Fan-backed Hasbro project: Unicron

[Borgeman]

From the aggressivecomics website, an interesting interview with Takashi Kunuhiro (Takara Tomy Senior Product Designer), noting that he had originally wanted the Unicron toy to be 100cm tall, but the sheer weight of all of that plastic wouldn't be able to work in planet mode, so it was scaled back to being about 70cm tall.

Doesn't make much sense to me tbh, I could see the "too heavy for robot mode" possibility in terms of balancing/posing, but in planet mode its a big ball, can't see how could weight make any difference. Maybe to the stand, but you'd make a better stronger stand.
Obviously that would all increase cost, so potentially $$$ came into it as well.

[Zommael]

Well, it's funded now, so that's exciting.

[DELTAprime]

I genuinely think Hasbro doesn't actually have 8000 customers for Unicron and they just fudged the numbers to avoid having more egg on their face after the abysmal interest in the Cookie Monster Haslab project.

[griffin]

This is odd... the extended deadline was supposed to close in about 40 minutes time (2pm Brisbane time), but they've added another 24 hours onto the clock and noted that the deadline now ends October 7th in America (tomorrow afternoon our time).
And they have removed the actual count now, just noting that it is 8000+ on the counter.

Hope this is just a temporary measure until they get the final numbers in from around the world, and give us a total number to see how well it actually went.
If their total official number is over 9000, that should cover any drop outs and cancellations over the next year (particularly from countries like ours that didn't pay all up front).

They won't tell us, but I'd love to see what percentage of their 8,000+ backers were from countries that had to pay up the full amount (US and Japan), to see how much money Hasbro ended up raising for this project. Not that they needed the money for this project, but they needed to make sure there was enough numbers to buy it, and if they charged some money up-front, it would mean people were more seriously wanting it. (unlike pre-orders at sites that don't take any money, it is a lot easier to cancel without a second thought on pre-orders that were just placed as a back up, leaving the site with unsold extras)

[Ralph Wiggum]

The clock is no longer showing up on the page, so I guess that?s that. I don?t think we?ll ever get the full picture of how many backers were direct from Haslab and how many were from overseas preorders. I said previously this was a bit of a dog?s breakfast of a crowdfund campaign with the extended deadline and the way preorders were mixed in with pledges.

I wish the best of luck with Hasbro in completing this figure on time and I hope people commit to their preorders.

[griffin]

The clock is no longer showing up on the page, so I guess that?s that.

Looks like it might have been a glitch, or someone on the website stuffed something up when updating the counter... because the text has been changed back to October 6th.

I hope the public holiday here today doesn't hold up our final numbers from EB Games to Hasbro... as the product page is still active on their website, so probably won't be taken down until tomorrow.
At least Hasbro Australia was getting updated numbers every few days from EB Games to give to Hasbro America, but I imagine that Hasbro America will allow a few days for final numbers to come in, as a cut-off date doesn't seem to be a problem after extending the deadline an extra six weeks.

[griffin]

Two new bonus items announced in it's final week...

- a digital comic bundle from IDW through comixology with "Unicron" cover (it is rather vague with being "exclusive", in that it could just be existing comics that haven't been offered in that combination before)

Those Americans who were able to order directly from the Hasbro Pulse / Haslab website, have just been emailed with their access code to their exclusive digital comic content... which is noted as being a couple of existing comics, with one being the IDW version of the Movie adaptation with a new cover art (which we saw already).

[Trent]

Well that’s a rip. Not that anyone would have backed for that alone but still disappointing.

[Paulbot]

It was always clear it was existing comics with a new cover...

[DELTAprime]

It would seem that at one point WFC Unicron was going to have a rather cool looking "city mode".

https://www.seibertron.com/transform...evealed/44302/