quarter (about 400) unsold, of an estimated 1500 boxsets (last year's number), is a lot of expensive boxsets that FunPub have to clear out before the end of the year.


As for the loss of their two main guests this year, it looks like FunPub is getting all sorts of karmic bad luck right now, just before they end their Transformers operations... and it isn't even caused by their mishandling of things this time.
If these things had happened six years ago before things started going bad for them with the Transformers fandom, they would have earned a fair bit of sympathy over the massive bad luck of both of their headline guests cancelling. As much as you want them to fail like this, it is the fans (attending the event) who will suffer most from this.