Skylanders in stock at MSRP including Cynder!!!

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Check your local Gamestops too. I dropped by mine and found a Whirlwind. Now I just need a Life-type and I'm done collecting this stuff.

...until the fall, that is.
 
Didn't think of Gamestop... I can check tonight.

Yeah, I've got Spyro(magic), Stump Smash(Life), Flameslinger(fire), Hex(death), Trigger Happy (Tech) Gill Gun(water) so I just need an Air and an Earth.
 
[quote name='folkmojo']As recently as January Activision is on record as saying that they will try to meet the demand for Skylanders. This makes sense because every time a shopper goes to the store and gets greeted with an empty shelf they lose money.[/QUOTE]

I worked in the toys industry for a long time. Usually the bottleneck in production was the injection molding tooling required to make the toys. There is a certain cycle time that dictates a maximum number of toys you can make a day. Basically you have to shoot in hot plastic, wait for it to cool and then remove it. It usually takes 30-60 a cycle.

It can take six month from the time you approve additional capacity to the time product shows up in stores. You have to cut a PO for new tooling, wait in line for the tooling to be manufactured (which can take months), ship the tooling to the manufacturing facility, test the new tooling and slowly ramp up production. Then you still have to ship the product across the ocean and also ship to stores once it hits the US. This time of year you also have to wait for the two week shut down for Chinese New Year which also creates a backlog when things come back online.

Most hot toys would start out hot in September and you'd cut a PO for new tooling then and hope it was online before Chinese NY in February. Shift that timeline to December when Skylanders started to run out and realistically April is the earliest you would possibly see product coming from additional capacity.

I have no idea if that is the case here, but 95% of the time in my experience when there was a prolonged shortage it was tooling capacity related. There are other things can be done in the meantime to expedite product coming in and squeeze out every bit of capacity, but it doesn't dramatically change things. You can be busting your ass on the production side to get everything in as quickly as possible and there is little difference from a consumer standpoint in stores.
 
[quote name='Gosha']I still don't get why people go so nuts collecting these things. Seems like you could just get all the elements and be done with it.[/QUOTE]

Me either, I went on Craigslist and ads are filled with these things and they are marked up as high as 500%!
 
You people that don't see the draw to get more and more of these don't know many kids do you? Sure you, the adult video gamer, gets enough of these to get access to every part of the game. Now the 7 year old gamer gets these to see each one's cool and unique abilities in game, and also have a toy to play with when video game time is over. It is a brilliant marketing strategy, one that absolutely will be used by other games, as others have mentioned.
 
[quote name='ackbar7']You people that don't see the draw to get more and more of these don't know many kids do you? Sure you, the adult video gamer, gets enough of these to get access to every part of the game. Now the 7 year old gamer gets these to see each one's cool and unique abilities in game, and also have a toy to play with when video game time is over. It is a brilliant marketing strategy, one that absolutely will be used by other games, as others have mentioned.[/QUOTE]

Yep, and they did that devious (yet brilliant) little thing of having you find the "special moves" for each character (including ones you don't yet have) and then showing you a video of all the cool things that character does. Of course a kid will then want that character ASAP!

FWIW, I drove down to the TRU that said they were getting them this morning and much to my surprise they had Legendary packs. My son is playing with L-Bash as I type.

By the way, we've veered off to general Skylanders discussion and not this deal, whatever it was (GS having them, maybe? ;)). So I'll close this up and refer you to the general thread. It would have been nice to have some of these posts (especially jkanownik's) in there. Maybe you can repost it there jkanownik?

http://www.cheapassgamer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=306041
 
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