It was a good article, but sometimes, I don't know, I think JTA just gets a tad bit ahead of themselves or assumes too much.
Like when the guy said he suggested to DDP that they sell stuff on Hasbro Toy Shop, DDP supposedly lit-up and wrote that idea down. Now if that was me giving the interview, I would be more inclined to think that DDP was mocking the question. Like "oh duh! I can't believe I didn't think about that, how silly of me for being so stupid"
And of course any collecting site that feels the need to tell their readers mid-article that they need to buy every figure they see to help support the line... really? No, really? I'm sorry, but I already buy 3x of every figure that comes out - two to open and one to keep on card, and you're telling me I gotta go buy more? I know you're not specifically talking to me when you write that, but just like you shouldn't be making those kinds of commentaries to me, you also shouldn't be making them to the collector who gets one of everything to open, or the collector who only buys the new sculpts or the collector who only buys OT characters, etc... What you want to buy is your choice and no one should be buying more than what they want or items they don't want because they think that their individual purchase is going to make/break a toy line.
Hasbro does seem REALLY quick to beat the "it's Lucasfilm's fault" drum this time around and claim that TVC sells far worse than Movie Heroes or Clone Wars, but if there is nothing on the pegs besides Movie Heroes or Clone Wars what do you think is going to sell? And their attitude that Movie Heroes isn't for collectors and now, all of a sudden, neither is Clone Wars - well all I gotta say to that is f**k you DDP - if you were going to have this attitude, you should have been up-front about that with the Clone Wars when you started it back in 2008. Of course you weren't going to say stuff like that back then because you wanted the collectors to buy into the line. Now that the line is dying, which is clearly because the kids aren't buying, you're going to cater to them because some wack job parents called complaining because Johnny wasn't blessed with the hand-eye coordination required to stick a small plastic gun into a small plastic hand?
And of course like I mentioned earlier in another thread - if articulation is out of the question then why is the same Sandtrooper that is shipping now in the Lost Line wave, and is going to get re-packed in the Legacy Collection also going to appear with a light-up gun in Movie Heroes? Aren't you afraid that bad-hand-eye-coordination-Johnny's mom is going to call in and yell at you about this figure?
Like P-Siddy said - it's simple - parents who are making the casual purchase for their Star Wars-fan child are going to take the path of least resistence - they're going to go with the product that is a) readily available; and b) cheapest - and in both cases this year, that was either a Movie Heroes or a Clone Wars figure. What I seemed to notice locally was that once all three lines were at the same price - nothing started to move, and don't give me that "well, in between your visits the figures are selling out and being restocked" crap, when you're frustrated with your local store that you hit every day, you start to count and catalog what's in stock, so you can clearly see if you missed something going out or so you can track how well things are selling. Well if nothing moves and counts don't change for months at a time, what proof do you have that any one line sells better than another?
Right now everyone is just pointing fingers and laying blame with everyone else because things have been so lean this year. Only until people wake up and take ownership of their own decisions and start to use some common sense are things going to change. And right now, I still don't see anything truly changing. Both the Movie Heroes AND Legacy Collection are going to have, minimally two EXACT SAME characters at the EXACT SAME time - the Red Geonosis Battledroid and the Sandtrooper. Who knows how many other double-dip characters we're going to see next year (since we've only been shown 2 figures out of a 12 figure case for MH wave 1, who knows), but all I know is that if the best you can do is show that you're going to have two figures in the Movie Heroes line that are also in the Legacy/BAD line, your lack of understanding what the true problems are is incredibly disheartening.