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The Vintage Collection / Re: The Future of Star Wars Collecting?
« on: December 7, 2013, 01:06 PM »That's a great point about the CommTech Reader. Way ahead of its time and shy of the mark of real interactivity. If they had integrated that technology into the vehicles/playsets, or beyond to any kind of gaming, then maybe. But that was 15 years ago (!!!). The more I think about it, it's the toy industry in general, rather than any particular brand, that is suffering right now.
There was a second generation of CommTech chips in the works. The figures that were to be offered with that second wave of CommTech technology eventually became what we saw in the POTJ line. Rumor had it that when you placed multiple second gen CommTech chips on the reader that they would interact with one another. But from a marketing standpoint the concept fell flat. Hasbro probably would have been better served by packing a figure with the CommTech reader, but it's all ancient history.
The action figure segment seems to be reaching for SOMETHING to bring it back. But I think it's really suffering because the market has become oversaturated by properties that THINK they can sustain an action figure line, and a shift towards video games on either console systems, computers and handheld devices. I suspect that what may help is if we see a game developed by both Hasbro and EA with content that's unlocked by codes with a figure. Will that happen? We'll see.