I don't even understand why they're doing it. Are Hasbro planning on relaunching ROM, GI Joe, Visionaries, MASK, Micronauts, Battle Beasts etc.? Where are the accompany toy lines? If not, then why bother doing this?

It felt like a lame way to try and market their other toy property comic series by riding on the coattails of the Transformers' success, but then once everyone jumped on the Transformers' coattails it ended up dragging the TF series down. And people complain about a handful of human characters in the Bumblebee movie... they've got nothing compared to Transformers: Hasbroverse! And why develop a character like Stardrive if there isn't going to be a toy of her?!? Damn it!

Actually, that's one of my beefs with IDW overall (long before the Hasbro shared universe thing) -- making us emotionally invest in characters not based on an existing toy. Rung, the DJD, Tyrest, Pharma etc. WHY? It's annoying because one thing I've really liked about IDW is how a lot of TF toys that have previously had very little if any canonical appearances have appeared in IDW! Hubcap! But with so many other TFs out there that are still underused, why not tap into them instead of just throwing new characters that we cannot reenact with our action figures!?!

Okay, G1 did give us non-toy characters too (Xaaron, Impactor, Alpha Trion etc.), but these were characters that the writers needed to have total freedom with. Often to kill off or remove (your "hi then die" characters like Scrounge, Crosscut, Ferak etc.), but also because toy-based characters were introduced and removed according to Hasbro. Typically out of production toys had to be removed or omitted from stories and new toys had to be introduced. So unique toyless characters were created so that they could do stuff without requiring Hasbro's permission. Impactor was the first leader of the Wreckers and killed off because he wasn't a toy. Springer then took over but they couldn't kill him off because Hasbro wouldn't have let them.

IDW, by and large, aren't under this restriction. With only a few exceptions, most IDW TFs aren't introduced/removed from the story because of Hasbro. IDW have a level of creative freedom that Marvel writers could only dream of. You could introduce a character as obscure as Hasbro's Overlord (not Takara's Masterforce Overlord, Hasbro's!) and get away with it. Heck, IDW even managed to get one of their original characters later made as a toy - Drift! Who's even expanded beyond the IDW universe. Why couldn't the DJD have been comprised of lesser known Decepticons that they could've written up the same personalities for? IDW have been known to disregard a toy's G1 bio in favour of something completely different (e.g. Swerve, Tailgate, Dai Atlas, Star Sabre, Whirl etc.). Clench, Fearswoop, Calcar etc. -- they could've had their moments to shine instead of being forgettable background characters as they were.