I don’t even know where to begin here. From a business point of view, I understand why SS is imposing a NRD on higher-priced figures. And really, it’s a two-fold issue where both the collectors and SS themselves are to blame, although they don’t seem to want to fix the problem on their end. Their QC sucks. But the customers who are constantly POing everything they make, then canceling every time the production figure doesn’t match the proto has to be hurting them financially. All of their figures are licensed, so they have to pay for that license. It costs them money to manufacture the items, ship those items from China, and then distribute them out to the customer and other retailers.
Let’s take Snake Plissken as an example, and I’ll just throw all these numbers out there as Hypotheticals. Let’s say worldwide, they got 3000 POs for Snake. They manufacture said items, have them shipped from China, and once everyone sees the production photos 1500 people cancel their orders... they just ate the cost of licensing, manufacturing and shipping on those, and now they have to warehouse the things. Based on mods done of figs by some customizers, maybe they pick up 500 orders; they still have to eat the cost of a 1000 units. That’s not cheap from a business stand-point. And all those fickle customers are costing them money. You can’t blame them for wanting to impose an NRD to get at least a percentage of their money back, and possibly cut down on fickle POs in the future.
On the other hand, the fact that SS wants to play in the big leagues with Hot Toys, and yet seem either too cheap or too lazy to hire someone in China to handle QC is an absolute joke. But then again. Everyone buying their items should know by now that SS is incapable of putting out a human figure that looks, 1. Like the actor/actress, and 2. Doesn’t have some sort of weird distortion to it. So, again, the customer is partly at fault. If you know they can’t make a human representation that looks good, and yet you continue to PO such items, you only have yourself to blame for buying their crap in the first place. If everyone stopped buying their turd humans, they’d stop making them or realize they have to improve their s&$ty QC. If they stopped making them... oh well. Gives them time to focus on what they can make. If they improve their QC, so much the better for the consumer.
In other words, the consumer is partly to blame... in a much bigger way than you might think. You continue to buy a turd, there’s no incentive for any company to stop producing turds. Accept some of the responsibility for NRDs. There are newer companies out there (Star Ace is a perfect example) that are cheaper than SS and making far superior products. For all those people that have a hard-on for SS, you’re part of the problem. They’ll never improve until their products stop selling, or they'll just be a distributor (or... go out of business).