MAAS Toys is making Veritech Hovertanks and Red Commander Bioroids w/Biover!

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, RavenHawk said:

This just seems... hmmm.... how to be polite about it... foolish.

No more so than, say, running a technically illegal business selling unlicensed toys for a "big fish" IP like Transformers.

 

Quote

Their entire business model is based around kickstarter. They claimed to have the license, but terms such as funding and what would be a go or no-go weren't discussed? I really think MAAS had some very preliminary conversation with HG, and then jumped the gun claiming to have a license and rushing out a mediocre design.

I'm more inclined to suspect that they actually do have a license, but were expecting to engage in a bit of loophole abuse by running the crowdfunding campaign from their own site until their first go at it turned into a huge mess.  Now they're probably approaching HG, hat in hand, to beg for special permission to use Kickstarter because their own fans screwed them when they tried to go it alone.

(I still think the entire reason they decided to license Southern Cross designs was because nobody had ever made proper toys for it, so they could break into legit toy manufacturing without being compared to any prior licensee's work.)

 

12 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Propose we edit the thread title for accuracy by adding "jk lol" to the end?

Second.

Edited March 4, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[RavenHawk]

7 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

No more so than, say, running a technically illegal business selling unlicensed toys for a "big fish" IP like Transformers.

Now now, according to everyone that responds to posts on Facebook and many other online locations, if they just put the words "not-" or "inspired by" in front of it, then they're fine. Totally. It's like, fair use or something.

 

 

(if not evident, that was sarcasm)

[Convectuoso]

Would it be safe to declare this project dead?

 

[505thAirborne]

25 minutes ago, Convectuoso said:

Would it be safe to declare this project dead?

 

If not Dead definitely on Hiatus. 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 minute ago, 505thAirborne said:

If not Dead definitely on Hiatus. 

That's Robotech for "cancelled".

[RavenHawk]

Seems like their list of "unresponsive" projects keeps growing. Well, their list of projects that, when people ask for updates, they are unresponsive about...

[JetJockey]

Lame to get us excited, show those images, and then say absolutely nothing. Not a good way at all to keep customers.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, JetJockey said:

Lame to get us excited, show those images, and then say absolutely nothing. Not a good way at all to keep customers.

... it strikes me as slightly odd to expect professionalism from what is, by definition, essentially a bootlegging outfit.

[JetJockey]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

... it strikes me as slightly odd to expect professionalism from what is, by definition, essentially a bootlegging outfit.

Well if that's what they are then perhaps none of us should have been excited about this project. I don't know. I'm just getting into 3rd Party Transformers and I'm seeing some good toys out of those companies. I guess there is a difference between straight bootlegging and a true 3rd Party just unlicensed attempt. Or maybe it's a gray area.

[Seto Kaiba]

37 minutes ago, JetJockey said:

Well if that's what they are then perhaps none of us should have been excited about this project. I don't know. [...] I guess there is a difference between straight bootlegging and a true 3rd Party just unlicensed attempt. Or maybe it's a gray area.

Any unlicensed third party producing and selling merchandise is by definition a bootlegger. 

After all, the definition of the word "bootlegging" is "the unlawful manufacture, distribution, or sale of goods".  If they don't have a license, that means they're manufacturing, distributing, and selling those goods unlawfully.  They'd prefer "unlicensed third party" because that weasel wording is just obfuscatory enough to not instantly brand them as the petty criminals they are.  There is no gray area there... it's either licensed and legal or not and not.

Don't expect MAAS to communicate like a professional toy company because they're not one.  They're a bunch of guys out there somewhere trying to make a buck on someone else's IP without getting caught and sued down to their skivvies.

[RavenHawk]

Infringing on someone else's trademarks/copyrights/other intellectual property rights with your own innovative engineering can lead to an impressive product, but is still wrong.

Copying someone else's product (often even just making upscaled molds from their products) is even more wrong.

MAAS falls somewhere in the middle, as they create their own designs based on other people's IP, but the engineering is often not even done by them.

It's sort of like fan art... it can be done really well, but it still technically infringes... except they sell it and are proud of it.

[JetJockey]

I guess to me originally bootleg toys (and items like VHS anime) were bad and obviously bootlegs. This is coming from someone seeing bootlegs back in the 80s and 90s. This "3rd Party" thing being a new term in toys to me was surprising. Someone in another topic called them 3P I think and I was searching around the Internet and webshops looking for this "3P" company not knowing what they were. And I guess I didn't see many of them as bootlegs since they seem to be quality toys. And toys that the licensed company isn't making or sometimes better than what the origin company is making. But you are right in that no license means bootleg no matter how good. But I guess I'm partial a good quality item as long as the origin company isn't making it. I have a few bootleg or fan videogames and I'm ok with it because the companies that should be making those games aren't.

[JB0]

1 hour ago, JetJockey said:

And I guess I didn't see many of them as bootlegs since they seem to be quality toys.

That's the other reason people avoid the term "bootleg" for those products. It has an implication of cheap copies of the original toys.

I get wanting to draw that distinction between these original, typically high-end products and conventional bootlegs, but "third party" conveys an air of legitimacy that isn't really there.  It is also a phrase the manufacturers themselves don't typically use, as they want very much to avoid anyone's legal department taking offense. They sometimes go to  great lengths to pretend their toy is a completely original idea instead of an "homage" to an existing work(I know of one company that actually writes their own fiction, published in pack-in comic books, presumably to further this illusion).

...

Well, it is still better than the video game market, where people call them "reproductions", even when they are using fan translations or betas that never actually HAD a cartridge release to reproduce.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, JetJockey said:

I guess to me originally bootleg toys (and items like VHS anime) were bad and obviously bootlegs. This is coming from someone seeing bootlegs back in the 80s and 90s. This "3rd Party" thing being a new term in toys to me was surprising. Someone in another topic called them 3P I think and I was searching around the Internet and webshops looking for this "3P" company not knowing what they were. And I guess I didn't see many of them as bootlegs since they seem to be quality toys.

To be fair, yeah... most bootleggers do churn out merchandise of obviously inferior quality because most of them are in the business of counterfeit merchandise rather than producing unlicensed original products.  So, naturally, most of them do a pretty poor job because they're trying to make their money through false or deceptive advertising practices.

Outfits like MAAS Toys are in this weird periphery demographic of bootleggers with work ethic.  Every now and then you'll find ones like that in the wild; bootleggers who are either so skilled or so committed to making a convincingly professional-looking counterfeit product that, by accident or design, the product they put out is as good or better than the real deal.  Others, like MAAS, are the skilled but amoral sort who aren't about to let a little thing like the law get in the way of making the products they want to make.

Back when I was first starting to collect anime on DVD, I found some box sets of Cowboy Bebop and Trigun at a local con.  Some enterprising bootlegger had done such an amazing job creating counterfeit DVD sets of those shows that not only did they look more professional than the genuine article, their work was so convincing it took us over a decade to figure out that they were bootlegs.  We only noticed because of a discussion of the various home video releases in the US and couldn't find our box set there... he'd created professional-looking original packaging, screen-printed the disc art differently, and even concocted his own original menus.

[JetJockey]

10 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Back when I was first starting to collect anime on DVD, I found some box sets of Cowboy Bebop and Trigun at a local con.  Some enterprising bootlegger had done such an amazing job creating counterfeit DVD sets of those shows that not only did they look more professional than the genuine article, their work was so convincing it took us over a decade to figure out that they were bootlegs.  We only noticed because of a discussion of the various home video releases in the US and couldn't find our box set there... he'd created professional-looking original packaging, screen-printed the disc art differently, and even concocted his own original menus.

With modern technology and ebay you can create good anime bootlegs and sell them almost without a problem. Ebay doesn't care as I've seen tons of anime bootlegs. In the old days, just getting two VHS machines to make copies was a big deal. And of course the quality would be poor from VHS. Dangaio episode 2 was one of the first bootlegs I remember seeing and it was grainy as hell. Most would consider it unwatchable these days.

[Seto Kaiba]

Looks like this project is probably dead... and MAAS Toys with it.

https://toy-wizards.com/2019/04/17/toy-news-rumor-maas-toys-goes-under-customers-demand-refunds/

[Mazinger]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Looks like this project is probably dead... and MAAS Toys with it.

https://toy-wizards.com/2019/04/17/toy-news-rumor-maas-toys-goes-under-customers-demand-refunds/

Sad to hear it.  I held out some hope even after communication dried up.

Well, maybe MEP toys will get interested in doing hover tanks.

[TheLoneWolf]

On 12/17/2018 at 8:48 PM, TheLoneWolf said:

I don't think the unfortunate residents of Hell will have to worry about finding a new home just yet, considering there's a long list of unreleased Robotech toys.

Called it.

This might actually be a blessing in disguise for Southern Cross. If MAAS' lazy designs were actually released, their sales probably would've been so disastrous as to completely extinguish that 0.001% chance the show has of seeing more mecha toys.

Harmony Gold should count their blessings that MAAS died when they did. If they had relented to MAAS' Kickstarter plans, it would've been yet another Kickstarter debacle for them.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Mazinger said:

Sad to hear it.  I held out some hope even after communication dried up.

I'm honestly not sure how to feel about it.

On the one hand, MAAS Toys were undeniably a criminal enterprise... so I shouldn't feel sorry for them.

On the other hand, MAAS Toys seems to have been trying to go at least partially legit by licensing Southern Cross from HG... so I ought to feel a little bad for the fact that their attempt to go legit was a part of what sunk them.

On the third hand, MAAS Toys was apparently dumb enough to pursue the license without first checking whether or not HG was OK with their crowdfunding-based business model... which puts them in "too dumb to live" territory.

On the fourth hand, they were literally the ONLY ones willing to make the attempt at Southern Cross mecha merchandise... which is laudable in a self-destructive sort of way given that every other company refused to even try.

On the fifth hand, I really need to see about getting this geiger counter fixed...

 

1 hour ago, Mazinger said:

Well, maybe MEP toys will get interested in doing hover tanks.

Transforming mecha toys are a good deal more difficult to design and produce than standard action figures... I would assume that they'll stick to what they're good at.

 

14 minutes ago, TheLoneWolf said:

Called it.

It was the obvious outcome... especially given that MAAS Toys was exclusively crowdfunded and Robotech has been death on the whole subject of crowdfunding ever since its embarrassing failures on Kickstarter.

 

14 minutes ago, TheLoneWolf said:

This might actually be a blessing in disguise for Southern Cross. If MAAS' lazy designs were actually released, their sales probably would've been so disastrous as to completely extinguish that 0.001% chance the show has of seeing more mecha toys.

I disagree.

MAAS Toys were literally THE ONLY "company" willing to consider developing Southern Cross mecha toys.  It was them and no one else and it took thirty-four frickin years to get THAT far.  The professional toy companies in Japan and the United States turned up their collective noses at Southern Cross as a waste of time because the projected return on investment wasn't big enough, and the indie and bootleg crowd that are now all that's willing to touch Robotech passed on it too.

MAAS Toys WAS that 0.001% Hail Mary that could have resulted in better-quality Southern Cross toys from another company down the road if their stuff sold reasonably well like what happened with Evolution Toys, Bandai, and Macross II.  

Now we get nothing.

 

14 minutes ago, TheLoneWolf said:

Harmony Gold should count their blessings that MAAS died when they did. If they had relented to MAAS' Kickstarter plans, it would've been yet another Kickstarter debacle for them.

Maybe, maybe not.

What MAAS Toys was trying to do was a lot less ambitious than the obviously doomed Palladium Books Robotech tabletop game and MAAS Toys's staff aren't as moronically self-sabotaging as the Harmony Gold staff running the Robotech Academy campaign.  IMO it's at least a coin flip whether they could've done it or not.  We'll never know for sure now, but if HG had been willing to allow MAAS Toys to try I don't think failure would've been a foregone conclusion the way it was for HG itself and Palladium.

[JB0]

6 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

On the fifth hand, I really need to see about getting this geiger counter fixed...

Well-played.

[RavenHawk]

33 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'm honestly not sure how to feel about it.

On the one hand, MAAS Toys were undeniably a criminal enterprise... so I shouldn't feel sorry for them.

On the other hand, MAAS Toys seems to have been trying to go at least partially legit by licensing Southern Cross from HG... so I ought to feel a little bad for the fact that their attempt to go legit was a part of what sunk them.

On the third hand, MAAS Toys was apparently dumb enough to pursue the license without first checking whether or not HG was OK with their crowdfunding-based business model... which puts them in "too dumb to live" territory.

On the fourth hand, they were literally the ONLY ones willing to make the attempt at Southern Cross mecha merchandise... which is laudable in a self-destructive sort of way given that every other company refused to even try.

On the fifth hand, I really need to see about getting this geiger counter fixed...

I believe you've ignored the sixth hand:

The designs that they showed were not good, and they seemed unlikely to want to improve upon them. If those were to be released, I think that they would have sold poorly.

I would imagine that those poor sales would be attributed to the property, as opposed to the products themselves, likely meaning that no one would want to touch the property.

So, now we're in a situation where folks are going to question the value of the property as they have for years, as opposed to completely writing it off as proven to be un-sellable (is that a word?).

So, a 0.00001% chance of someone making something is technically better than 0.00000% chance.

 

BTW, at the moment, I'm listening to the March interview with Spencer Wilson, the guy behind MAAS toys. He is astoundingly evasive and incoherent in his replies to questions, even for someone running a company based on serial IP infringement.

[Bolt]

49 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

What MAAS Toys was trying to do was a lot less ambitious than the obviously doomed Palladium Books Robotech tabletop game and MAAS Toys's staff aren't as moronically self-sabotaging as the Harmony Gold staff running the Robotech Academy campaign.  IMO it's at least a coin flip whether they could've done it or not.  We'll never know for sure now, but if HG had been willing to allow MAAS Toys to try I don't think failure would've been a foregone conclusion the way it was for HG itself and Palladium.

Are you referring to “table top game” or role playing game from Palladium? I’m only familiar with the RT role playing game , which seemed to survive for years, and even had a “new” small format revision at one point. 

[505thAirborne]

So I guess we're back to "One of these Days" someone with skills like Captain America will design a Hover Tank. 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, RavenHawk said:

I believe you've ignored the sixth hand:

Any more extremities and I might not be allowed to leave the next time I visit an aquarium... or maybe I'll just have to move to New York and annoy Spider-Man.

 

Quote

The designs that they showed were not good, and they seemed unlikely to want to improve upon them. If those were to be released, I think that they would have sold poorly.

I would imagine that those poor sales would be attributed to the property, as opposed to the products themselves, likely meaning that no one would want to touch the property.

On this, I am inclined to disagree for the reasons given previously.

Look at what happened with Evolution Toy's VF-2SS.  Even though the quality of their toy was iffy at best, the fact that it still sold was evidence enough to convince companies that'd previously written the Macross II series off to reevaluate their estimate of its profitability.  If there's enough demand that a bad toy sells, competent companies will naturally assume that a well-made toy will sell proportionately better.  It's a gamble, but it's gambling with infinitely better odds than having nobody interested in making an attempt.

 

Quote

So, now we're in a situation where folks are going to question the value of the property as they have for years, as opposed to completely writing it off as proven to be un-sellable (is that a word?).

So, a 0.00001% chance of someone making something is technically better than 0.00000% chance.

That's not the situation we're in, though.

MAAS Toys was the ONLY outfit willing to gamble on making Southern Cross mecha toys in defiance of the professional consensus that Southern Cross mecha toys are commercially unviable.  With MAAS Toys out of the picture, there's no outfit left that questions Toynami's assessment that Southern Cross is a dry well for something as development-intensive as mecha toys.

 

Quote

BTW, at the moment, I'm listening to the March interview with Spencer Wilson, the guy behind MAAS toys. He is astoundingly evasive and incoherent in his replies to questions, even for someone running a company based on serial IP infringement.

Wasn't that around the point where they started to make pointed hints that their attempt to go solo on crowdfunding backfired epically when a bunch of their backers backed out and got Paypal refunds?

 

 

58 minutes ago, Bolt said:

Are you referring to “table top game” or role playing game from Palladium? I’m only familiar with the RT role playing game , which seemed to survive for years, and even had a “new” small format revision at one point. 

Tabletop game.  Palladium Books tried to launch a tabletop miniatures strategy/war game ala Warhammer 40,000 under the title of "Robotech RPG Tactics" via Kickstarter.  It was the second of two epic Kickstarter disasters for Robotech.

Their campaign was successfully funded with ~$1.5 million (US), but Palladium Books screwed the pooch right out of the gate by not checking that the factory they partnered with could manufacture from the design docs they'd had made for the minis.  It went downhill from there:

• Massive cost overruns from redoing the miniature designs nearly exhausted the budget early on
• A rigged backer vote to take the incomplete game to retail in defiance of promises that backers would get the game first caused a storm of controversy and accusations of breach of contract with the backers
• Misappropriation of most of the remaining budget to manufacture retail stock of the incomplete game that didn't sell worth a damn led to three years of lying to cover up the fact that they'd run out of money while Kevin Siembieda frantically tried to get a loan for the ~$700k he needed to finish the game and meet his basic obligations to the Kickstarter backers.  
• Having to hire a new PR guy to lie for them since nobody believed Palladium's own staff anymore further depleted the budget, 
• One of the game's contributors attempted to blackmail the Kickstarter's backers into backing an unrelated game based on a property he'd licensed from Palladium.  He promised that he could fix the issues with Palladium's Kickstarter but would keep the fix to himself until (or unless) his own project was fully funded.
• The predictable backlash from te blackmail attempt led to the attempted blackmailer getting banned from Kickstarter and Palladium Books's account being threatened with a suspension, leading him to attempt suicide, which Kevin Siembieda immediately blamed the Kickstarter backers for in an attempt to morally blackmail them into silence.

The whole sad mess ended with Harmony Gold revoking Palladium Books's Robotech license... but not before the backlash from it contributed to Harmony Gold's own Kickstarter plans for a crowdfunded new series pilot called Robotech Academy crashing and burning so hard Harmony Gold ragequit before Kickstarter could officially declare their project a failure with less than half of its funding goal reached.

The whole game was doomed to fail anyway, since Robotech doesn't have the kind of brand awareness you need to sustain a tabletop game, but hey... they went out with a bang AND a whimper, because Harmony Gold took Old Publishing Yeller out back and put him down.

Edited April 18, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[RavenHawk]

5 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Wasn't that around the point where they started to make pointed hints that their attempt to go solo on crowdfunding backfired epically when a bunch of their backers backed out and got Paypal refunds?

Not to my knowledge. This was last month. I'm about a painful hour into it so far. It is clear that the money from each crowdfunding doesn't actually go towards that project's deliverables but to pay off financial miscalculations from the previous funded-but-not-produced-because-of-lack-of-funds project... but he insists that is not the case with the Robotech license... any money from crowdfunding it would go towards molds... but they were (as of 3/2/19) still intending to crowdfund someday, once they're done talking to HG, but can't comment on it... ugh...

He keeps talking about around a dozen projects that they're working on, but have no money for... and apparently all the company's hopes and dreams are based around money from the future sales of a figure that was supposed to retail for $25 and was limited to 500 pieces.

[Seto Kaiba]

11 minutes ago, RavenHawk said:

Not to my knowledge. This was last month. I'm about a painful hour into it so far. It is clear that the money from each crowdfunding doesn't actually go towards that project's deliverables but to pay off financial miscalculations from the previous funded-but-not-produced-because-of-lack-of-funds project... but he insists that is not the case with the Robotech license... any money from crowdfunding it would go towards molds... but they were (as of 3/2/19) still intending to crowdfund someday, once they're done talking to HG, but can't comment on it... ugh...

Turns out I was thinking of something they'd said two months earlier about their attempt to go solo and do crowdfunding without an intermediary like Kickstarter or Indiegogo... which resulted in several backers never paying and others backing out and getting refunds thru PayPal after the money had been spent, leaving them tens of thousands of dollars in the red.

[RavenHawk]

1 minute ago, Seto Kaiba said:

leaving them tens of thousands of dollars in the red.

I'm not sure how they could recover from that, considering that he said he didn't send out the price from the raffle that they ran yet because 1) he didn't account for PayPal taking their cut from $300 they raised (which is like 4%), and 2) no one seems to appreciate that it will cost him around $30 to ship it from his home in the Philippines.

[JB0]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

• One of the game's contributors attempted to blackmail the Kickstarter's backers into backing an unrelated game based on a property he'd licensed from Palladium.  He promised that he could fix the issues with Palladium's Kickstarter but would keep the fix to himself until (or unless) his own project was fully funded. 
• The predictable backlash from the blackmail attempt led to the attempted blackmailer getting banned from Kickstarter and Palladium Books's account being threatened with a suspension, leading him to attempt suicide, which Kevin Siembieda immediately blamed the Kickstarter backers for in an attempt to morally blackmail them into silence.

Oh. Oh wow. I'd missed that part of the long-running trainwreck.

[Bolt]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Tabletop game.  Palladium Books tried to launch a tabletop miniatures strategy/war game ala Warhammer 40,000 under the title of "Robotech RPG Tactics" via Kickstarter.  It was the second of two epic Kickstarter disasters for Robotech.

Oh gosh. I remember that now. I found it curious , thought about getting some to convert into Tau customs..and passed on without a second thought. 

[Bolt]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The whole game was doomed to fail anyway, since Robotech doesn't have the kind of brand awareness you need to sustain a tabletop game, but hey... they went out with a bang AND a whimper, because Harmony Gold took Old Publishing Yeller out back and put him down

Ouch. 

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, RavenHawk said:

I'm not sure how they could recover from that, considering that he said he didn't send out the price from the raffle that they ran yet because 1) he didn't account for PayPal taking their cut from $300 they raised (which is like 4%), and 2) no one seems to appreciate that it will cost him around $30 to ship it from his home in the Philippines.

That'd certainly explain why MAAS Toys is apparently shutting down so abruptly... they're in debt, and have no obvious way out as the income from new crowdfunding can't keep pace with the cost of new production and their outstanding debts from their earlier, failed projects.

 

9 hours ago, JB0 said:

Oh. Oh wow. I'd missed that part of the long-running trainwreck.

Yeah, that was a big scandal.

It left Palladium Books with two great big public relations black eyes... one from the dustup over a member of Palladium Books's own staff attempting to finance a side business by extorting money from the backers of the Kickstarter, and one from Kevin's attempt to use the fallout from it to silence his critics.

It also sank Rogue Heroes LLC, the side business the staffer had tried to fund via extortion, since they got branded as a shell company Palladium Books created to sidestep Kickstarter's terms of service.

Edited April 18, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[JetJockey]

That Kickstarter story sounds crazy. Pretty striking how bad this whole Southern Cross thing went. Hopefully no one uses it as a measure of demand for Southern Cross. What they showed didn't generate enough excitement from me and I love Southern Cross. As much as I want a hovertank, it wasn't going to be that one if they continued the plan.

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, JetJockey said:

That Kickstarter story sounds crazy.

Oh, it was.

Palladium Books presided over a complete and utter fiasco.  Their naive incompetence, massive overconfidence, and overestimation of actual demand for a Robotech tabletop game to a frankly comical extent based on the Kickstarter campaign's payout made the project self-sabotaging to the point that it swiftly devolved into a rolling multi-year public relations disaster for the Robotech brand.  The PR fallout from Palladium's Robotech Kickstarter had a measurable role in the failure of Harmony Gold's own attempt to use Kickstarter to finance a pilot for a new Robotech TV series.  When that Robotech Academy Kickstarter campaign inevitably failed as a result of Harmony Gold's public displays of massive hubris (bragging that fans would be throwing their money at it), the shameless attempt to exploit Carl Macek's passing a few years earlier to get fans to open their wallets ("Make Carl's dream a reality!"), the concept art and animation looking like arse thanks to having been done by a South American fan film group HG had shut down years earlier, and the distrust of Kickstarter sown in their fandom by Palladium's ongoing clusterf*ck, it led to HG ragequitting the Kickstarter about a week before it was due to end when it became apparent they were unlikely to even come close to their funding goal (after a month they barely hit 38%).

All of that public embarrassment for Harmony Gold and the Robotech brand was what prompted management there to set a condition in all future license agreements that there would be no crowdfunding of any kind for licensed Robotech merchandise.

That, of course, was the VERY BIG PROBLEM that put the brakes on MAAS Toys's plans for a line of licensed Southern Cross toys.  They would've been in violation of the terms of their license if they'd used Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or a privately run crowdfunding drive, and without crowdfunding they couldn't afford to keep the lights on let alone finish the design and start production.  As catch-22's go, it's a doozy.

 

8 hours ago, JetJockey said:

Pretty striking how bad this whole Southern Cross thing went. Hopefully no one uses it as a measure of demand for Southern Cross. What they showed didn't generate enough excitement from me and I love Southern Cross. As much as I want a hovertank, it wasn't going to be that one if they continued the plan.

Really?  This kind of crash-and-burn abject failure has been the norm for Robotech for like 33 years now.  Southern Cross itself isn't exactly a stranger to it either, if we're being honest.

For that very reason, I don't think that MAAS Toys's implosion will have any measurable effect on how the perceived viability of the Southern Cross license.

Not that that's cause for good cheer, mind you.  It's because the vast majority of toy companies had already written Robotech off entirely as commercially unviable, and the ones that hadn't yet (like Toynami) wrote Southern Cross off as commercially unviable based on its status as the Robotech fandom's un-favorite saga.  Perceived demand for Southern Cross toys was never not at rock bottom, so a realist would say there's no impact and optimist would say there's nowhere to go but up.

[Bolt]

11 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Not that that's cause for good cheer, mind you.  It's because the vast majority of toy companies had already written Robotech off entirely as commercially unviable, and the ones that hadn't yet (like Toynami) wrote Southern Cross off as commercially unviable based on its status as the Robotech fandom's un-favorite saga.  Perceived demand for Southern Cross toys was never not at rock bottom, so a realist would say there's no impact and optimist would say there's nowhere to go but up.

Unfortunately RT is seems to have had a dead chicken strapped to its neck for decades..

Until HG looses (I doubt they are willingly going to let go) RT , that chicken is just going to keep rotting..

[jenius]

I thought the South American fan was a pretty talented cg artist... Kinda seems mean to lump him in as part of the reason Academy was dead on arrival. I think the bigger issue was that the plot sounded recycled, they didn't address the issues with IP and who would be in the show from other generations, and that we had shadow Chronicles so the audience knew where things would go and also wondered why HG wouldn't just make a second Shadow Chronicles episode.