Pardon the imprecision of my language. I don't give the same kind of damn about this as some of you.
What I mean is that the overall situation for Sideshow has changed. There are obviously details of the current business situation between Disney/LFL and their licensors that has given rise to the lack of new output by Sideshow, particularly in the way of 1:6 ST figures. Hot Toys is a competitor now and the business model previously employed by Sideshow is obsolete. The expectations customers have established based on the old model are null and void. (Oh, look...I said assumptions in my original post, not contracts. You're welcome for the clarification.)
But the point still stands that v.1 is v.1 and nothing will ever change that. This is v.2. No one is violating the sacred 2000 unit ES.
You mean changed as in... Sideshow selling their line of SW OT figures side-by-side with (both as distributor for and competitor to) a major Asian Manufacturer who produces slightly higher quality figures that originally cost more than Sideshow's, but are technically for the "Asian market" and Sideshow's technically for the U.S. market?
That was the situation for Sideshow from the very start - since the very first SW figure Sideshow ever produced, and it was the situation all along.
Hot Toys has produced less than a dozen unique SW figures from the OT - and that includes every single thing up to today... teased, announced, released. That is in the nearly two years since the "big" HT/SW announcement in July 2014. Not even an average of six unique OT figs a year so far.
Medicom released nearly double that number of 1/6 (Sideshow's descriptions, not mine) SW OT figures over the first 5-7 years of Sideshow making SW OT figures. If you include Medi PT and re-issue ("v.2" or more distinct variants like TC-14) figures, Medicom would have come close to averaging six figures a year.
Overall situation change for Sideshow? Yeah, but... not as great as you'd think. And forget the SW ST. A company like Sideshow could easily clean up by simply offering SW OT figures for the whole next decade.
And... they redo three small discs that sit on the back and drop the light-up stand and that's a "v.2" IG-88? Only to the lawyers.
Proto looks nice.
That's actually the new Sideshow official motto.
They heard people said it so much, but what they didn't realize is it was mostly said when comparing how the prod fig came out.
But yeah, in all seriousness, Silentsurfer also did an unbelievable job on the first IG prototype paint-up. The production figure came about 7/10 of the way to matching it, but even that was pretty impressive.