captainsnoop:

its a weird time to be a fan of transformers toys right now

see, since the entertainment industry realized that China is a massive untapped market a couple of years ago, Hasbro has started making this MASSIVE marketing push in China

so basically, China has all of the latest Transformers toys on shelves. always well stocked, always up to date, always readily available

meanwhile, outside of China, the rest of the world is struggling to find the latest releases. hasbro just… isn’t shipping stock to western stores.

so what’s happening as a result?

Chinese companies, namely Wei Jiang and Kubianbao, have started releasing extremely high quality counterfeit versions of official Hasbro toys. Not just cheapo knockoffs, properly high quality fakes that are better than the Hasbro releases.

Can’t find the 20 dollar official Hasbro Megatron toy? Buy Wei Jiang’s counterfeit version! It’s 45 dollars, readily available online, it’s twice the size of Hasbro’s one, it has several improvements made to the figure’s engineering over Hasbro’s version, AND they added die cast metal to it. 

So what’s happening is that fans outside of China are importing chinese bootlegs of Hasbro’s toys because they’re objectively better and more readily available than Hasbro’s official releases.

And they’re more readily available because Hasbro is focusing marketing on China right now.

And, if my research is correct, Wei Jiang and Kubianbao’s counterfeit offerings are often sold in the same stores as Hasbro’s official stuff, and Chinese fans prefer buying the counterfeit stuff because it’s better.

So, because Hasbro started trying to maket heavily to China to the point that they’re neglecting markets in the rest of the world, they’re losing sales all over the world to Chinese counterfeiters because the Counterfeit toys are better and easier to find.

And the Chinese audience they’re marketing so heavily to prefers the knockoffs to the official releases anyway. Because the knockoffs are better.