Aren't people taking this a bit seriously? All this talk about the legality of making a new run skates over the fact that we're talking about dollies for grown-ups.
If we're going to talk about courts and binding agreements maybe we should also talk about the morality of a few fans who happened to be in a position to buy these figures suggesting that newer fans shouldn't have the chance to collect characters from the most beloved franchise of all time.
You are not a "collector" so I get your stance. Guess what non of us are anymore due to this business practice. There is BIG business in collectibles or you would not see anyone raising a feather about this type of thing. I do collect certain things like 1:1 custom light sabers and I have the 1:1 EFX prop replica ANH Stormtrooper helmet. There are ways for companies to appease their collectors and get around limited edition sizes and still produce products that people want.
When I first got into the 1/6th arena, I gave up collecting any other scale figure and some other collections as well as there just isn't room, money, or time for everything. I never plan to sell any of my figures, even the ones that are really outdated and kind of stupid looking by today's standards but at the same time, If my wife gave me grief over too many purchases (like right before Christmas with the HT SW line) I liked being able to point to a given figure and go "but that one there is now worth three times what I paid for it". I never plan to see it, and quite frankly I would have some guilt selling an open figure to anyone for that much even if they were begging for it but none the less, it did make my wife somewhat less annoyed with my ever-growing collecting habits.
I am actually not angry that newer collectors, or collectors that had to make hard choices about their financial outpourings at the time of this and other releases now have a chance to get them. Unfortunately, if SSC ups the price and downgrades the pack-in, you are nearly being scalped anyways (unless they actually make improvements).
My annoyance (anger is too strong) is that the company as a whole seems to be slipping further and further away from doing its products justice and actually giving a damn. How about some actual NEW product announcements in tandem with re-releases? Smaller companies are getting better and better and faster and faster with their product output while the Behemoth that is SSC has crawled to a stall and has put out less and less challenging pieces design-wise while making the ones they do put out with some very serious problems and failed process'. On top of that, their prices continue to climb past their contemporaries whose products, while not perfect, do outshine their own recent output.
So if we are not "Collectors" and no longer care about the quality of the product then what are we? In my mind, a HIGH END COLLECTIBLE was not necessarily about having something that no one else did. It was LIMITED because it was so WELL MADE. It could not be mass produced because it was hand-crafted. By re-releasing these, we see that these are just molds to be pulled out of retirement, box art to be repurposed, and items to be mass marketed. This is disheartening to me, not because all of you can now share in this figure but because it feels that we are no longer getting what we once did and paying more for it.
It's more honest to just suddenly yell "look over there!" as a way to distract from the truth.
