Are there too many Exclusives in the Siege Toyline?

[Tha_Phantom]

1: Do you think the Siege line has too many exclusies?
2: What Exclusives have you bought/are intending to buy?
3: Has the Exclusiveness, and associated cost, of these figures impacted your buying of them?
4: What figures from the Siege line would you have bought if they had been given a general release, but now will not be doing so?[/SIZE]

1. Yes, as in too many figures are being made as exclusives rather than regular releases. I'm not upset with the range of characters we've been getting lately.
2. Pulse G2 Megatron, Ratchet, Bluestreak, Rainmakers, Refraktor 3 pack, clear Mirage (splitting the set with a friend), G2 Sideswipe (splitting the set with a friend), Ironworks (splitting the set with a friend) and although they are not Siege I did also buy red Swoop and Richochet this year.
3. Yes, I would have purchased Thundercracker and Skywarp in addition to the Starscream I already have, but decided to skip them in favour of the Rainmakers to satisfy my Tetrajet itch. I also considered the Galactic Man Shockwave for a while, but with everything else coming out he's just not that important to me.
4. Skywarp (and also Thundercracker even though he is already a retail release).

[Miss Kitty Fantastico]

1: Do you think the Siege line has too many exclusives?

I mean if having exclusives is part of what keeps the lights on at Hasbro, I don't know - to my mind ideally everything would be available to everyone, but I guess that's not how the business works. I feel like major characters like Ratchet and Skywarp being hard to find is a bad move, but then again I'm sure everyone's a major character to someone.

2: What Exclusives have you bought/are intending to buy?

I'd like to get Greenlight, Ratchet, Atalancer, Bluestreak, Skywarp, Smokescreen I think? I cant keep track of them all - but that depends on whether I can find them somewhere I'm ready to shop from. See below:

3: Has the Exclusiveness, and associated cost, of these figures impacted your buying of them?

Cost not so much (so long as it's not ridiculous), but their not being in local stores, yeah that could be a problem. I'm kind of knee-jerk averse to online shopping, I like keeping things on the simple level of walking into a shop and saying "Here is money, give me toy," and either everyone's happy or I've accidentally walked into a hat shop and we're all confused. I buy from BBTS occasionally (my She-Ra source), so I've picked up a few bots from them, and if they get any of the exclusives they can have my money. If that rumour about EB getting Ratchet in turns out to be good, also yay. Otherwise I'll probably just let them pass.

4: What figures from the Siege line would you have bought if they had been given a general release, but now will not be doing so?

Well obviously any of the exclusives I can't buy as above I won't, but besides that... not sure. I recently decided not to get Omega Supreme, and maybe seeing all these exclusives appearing and raising the strong possibility of not being able to get the 'complete set' I'm after (mostly the 84/85 ones) might have played a part in that decision; Omega isn't really a favourite of mine, plus he's not cheap, and I don't know that I've got somewhere suitable to display him alongside the others anyway (I mean he'd just tower over most of them, it wouldn't be a balanced display) but I am the kind of person who'll complete a set just to complete a set, so I was tossing up getting him. Seeing these exclusives popping up and facing the possibility that I wouldn't be able to have the complete set anyway, well, that may have been a factor.

Also, kind of out of left field, that Powerdasher, Aragon - I never had the original, he wasn't in the cartoon, but I remember seeing him in the catalogues or whatever, and he was such a bizarre little twerp that I have a kind of affection for him, so even if he is just a repaint of something else I could've seen myself getting him and kind of hiding him at the back of the shelf as an in-joke (same with the other two Powerdashers, whatever their names are, Techolas and Dimli or whatever who knows). If I saw them on a shelf I'd probably get them (I've bought plenty more ridiculous stuff) but if they're only available out of the back room of a karaoke bar in Minsk I won't lose any sleep over missing them.

[GoktimusPrime]

It's pretty obvious why there are so many exclusives in CHUG now. As of this year CHUG has been in production for 13 years. CHUG has existed for about half a decade longer than G1 itself! It's little wonder that a lot of these toys being released are limited exclusives because most of the better known and more popular characters have already been done as CHUGs. Most of what's left are lesser known characters who may not sell as strongly as mass retail releases.



Now I know that as fans most if not all of the characters being released in Siege are already known to us. But that's because we're fanatical about Transformers (the very meaning of the word "fan" itself as a shortening of "fanatic"). But look at it from a non-fan's POV, because that's part of the market appeal of store-released repaints. Repaints themselves can be a hard sell to the general market but repaints that make obscure references? Let's look at what we're getting from Selects so far...
* Combat Megatron: a repaint of the store-released Siege Megatron based on an aborted prototype of 1994's G2 Combat Megatron
* Galactic Man Shockwave: a repaint of the store-released Siege Shockwave based on the pre-Transformer version of Shockwave released via Radio Shack in the 80s
* Autobot Lancer: redeco/retool of the store-released Moonracer mould based on what was a generic background character who appeared in only 1 episode of the G1 cartoon
* Redwing: based on a BotCon exclusive toy that was conceived by mistake and never even made. I've got to be honest, I didn't even know who he was and had to look it up.
* Nightbird: an obscure and formerly Obscure character from the G1 cartoon
* Cromar and Zetar: if they were any more obscure than this then we'd be looking at a CHUG Time Warrior (yes please!)

With the sole exception of Smokescreen, we can see that all of these Selects toys are repaints based on obscure (and formerly Obscure) characters. They're not widely known and they're all repaints. Not that long ago all of these toys would've only been possible as BotCon exclusives. Today they're made available as mail-away figures which makes them far more accessible than convention exclusive toys.
I'm personally quite happy that we're getting these toys, and the idea of plain-packaged mail-away exclusives is reminiscent of the G1 mail-aways. How fitting is it that Powerdasher is being released as a mail-away exclusive toy? If only they required us to clip and send in Robot Points from the store released toys!

[Bidoofdude]

With the sole exception of Smokescreen, we can see that all of these Selects toys are repaints based on obscure (and formerly Obscure) characters. They're not widely known and they're all repaints. Not that long ago all of these toys would've only been possible as BotCon exclusives. Today they're made available as mail-away figures which makes them far more accessible than convention exclusive toys.
I'm personally quite happy that we're getting these toys, and the idea of plain-packaged mail-away exclusives is reminiscent of the G1 mail-aways. How fitting is it that Powerdasher is being released as a mail-away exclusive toy? If only they required us to clip and send in Robot Points from the store released toys!

I think a big part of this exclusive fatigue has to do with all the different lines and retailers at once. Especially as an international buyer where stuff is not confirmed to be coming from somewhere easy to access, there’s just so much effort required as fans. As someone purely into G1 cartoon characters, obscure repaints aside, I still have to go to Walmart, Amazon, Walgreens/whatever Asian store stocks Ratchet, and Hasbro Pulse PLUS regular retail to get all the guys I want, and half of those aren’t even here.

[GoktimusPrime]

I think a big part of this exclusive fatigue has to do with all the different lines and retailers at once. Especially as an international buyer where stuff is not confirmed to be coming from somewhere easy to access, there’s just so much effort required as fans.

I see this more as an issue with our local distribution (or lack thereof) rather than what I would call "true exclusivity." After all, we also missed a lot of the Thrilling 30 stuff but those toys were readily available in stores overseas. Even store exclusives aren't the same as mail-away/online exclusives because people can just walk into any of these stores and grab the toy. We've had our fair share of store exclusive stuff too (e.g. Target exclusives, TRU exclusives etc.). I know that the end result still sucks for us, but it wasn't by design. Not in the same way as Pulse or Takara TOMY Mall exclusives; I regard those as "true" exclusives if you take my meaning.

As someone purely into G1 cartoon characters, obscure repaints aside, I still have to go to Walmart, Amazon, Walgreens/whatever Asian store stocks Ratchet, and Hasbro Pulse PLUS regular retail to get all the guys I want, and half of those aren't even here.

Once upon a time most of these figures would have been picked up by local retailers, but for whatever reason that eludes me it doesn't seem to be happening with these store-exclusive Siege figures. But even all of these store exclusives appear to be repaints and/or retools of pre-existing moulds, and again many of them are based on fairly obscure characters (with characters like Ratchet and Skywarp being exceptions).

Although if you're looking to build a CHUG collection based just on characters who appeared in the G1 cartoon then you're at a considerable advantage. Not only do you have fewer toys to collect but also most of those characters have already been done as CHUGs anyway. Obscure and generic cartoon characters aside, we've got...
* Season 1: all done
* Season 2: all done
* Season 3: almost all done; there are a few outstanding ones like retail CHUG versions of the Battlechargers and... that's it
* Season 4: most done; we need the remaining Throttlebots, Autobot Targetmasters, Headmaster Horrorcons and Scorponok
So as far as the Anglophone G1 cartoon is concerned, the overwhelming majority of the cast already exist as CHUG toys. You're just filling in a few gaps now with the latter two seasons.

If you're also looking to complete the Japanese G1 cartoon cast then that's a different story, but again we have had some progress here including characters like Go Shooter, Metalhawk, God Ginrai, Dai Atlas, Sonic Bomber, Grand Maximus, Lio Kaiser etc., and arguably King Poseidon with the upcoming Seacons. When I look at both the store and online exclusives for Siege, aside from obscurities from the G1 cartoon, I can't see any toy based on a character that doesn't already exist as a CHUG figure. As much as the decision to include Smokescreen as an exclusive figure instead of Barricade just confounds me, but the fact is that CHUG Smokescreen toys already exist.

And honestly... we live in an age of online shopping. Making toys exclusive like this isn't nearly as difficult as it used to be before online shopping. In 1985 we missed out on Shockwave and the Deluxe Insecticons which just sucked. The internet didn't exist for any of us to bug our parents to shop online. I mean, we had a modem on our Commodore 64 but all it could do was allow computers to remotely communicate with each other... but it wasn't the internet! Heck, a lot of us could've probably imported G1 Megatron if online shopping were a thing.

And I'm talking as someone who has, for a very long time, resisted online shopping. I didn't really get into it until 2013 (the year when we started missing those sweet sweet Thrilling 30 toys). I still greatly prefer brick and mortar shopping over online shopping but the fact is that we're doing pretty well considering that online shopping even gives us the option to obtain toys that we're missing at local retail. Especially as local retail seems to be increasingly unreliable.