What happened?

They're aimed at children mostly, so they make them cartoony to be less threatening to parent's buying their kid a man with an axe. That's why "collector" brands exist, to capitalize on older buyers with realistic designs in most cases. Unless you're trying collect a character from a kid's show in which case why are you watching shows for five year olds?

>>6173120
Kenner was going just as to shit in the 90s when they got bought out by Hasbro. Toybiz the same, but early 2000s. For toybiz, it was QC. For Kenner, just shoddy products. Never got past the 5POA stage, just started making the sculpts more exxxtreme exxxagerated proportions.

>>6173136
Kenner's Beast Wars was articulated as fuck for the era, though.

>>6173143
That was the exception, not the example.

>random giant axe thing for deathstroke
>clamp to pull out abominable snowman's teeth for azrael
y tho

>>6173120
>What happened to the greats like Kenner or Toybiz?

Kenner was bought out by Hasbro in like 1990 and was never a market leader in articulation.
Toy Biz bought Marvel Comics and Ike decided making physical objects costs too much.

>>6173154
>Toy Biz bought Marvel Comics and Ike decided making physical objects costs too much.
There was more than a 10 year stretch between those two things

if you read any financial reports from the major companies from the past 5-10 years you will see they are basically losing kids at earlier and earlier ages to video games/phones, etc

they know their core market is kids probably less than 8 years old and old people with nostalgia. Young kids don't give care about articulation so they cut costs and try to make the shit look passable by making it more stylized

if you need any more evidence, think about the last time you saw a kid older than 8 in the toy aisle that wasn't a neckbeard collector like yourself

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>>6173388
>companies blaming shit on something that happened 30 years ago
I don't think kids can get any younger when it comes to playing video games for most of the day.

FYI, toys are much more expensive.
With minimum wage in the 80s and 90s, you could buy a 5"-6" toy from one hour's work.

Today you can't even buy half of a 6" figure from an hour's work.
You can't even buy a properly articulated 1:18 figure with an hour's work.
Hence those cheapo 3.75" figures costing only $8, which is roughly what you get paid in an hour on minimum wage... before taxes.

>>6173120
if that line had better joints, i wouldve given them some of my money. they had those extreme designs, but the only things with good articulation are all those shitty comic accurate figures

>>6173596
Same. This is the first time I'm seeing them, but those sculpts are fucking great. I'd definitely be on board if they could pose well.

>>6173388
>tfw waiting for the glorious day the toy companies go full force in appealing to the manchild market

:)

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>>6173120
I know batman's secret identity.

>>6173580
I think it's both. My cousins' kids barely touched action figures. They both had tablets and smartphones before they were 10. I had a Nintendo but it never left the home.

At the same time, companies use that as an excuse. Uh oh, kids are into other stuff, time to raise prices! It also allows them to handwave away their part in inflating away the value of the dollar while simultaneously destroying wages.

I'll cop to raising prices in the face of falling demand. But I know when I'm beat and it was more of an attempt to soften the crash than stay afloat.

>>6173388 op here. Thanks for the input, I'm no longer an avid collector of action figures, just wanted to know why they look so different compared to 10 or 20 years ago.

>>6173580
yes video games were a thing 30 years ago too, but the biggest difference is probably price as you mentioned

toys now are probably twice as expensive and electronic phone/tablet entertainmet is free or a few dollars. Thats a huge difference in what a parent might decide to buy on a whim for their children. In the past a gift may have been a random toy, now its a random app or movie

however, that said, what it really means is that toys could skate by 10+ years ago by just being random toys...now they have to be attached to other gimmicks/name recognition like video games or movies. This is why Hasbro started doing the weird shit like making a Battleship movie and why transformers as a property is still pretty much holding strong

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>>6173886
>he didn't have a Tiger Electronic/Mattel/Gameboy/GameGear/TurboExpress/AtariLynx/etc to play video games outside his house as a kid
poorfags can't afford smartphones today either
>kids are into other stuff, time to raise prices!
They've never risen the price on stuff just because kids aren't buying them.
They've only raised the prices because of our buying power lessening and the slave producers aren't slaves anymore.

>toys now are probably twice as expensive
Not really.
Most of the cost is mostly down toward minimum wage and wages in general not keeping up with inflation. So goods rose in price to match inflation, while we've been making less money than ever.

>Thats a huge difference in what a parent might decide to buy on a whim for their children. In the past a gift may have been a random toy, now its a random app or movie
Eh... i worked with kids and i can definitely say that kids want toys as much as before, but parents are actually being cheapasses and allowing them to get some free app or buy some stupid mini game/addon for like $5.
That's cheaper than a toy, which just points toward it being a matter of cost. A physical toy costs too much.

>This is why Hasbro started doing the weird shit
Nah, this is just Hasbro raking in dough the same way Marvel does. Hasbro's remaining stuff is mainstream and most of their products are household names before any movies.

It's other companies who need to release media and other shit to get notice by mass market stores like Walmart, hence companies like Jakks and Playmates mostly making licensed stuff instead of creating their own IPs.

>>6174864
>poorfags can't afford smartphones today either

Dude they basically give smartphones away now. you can get a decent Smartphone that will play apps and crap for $30. And people literally throw away their old smartphones. Besides, when have poor people been smart with their money?

>>6173120
kids are getting stupider thanks to video games.

Action figures are kaput.

Fuck kids.

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>>6174872
Yeah, smartphones are cheap with a plan, but the plan is fucking expensive.
Then oyu take into account that low income parents can only afford that one phone, and giving your kid that phone is something that a kid can rely to play on.

>>6174898
What a hypocritical thing to say, unless you're older than 40, before video games became a thing.

i fucking hate video games

I had video games as a kid I just don't remember playing them that much. I had an N64 that I'd pretty much play only when I had friends over and a Gameboy that I'd play on long car rides. I don't remember seeing them as this amazing that ate up all my time. Do you think kids are generally more attracted to them now becuse the graphics are better? Video games were big in the 90s too, why didn't this happen sooner? Or had it been building to this point?

>>6175689
It's like the internet. It's existed and evolved for many years, but it took time for it to become a part of the contemporary first-world lifestyle. With the help of marketing, now not only have video games become normalized but also but also they have increasingly lost their age restrictions among public consensus as the internet did. Furthermore, being technologically inclined has become the in-thing these days. Video games were able to jump on that band wagon and have become a staple in being technologically current rather than simply being another way to have fun. In a way technology has almost become a fashion statement.

Toys, particularly action figures which are popular on /toy/, don't have the luxury of joining those ranks. That's why you get things like Skylanders, amiibo, and toys with QR codes trying bring toys the modern frontier. Action figures rarely get to have a piece of that pie, though.

Otherwise, toys have died within childhood in the eyes of the public with the adult collector base being considered niche and weird. I come across many people both younger and older than me, who talk about video games openly as work or outside, giving me weird looks and comments when I say I don't really play video games anymore. Meanwhile you hardly get any adult talking about toys and more adults will look at anybody who mentions toys beyond buying them for kids oddly than not.

If action figures can seamless integrate technology while keeping standards appealing to collectors integral to the product, then perhaps you can get everybody to become a /toy/ soldier and flood the board with as many anons as /v/. Thouh I do not know how many people would want that...

>>6175767
Also forgot to say that ultimately, things that are trendy or popular with adults usually trickle down to the interests of kids. Especially if its something kids can safely partake in. On top of that, they have more adults today who will pull them up to video games, which will stay more with them through adulthood than ever before. As time goes on, this cycle will increase unless video games suffer from another crash which is unrecoverable. It will evovle into another "child to adult to child" pastime passed through generations and openly enjoyed through the majority of one's lifetime.

>>6175689
Kids of the 80's and 90's were raised by parents who didn't want them spending all day on a game system or TV and typically (with obviously some exceptions) still encouraged kids to play outside.

Post-2000 kids are raised by parents who themselves were gamers, and may still be, so there's no longer a wasting time stigma with them. Not to mention many kids losing their freedom and outside being too "dangerous" from society's point of view.

>>6173153
Mostly likely reused molds, they both have that gap on the lower handle to shoot from spring loaded cannons.

>>6175022
You don't even need a plan, dummy, you just need a wifi connection and all the free games are yours. So many parents just give their toddler their old iPad/iPhone because they need this years model.

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>>6176353
>implying they don't resell them or trade them in for credit
Fucking Mitt Romney, just hang yourself already.
You're lucky that the US is mostly so spoiled that a French Revolution won't happen to you within your lifetime.

You're so out of touch.

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>>6175689
> I don't remember seeing them as this amazing that ate up all my time.
Are you fucking joking?
How many games did you even have?
Fucking VGs was life and at school everyone was a gamer, except for the nerds whose parents denied them a childhood.
I don't think anything has changed with how kids perceive video games and play with them.

>>6175767
>With the help of marketing, now not only have video games become normalized
Marketting did shit but make console fanboys. The ONLY thing that normalized video games is that people like myself continued playing video games into adulthood. This is why the median age for gamers is 35.
>more gamers are over the age of 36 than between the ages of 18 to 35 or under the age of 18.
Back in the 80s and 90s, the average gamer was a kid. Almost all growth in the industry is from adult gamers, while you can't get kids to be gamers anymore today than back in the day.

>>6176548
>still posting Romney
You're a whole election behind.

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>>6177148
curse upon him and his family forever.