The Flame-Haired Machines Huntress

[RandomHero]

Uncharted 4 sold 16 million copies. I know not every game sold at face value, but in theory if it had, at $60 a game that’s $960 million in sales. I’m sure the money they made from microtransactions in the multiplayer/co-op area made up for a chunk of games that were sold on sale, so $900 million really isn’t unfathomable for the game.

By comparison, Thor Love and Thunder had done $760 million world wide. The Freddie Mercury biopic did $910 million.

Keep in mind, not every game hits those numbers though. So while it’s possible that games can run with those big movie box office returns, it’s not always the case, especially for games not as widely known.

It was once stated by a member of the collecting community who is no longer with us that most production runs on these figures not made by Hot Toys was around 1500-2000, and I believe that number was corroborated by people in the know. I think that’s why companies are willing to take chances on making figures for Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil, Horizon, etc. But it’s definitely tougher to make a case for more niche games.

 

[Scythe Of Luna]

We're definitely among the hungrier & underserved niche markets, that's for sure. I can count the major companies that do official 1/6 video game stuff with any regularity without running out of fingers, though,

 

[Scythe Of Luna]

..... So I guess it just comes down to bigger i.p. hogging the corporate mindshare like R_X_X was saying & licensing fees making a small production run a harder pill to swallow for the big fish.

 

[RandomHero]

..... So I guess it just comes down to bigger i.p. hogging the corporate mindshare like R_X_X was saying & licensing fees making a small production run a harder pill to swallow for the big fish.

That’s exactly it. A $200 figure at 2,000 units is $400,000 in sales. I doubt Sony is licensing The Last of Us out for a quarter million, so it’s tough for these companies to land the license. It’s also why Hot Toys does 4-5x the size of production runs.

 

[WhoaItsJBot]

There have been more and more properties the past few years not getting any merch, or at least not the usual amount. Alita and Arcane are the main two I want more stuff from. At least Alita still has statues trickling out. Another is Prey, it's the most recent but I was hoping to see license announcements by now.

 

[Burnside]

we should be getting more figures that we tend to receive

Videogame characters were dark horse at first, but look at Resident Evil. Demand is there, lots of companies are waking up. At least to the Jill character

power-armor helmet wearing space man.

Still waiting for this one to happen. No matter how Doomed those releases probably are... It would take a earthQuake to change 1/6 companies thinking towards helmet wearing muscular men

 

[Scythe Of Luna]

Uncharted 4 sold 16 million copies. I know not every game sold at face value, but in theory if it had, at $60 a game that’s $960 million in sales. I’m sure the money they made from microtransactions in the multiplayer/co-op area made up for a chunk of games that were sold on sale, so $900 million really isn’t unfathomable for the game.

By comparison, Thor Love and Thunder had done $760 million world wide. The Freddie Mercury biopic did $910 million.

Keep in mind, not every game hits those numbers though. So while it’s possible that games c

That’s exactly it. A $200 figure at 2,000 units is $400,000 in sales. I doubt Sony is licensing The Last of Us out for a quarter million, so it’s tough for these companies to land the license. It’s also why Hot Toys does 4-5x the size of production runs.

Yeah, video game based figures are in a weird spot in that they're derived from another comparatively expensive hobby, too, so I imagine that is part of what keeps it niche. INTEREST in the figures is probably waaay beyond the average production numbers, but that doesn't bear out in sales just due to the barrier to entry to get attached to the character enough to spend a couple hundred bucks. One hobby is often competing with the other for limited goofing-off money.
Anyone who can successfully juggle those two hobbies with a lot of purchase consistency are doing better than average, I'd think, & I'm sure the big companies have market research nerds figuring out how much we're realistically likely to spend.

I'd like that Cyberpunk figure & bike, for instance, but I haven't shelled out for it, because I buy games. LOL

 

[R_R_X]

Yes games sell tons, but the ammount of people that buy games who are willing to drop a couple hundred bucks on figures, unlicensed ones no less, is extremely small.

The typical number of units for mass production runs for unlicensed MCU and DC figures is about 1000-2000, if a brand is lucky and makes a very sought after character they can produce up to 4000 units, that is still a fraction of what Hot Toys produces on an Iron Man alone.

Video Games tend to do even more poorly than that, a very beloved protagonist can get 1000-2000 units but it's never guranteed, sometimes you get outliers, I was lucky enough to have worked on an outlier that reached insane numbers, but that is considered to be a special case, no other figure sold quite like it, we have been lucky enough to have most of our figures pass the 1000 mark and even 2000, and other companies like GameToys have been faring pretty well with their FF line but the truth is most video game figures don't pass the 1000 mark, a good example of this would be the CCToys GTA V figures, one of the most profitable and well know games of all time and all 3 figures sold average at best, making secondary characters is even a bigger gamble and one that rarely pays off and we're talking unlicensed here, if you go licensed then you're basically burning money, Sony and other companies like Capcom have insanely high license fees and they're unresponsive and a pain in the *** to work with, 1000-2000 units for licensed video game characters is barely breaking even if even that.

So when you ask yourselves why don't official companies make more video game stuff, the answer is it simply isn't worth it. First of all most of them don't give a **** about video game figures just like most collectors don't, they will never sell like Iron Man, Batman, Superman and other comic book heroes and then most video game character designs aren't as appealing to regular collectors who themselves aren't as invested in games as they are in the MCU or Star Wars, most of them buy a game, play it for a week or two and then forget about it, it's why horrible likenesses in video game characters are so easily accepted because the investment in the character and most importantly, the actors, isn't there and of course the profit won't be there, they all consider it a poor investment, waste of time and recources and of course actual gamers are more invested in actual games, consoles, PCs, gaming setups than figures, most of them will buy a few funko pops or collectors editions and call it a day.

My conclusion on this whole thing is when it comes to video games figures, you have to be very smart about your decisions, you need to be passionate about what you're working on, pick beloved characters, be smart in how you advertise your products and be fair with your prices, if you're a fan of video games and really want certain characters your best hope is third parties but even then you have to understand if the profit isn't there then most of them won't chase a line and while the interest in gaming has been ramping up in the past years, gaming related collectibles are still very much niche and unfortunately will never reach the heights of MCU, DC and Star Wars collectibles.

 

[Scythe Of Luna]

Videogame characters were dark horse at first, but look at Resident Evil. Demand is there, lots of companies are waking up. At least to the Jill character

Still waiting for this one to happen. No matter how Doomed those releases probably are... It would take a earthQuake to change 1/6 companies thinking towards helmet wearing muscular men

I hope this energy maintains momentum. It's getting to be 1/6 scale RE4 Remake Leon & Dead Space remake Isaac Clarke O'clock for me. LOL

I also need to either upgrade my computer or finally buy a current gen console, though which is always the struggle. Toys or games?

 

[Burnside]

R_R_X thak you for the time and efford explaining all this! Things are a bit clearer now. For me that is

 

[Garlador]

That’s exactly it. A $200 figure at 2,000 units is $400,000 in sales. I doubt Sony is licensing The Last of Us out for a quarter million, so it’s tough for these companies to land the license. It’s also why Hot Toys does 4-5x the size of production runs.

It’s also why they pick IPs they can release multiple iterations of. We get Stormtroopers in every flavor of the rainbow, Iron Man reissues aplenty, Spider-Man but in a cloak or with a backpack this time, etc.

Aloy is just so unique, and part reuse is limited.

 

[vaanrose]

I think it all comes down to age demographics. I feel like Millennials just don't buy figures, at least not at the rate that older, and younger, people do. 80s IPs always seem to sell, as does anything new and current. The older fans love adding every obscure thing from their childhood to their giant collections, and the kids on Reddit love meming about draining their wallets to buy the next MCU thing, but nobody seems to care about anything that released in the 2000s.

There's occasionally stuff from the 90s that's popular enough to get a figure or two, but once you hit the 2000s, it seems like there's this giant gap of media that just never gets new merch. You have to be one of the crazy big franchises, like LOTR or Harry Potter, to even get a bone tossed your way, and that stuff is almost always produced by the lower tier companies because nobody else wants to make figures from them, because when stuff from this era does get made, it undersells.

There just doesn't appear to be a market for the stuff that primarily Millennials are fans of, and this happens to include basically all the popular video game stuff. It's only really been the absolute upper tier of long running video game franchises, that still release modern titles popular with the younger audience, that have been able to succeed in this market, like Resident Evil, or Final Fantasy, both franchises that fall in the top 10 highest grossing video game IPs (most the rest of which is Nintendo owned, which nobody is willing to go anywhere near).

 

[Garlador]

There just doesn't appear to be a market for the stuff that primarily Millennials are fans of, and this happens to include basically all the popular video game stuff. It's only really been the absolute upper tier of long running video game franchises, that still release modern titles popular with the younger audience, that have been able to succeed in this market, like Resident Evil, or Final Fantasy, both franchises that fall in the top 10 highest grossing video game IPs (most the rest of which is Nintendo owned, which nobody is willing to go anywhere near).

I would pay the painful Nintendo up-charge for a 1/6 Samus Aran in a heartbeat.

 

[WhoaItsJBot]

I would pay the painful Nintendo up-charge for a 1/6 Samus Aran in a heartbeat.

I can only imagine how great Samus would look if she was given the Hot Toys Iron Man treatment.

 

[Scythe Of Luna]

There have been more and more properties the past few years not getting any merch, or at least not the usual amount. Alita and Arcane are the main two I want more stuff from. At least Alita still has statues trickling out. Another is Prey, it's the most recent but I was hoping to see license announcements by now.

I would pay the painful Nintendo up-charge for a 1/6 Samus Aran in a heartbeat.

Friggin' THIS! The idea of a 1/6 scale Threezero Samus (hopefully with die cast) haunts my dreams. LOL
I still need Link, too, but I haven't really loved the most recent costumes enough to pay through the nose. With my luck someone will finally do Samus & it'll be the Dread version.

 

[Garlador]

Friggin' THIS! The idea of a 1/6 scale Threezero Samus (hopefully with die cast) haunts my dreams. LOL
I still need Link, too, but I haven't really loved the most recent costumes enough to pay through the nose. With my luck someone will finally do Samus & it'll be the Dread version.

I know there's the 1/6th Medicom Link figures, but, yeah, they're just not my favorite versions of Link (both are right-handed, for starters). I'd bite for Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess though.

At this point, I'd take a Metroid Dread version of Samus, though the Prime 2/3 Varia Suit is perfection to me and the figma is incredible. Honestly, so many of my favorite female characters are video game characters, and I'd probably have a whole section of 1/6th section for them, my own hall of fame. Samus, Lara Croft, FemShep, Jill Valentine, Chun-li, and, of course, Aloy.

 

[Scythe Of Luna]

I know there's the 1/6th Medicom Link figures, but, yeah, they're just not my favorite versions of Link (both are right-handed, for starters). I'd bite for Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess though.

At this point, I'd take a Metroid Dread version of Samus, though the Prime 2/3 Varia Suit is perfection to me and the figma is incredible. Honestly, so many of my favorite female characters are video game characters, and I'd probably have a whole section of 1/6th section for them, my own hall of fame. Samus, Lara Croft, FemShep, Jill Valentine, Chun-li, and, of course, Aloy.

I have my fingers crossed for a Chun Li from that TBLeague partnership with another company whose name is escaping me. Ryu looks insane, but I have eyes only for Chun Li. (Hopefully the thicc modern look carries over well.) Only downside is material availability for bodies that hold up is still sketchy from how slow going that line is so far.

Aloy is going to be one of those that I won't be able to believe is real even after I have it. LOL There are some games that I know I'll want an action figure of within half an hour of starting it, & it's always a bummer to have to reign in my expectations. It's rare I get to check anyone off of that list. 'Same thing happened with Jessie Faden in Control, but I feel like that's pretty slim in terms of likelihood. But Samus? Come ON. LOL & yeah, definitely the Prime model, or even a Threezero variant that captures a "generally Samus" vibe would be acceptable. Their interpretations tend to be pretty faithful.

 

[AviMiz97]

@R_R_X Now that we received updates from Lim, can we expect to see something in the near future about the flame haired huntress?

 

[RandomHero]

@R_R_X Now that we received updates from Lim, can we expect to see something in the near future about the flame haired huntress?

He had said *maybe* this year…but that was when John was still supposed to go up for pre-order over the summer and he only just went up now. There’s still Nate, Joel and Ellie to get through before the Huntress. I wouldn’t count on anything any time soon. It’s definitely best to temper expectations on more info on this.

 

[Garlador]

He had said *maybe* this year…but that was when John was still supposed to go up for pre-order over the summer and he only just went up now. There’s still Nate, Joel and Ellie to get through before the Huntress. I wouldn’t count on anything any time soon. It’s definitely best to temper expectations on more info on this.

I'm eager to get an update, but I got plenty to look forward to in the meantime.