Quote:
Originally Posted by Silas Loki
All of that said, I just want to clarify an important point. I'm not suggesting that the finished piece will be bad (in of itself), I am suggesting it will be something other than what everyone is getting excited about, because it will be next to impossible for the Chinese plant to produce something to this level....I'd be confident in saying that this is a fact!
So, ask yourself this, given that the production plant will never produce something as stunning as the artists prototype, why does Sideshow use the artists prototype for the advertisment? Why don't they wait until they have a first off manufacturing sample and advertise that? I think everyone knows the answer to this, and it has nothing to do with time frames (at least as far as I can see).
|
Do you honestly need to ask this? I would think its pretty much common sense that the nicer the prototype looks, the more excitement is generated and hence more pre-orders placed. In other words, its about sales.
Sideshow, or more specifically the artists involved with the prototype, go to great lengths to make the best prototype statue that they can and then Sideshow tries to get the Chinese factories to produce a statue that is as close as possible to the prototype. Of course, everyone that has any experience in this market knows that its going to fall short of the prototype to some extent. If the workers in the Chinese factories were as talented as the original artists, they would likely be working as an artist at Sideshow as opposed to a worker in one of the lines in the factories and if they put as much time into each individual statue as the artists put into the prototype, it would likely take years for a single statue's edition to be released.
Lets face it, its really all a grey area. Everyone has different expectations and different subjective opinions in regards to what they deem acceptable quality wise and the artists working on the lines in China all have different levels of skill. Not to mention everyone has their good days and bad days at work. So some statues are going to be better than others no matter how one goes about it. Its simply unavoidable. Even if the original artists did every last statue in an edition, you would still ultimately have variations which would lead to some statues being better than others.
The final line when taking all of this into consideration needs to be Sideshow's quality control dept. and this appears to be the one area with Sideshow that could use the most improvement. At the price levels of these statues, Sideshow should be going over each and every statue before they get shipped out, to make sure the final statue is up to an acceptable level quality wise and doesn't have serious defects and it appears from the posts I have seen on these forums, Sideshow fails to do this on many occasions.
I still don't see anything wrong with pre orders, especially if you want to make sure you get an EX. If you don't like it, you can always send it back. If there is any market where pre-orders are hurting the industry its gaming. Developers releasing unfinished games and games with tons of bugs with the idea that its ok because they can release an update for the game after its been released. If people stopped pre ordering and only purchased a game if it was finished and not full of bugs, it would force the developers to change this aspect of the market.
That being said, pre orders with statues....well, I just don't see it being an issue. In fact, I love the Flex Pay option that pre-ordering gives you. I vastly prefer the Flex Pay option over paying full price for the statue in one payment. It always seems like the times I buy a statue in one payment, a bunch of great stuff gets released on eBay that I am unable to bid on due to going over my monthly budget. So I vastly prefer spacing the payments out using Flex Pay. So again, given the return policy, I just don't see pre-ordering as being a problem.