KNOCKING OFF THE TOY GIANTS

The toy industry is undergoing tremendous growth for the past few years and we strongly believe we are now in the golden era of toys collecting. This is mostly due to the advancement in technology for toys production and ease of rapid prototyping a product through the usage of 3D printers. Anyone now can practically design their toys from ground up in a free 3D software like sketchup or blender and export it to a 3D printer.

The flip side of this is that there are numerous companies roiling out knockoff of an already released toys mostly at a sub-par standard and extremely low price. However, we start to notice some companies producing knockoff by reverse engineering popular products with surprisingly good improvement based on known flaws of the original toys highlighted by fans in forums or youtube. These so called knockoff toys producer are also gaining popularity and respect among toys collectors. It is very evident that knockoff products are gaining inroads into toys collectors hands from Gundams, Legos, Star Wars, Transformers, 1/6 scale action figures and way much more than we know it.

Some notable knockoff products from Gundam model kits which has been around for years were TT Hong Li and Daban. We are also seeing Transformers knockoff which are much better in quality compared with Hasbro from products like Wei Jiang, MMC and Maketoys. There are also cases knockoff Transformers products price at much higher than what probably Hasbro would have release due to the immense high demand. This also has a lot to do with Hasbro inability to design and produce a product based on market demand (E.g. Transformer Combiner Devastator took a very long time to finally release to the market by Hasbro). Hasbro is also cutting corners in their plastic materials by giving us not internally hollow parts but also visible ugly hollow parts of almost all arms, legs and body parts.­

The other main issue with big mega companies like Lego is their pricing of their products. The prices of their higher end Lego sets especially UCS line costing hundreds of dollars are often illogical. Well, there is no doubt that we are paying the higher price due to their R&D, technology, licensing and royalties which compounded to the end user price but if we ponder for a while that an UCS set is just a bunch of plastic and shouldn’t  be that costly. That is why Lego bricks are widely reproduced by knockoff brands like Decool, Lepin, Lele, Kazi, Sloban and several others. We are not here to debate whether collectors should buy knockoff but there are times that these collectibles are really not for all even the hardcore fans may feel the squeeze in their nuts!

The 1/6 scale action figure market is also no difference with mostly market dominated by Hot Toys, ThreeZero, Enterbay and Sideshow Collectibles. Who can imagine that a 1/6 scale character plastic toy can fetch USD300? These days many may have to kitbash their own but the demand for super heroes genre is still very strong thanks to the non-stop Marvel and DC releasing their movies with new cool characters every year.

That is just the current situation of knockoff and original Toys. Let us know at the comment box below whether you should firmly support original or you do not have much choice due to budget constraints.