It's not inflation driving costs. The more product they develop the more money they need.
Most business do not keep all their profit from years past.
The more a business grows the higher the margins need to be to maintain the same level of profit. Unless you have run a large business or gone to business school most people don't know that.
The cost of a marvel license for a couple years is millions of dollars. Same for Warner. Every few years. Wider range of figures every year (they are making 4 times as many different figures per year now compared to 6 years ago) means they have to invests hundreds of thousands more on product development per year.
Every individual figures has a failure or QA rate of around 25%. When your making 5 unique releases a year at say 3000 units per (not saying the numbers are exact or correct but used for illustration ) Which is a total of 15,000 figures per year....with 3750 of those a total loss. That's the old let's say. Now they make 20 figures per year (let's stick with 3000 units for comparison purpose) 25% lost equals 60,000 units.
When I got my degree the numbers used to illustrate increased cost per 4 years was around a 50% increase in costs. Wages go up. You add staff. Your manufacturing goes up so new equipement or new partners to do the work...for a place like hot toys there may be other new costs that they didn't have at the beginning. Not sure exactly how any social services are handled there, but in the USA the employer pays half of your unemployment wages, they pay for part of any disability stuff like that..so a company just starting out does not have those type of expenses but as you are open longer you do. Look at the conventions and those displays. It can costs tens of thousands of dollars for say the millennium falcon and troop transport type shows. Shipping and set up and wages and high wrong local help and air fare. There's a lot that goes into the overhead most folks don't know about...
Anyway....
So let's say hot toys has grown more then most companies (which I would say is true) so let's say instead of a 50% increase in costs let's go with 60%. A little above average but not unheard of.
If 5 years ago those above numbers where used when the figures cost say 100 dollars to make (covering manufacturing costs and overheard and all that divided across every figure for an entire year) and they sold them for 200 per figure on average then they would have spent 1.5 million dollars (5 figures times 3000 units is 15,000 units total at 100). And made 2,250,000(remember there's a 25% return or failure rate so only 11,250 units are sold for profit and 3750 are a loss)
If they kept the same price but with the adjusted cost it would work this way...20 individual released a year at 3000 units per for a total of 60,000 units sold. For a total cost per year of 9,600,000 to make. They sold 45,000 units for a total of 9,000,000 dollars. If they had kept the same price they would be losing money. If they add new figures the cost of every single figure has to go up. They numbers I used are not exact, but I can assure you it's not that far off.
for the last four years there has been no inflation according to the us government.
What happens as a business grows their costs skyrocket. And they have to pass that on somehow. It's complicated and most people don't understand so they call it greed. It's actually more about economics. To keep up with increased cost they would have to double the cost of the average figure every five years. At least. And that's if they just want to keep making the same margins and not make more money. Or expand again. It doesn't factor in figures like tonto that bomb. Look at those numbers again and consider if they didn't sell out on two of them let's say they had two bombs out of those 20. So they then would have only sold enough to equal 18 unique figures but produced 20. So the cost to make everything that year (including overhead for these examples) was 9,600,000 but they only sold 7,800,000 worth of product.
This is over simplified and streamlined just to make my point. The real numbers and reasons behind all this stuff is A LOT more complex. But I'm just trying to show that it's not as simple as greed or anything like that. They could in fact have doubled the cost of any figure and lose money, when compared to past performance. I know this is a crazy post. Lol and that you or most people don't care. I'm just trying to provide info in case anyone actually wants to know. Lol