Yesterday, I had a chance to actually wander about and spent a moment in our local second-hand game, toy and junk shop. Aside from seeing the sad results of some Flash fan offloading ALL his merchandise (including TWO Super Powers Team Flash action figures still in their original packaging, and a set of statues that has to be seen to be believed) I was a little bit saddened to see literally TONS of Guitar Hero paraphernalia and half a dozen DJ Hero boards. I remember really enjoying GH a couple of years ago, even as my snottier hipster friends opined that “I can actually play a real guitar blah blah blah fishcakes”, and bought the expansions up until they started releasing custom track packs for bands that aren’t my favorites. (Nothing against Aerosmith, but I am still waiting for GH: Monkees or GH: Steely Dan.) Even though the games were super-successful during latter years of the Bush administration, it seems that Guitar Hero is on indefinite hold and I can’t find any evidence that they’re coming back, which makes me sad given my crush on Casey Lynch…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) went down to Georgia, but couldn’t beat ‘Knights Of Cydonia’ on Expert, asking: Does a company’s willingness to flood the market with their games/comics/toys/adult diapers change your enjoyment of their product, or is there no such thing as too much of a good thing?
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Having too many variations or iterations of a good product can dilute both its quality and appeal. Just look at Wolverine in the 90’s.
You can usually judge the quality of a game based on how quickly the company floods the market with junk related to the game. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone to the local game store to find the shelves flooded with hundreds, I kid you not, copies of the latest Maddening Pro Jerk-Off Sports game which is just a retread of the last years version of the same, only to find that the RPG I had been waiting for six months for release is sold out because the powers that be only ordered two copies in order to make room for all the copies of the aforementioned game abortion, the majority of which will end up in the five dollar bin inside of six months. So I admit I am prejudiced against ultra-hyped products. But it seems to hold true, the better games seem to sneak under the radar, where as the crappy games – usually sports franchise games or movie tie-in games – are marketed up the kazoo and usually not worth the price of the plastic wrap they are wrapped in. Case in point: Psychonauts. The best game nobody ever heard of.
Wizards of the Coast carpet bombing D&D with several books for every class,race or spell class killed a lot of my enthusiasm.
What Hasbro did to G.I. Joe makes me pine for the days when there was one action figure with fuzz on his head and a scar on his cheek.
So I thought the question was flooding the market with accessories (not more of the same character in another book). Personally, I could care less if there is a Wolverine diaper (but that does make me think of Shnikt! in a whole new way), but I would not appreciate Wolverine appearing in every comic like the 90s…and I guess forever after. :)
Depends on what gets included in the flood.
Look back at the Batman toyline that spawned out of the 80’s movie. All those variant repaints of Batman flooding the stores were a bad idea when the line was almost exclusively Batman variants. It took a couple of years before they added Robin, villains were seldom released and stores were so overcrowded with them that the prices dropped by half WITHOUT being a clearance item. I think it was said best by some little boy I overheard in the store, “I like Batman, but why does he change clothes more than Barbie?”.
If a flood of items includes a variety, then it isn’t so bad. There are fans of all kinds who may need something specific to display that they love a certain thing, so being able to find a Doctor Who coffee mug, a D&D wallet or a Star Wars mouse pad isn’t too bad. There CAN be too much of a good thing, but a variety of items in itself isn’t too bad.
And I wish they’d make Monkees Guitar Hero as well. I need more reasons to wear my Mike Nesmith style hat.
Let’s talk Transformers:
The new toy line for Transformers: Prime has at least four Bumblebee molds in it. The Transformers toylines have always been built on repaints, but those repaints are usually distinct characters. In the $12 there are three ‘Bee molds taking up spots that other characters could have. The stores here in Georgia look like beehives :)
History tends to repeat itself, it seems. It is just as bad as the old Batman toy line made up of almost nothing but Batman repaints.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got plenty of TF toys that are the same except for a small resculpt, a cool paint job or some other minor difference, but even back when I was a kid I wasn’t too crazy about collecting multiples of the same character, let alone from the same set. In my current collection, my multiples of Optimus Prime are all different incarnations (G1, Robots in Disguise, Cyberton, etc), and even a few of those I only have because they were gifts.