Former Hasbro Employee [Paraphrased]: "Perceived Value" Initiatives Mandated Across All Lines To Create "Hasbro Brand" Uniformity

This initiative is in place of giving collectors value for their purchases. Bobby Vala, a former seven-year employee at Hasbro was interviewed on a podcast recently. The video of it can be found HERE. He offers opinions and insights to the Hasbro Star Wars and Marvel brands explaining why we get so little with those action figures. It’s something called PERCEIVED VALUE. The Disney licensing fees are so high, that they cut out any potential opportunity of multiple portraits or interchangeable hands. And Hasbro’s GI Joe line suffers the brunt of this because of the cut back on accessories as to not make the Star Wars and Marvel lines look bad. (more….)

Bobby Vala is a former employee of Hasbro who worked on many lines including GI Joe as well as kid and collector products for Marvel. He was disappointed to see the original 6″ GI Joe line get canceled. The GI Joe “real world” line was more than the sci-fi-focused version of the line out now.

When Hasbro produces Star Wars and Marvel (both of which are on the higher side of licensing costs), a royalty is paid to Disney. This huge number eats into the cost of the figure quite a bit.

With any The Black Series figure, you’re getting the figure with the royalties taken out. And when all is said and done, you feel like you’re not getting a lot with the figure, but that’s the reason why. The licensing fees took away any chance of getting additional accessories.

As you know, GI Joe has no royalty because Hasbro owns it. You can add more into every figure in the line because of this. You were able to find extra hands, extra heads, magazines for guns, etc. But now you’re seeing that get taken away.

Hasbro Senior Management only wants to put out GI Joes if there is entertainment behind it. Although the design team pushed back, they lost that war. This was when the 2020 GI Joe film never came out.

Now we’re back with GI Joe classified.

And now Hasbro is working in PERCEIVED VALUE into the line. They scaled back GI Joe accessories BECAUSE Star Wars and Marvel have less. GI Joe, therefore, gets watered-down. It has less “meat” than it should. The current G Joe figures could come with a wealth of more parts and accessories. But PERCEIVED VALUE ruined it. As a result, profit margins are better on the GI Joe line, but the collector is reaping no benefit.

There is much more in the video. This is just from my quick note-taking. How do you feel knowing that other lines could be coming with more accessories than they do, but there is a bigger push to keep all the lines uniform, as to not upset that balance of perceived value? Hasbro intentionally holding back additional accessories to make it look like one line isn’t getting more than the other is pretty shady, no?

Thanks to JTA reader Mark G. for the alert.

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