looking for news.

Upcoming releases, past releases, news related to Busou Shinki & MMS

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halconfenix
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Re: looking for news.

Post by halconfenix » Fri Feb 07, 2014 9:59 am

No idea what the announcement is but...

http://573.jp/cEVf

Can some one translate this Please?

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Re: looking for news.

Post by rubixbox » Fri Feb 07, 2014 10:07 am

halconfenix wrote:No idea what the announcement is but...

http://573.jp/cEVf

Can some one translate this Please?
Running it through WorldLingo, it looks like it's an announcement about an event where you can buy older Shinki figures. Of course, given the accuracy of free online translators, I am fairly certain that's not the case.

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Re: looking for news.

Post by Klinkin » Fri Feb 07, 2014 11:33 am

Rough translation via Google Translate.

As far as I can tell, they will be selling Shinki of some sort. They mention "past releases," so I highly doubt we're getting any new figures. It will be held at the Konami Style store in Tokyo, and you might have to RSVP in advance. However, down near the bottom, I found this:
(Examples of conditions)
And parts shortage (duplicates), paint failure, excessive slack and damage of the joint, assembly difference.
· State stickiness of the product, crack, cracking, rust transfer, color, fade, resin deterioration, peeling paint, hard to assemble and the strength of the hinge due to dimensional changes in the packing-trace some of the blister, etc..
Damage of the package
※ The product of this time, is that as long as the stock brewery products, sold in BASIS.
We're sorry, exchange for (including the symptoms described above) lack incompleteness (contents, including parts, etc.) of the product, so I can not do any guarantee correspondence of returned goods repayment etc., Please purchase on your understanding .
...How Google Translate can turn intarwebs lingo into perfectly readable English but still manages to make a mess of Japanese like this is beyond me. From what I can tell, the Shinki they're selling may (read: likely do) have various issues; either they're all old, or they're factory rejects. These likely aren't going to be the proper, new-in-box Shinki that people are expecting, but display items, factory rejects, and old stock they dredged out of who-knows-where. I bet if you're lucky you can find a good deal on a really rare Shinki, but the description makes this seem like the abandoned Shinki shelter of sales. My gut reaction here is that Konami is selling off all remaining stock in preparation to close down the line for good.
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Re: looking for news.

Post by Shiaoran » Sun Feb 09, 2014 10:44 am

It seems that they'll sell the same stuff we have seen on Taobao, and I'm also afraid this is the end.

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Re: looking for news.

Post by Zenislez » Mon Feb 10, 2014 2:54 am

It is sad, but at least now there should be a concrete and clear answer about the fate of busou shinki line.

It is sad if they really choose to kill the busou shinki line, but anything good will end one day...and one day all shinkis will end up as junk.

But at least for me, I will make sure that none of my girls and some more if I can get my hand and save as many as I can and make sure that none of them will become junk while I'm alive.

I don't know about everyone's opinion, but I still think there's something special with MMS line. It just has a certain charm that no other figure/toys/figma/ect can match.

It's been a short but enjoyable time.
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Re: looking for news.

Post by Megaphone » Sat Feb 22, 2014 6:35 pm

I see the prices of all existing busou shinkis in the konami shop.... wow and I can´t buy it....
I love the busou shinki colection but I must say Konami is the worst company in the terms of publicity and integration between the toys Division, game divisions, anime and Konami of america.

I have 53 busou shinkis and for me was incredible all the time spend on my collection.

:fubuki:

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Re: looking for news.

Post by halconfenix » Sat Feb 22, 2014 9:48 pm

for what i was told, the konami shop at tokyo was pretty much "raided" by shinki fans and everything was sold out... so i hope that konami will think VERY well of what just happened and give us some hope... it's more than clear now there's still people out there wanting more shinkis... it's now up to them to give us ANY news about the line....

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Re: looking for news.

Post by ArcticKitsune » Sat Feb 22, 2014 11:50 pm

From what's been posted Konami JP did that Shinki sale event with more than 2000+ to 3000+ people lining up. Only 1500 reservation tickets with many people sent back home in a depressed way. They still lined up even knowing they wouldn't get one. Shinkis sold out swiftly and Akihabara (assumingly whole of Japan and the net stores) were all raided for every bit of Busou Shinki related material.

Konami has no choice but to act up on this now or pull the plug to anger the fans in an insulting manner. Make more Busou Shinkis or point the middle finger at them....I'm waiting to see what they'll choose.
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Re: looking for news.

Post by Mobius » Wed Feb 26, 2014 6:18 am

Well, I hate to play devil's advocate but...

As we're not really in the know about the Japanese market for the most part, I think it could be safe to assume that perhaps they looked at the numbers around the end of the anime and decided that it'd hurt them more than they'd profit off of it. I'm not entirely sure about the international marketplace, but I do know that at least in the US, the First Sale Doctrine holds true - once a person buys a product, i.e. us buying a Shinki, it's theirs and unless there's a contract saying otherwise, the seller's involvement ends. There might be ridiculous and obscene prices for Shinki, but that's all on the used market - and if the Doctrine or something similar applies, that means Konami or anyone else involved in the actual production will even see a cent of it. As demand rises, so does the price in a market where the product can no longer be produced; that's why antiques are so valuable, aren't they?

Maybe there was factory troubles, maybe there were a whole bunch of other things that we could speculate about that we don't know, and maybe not even the die-hard Japanese fanbase knowing. But I'm going to try and look at the numbers here.

From what I can gather, the consensus on the English net says that an average anime episode costs about ~$100.000 USD to make. Ignoring advertisements, promotions, market research and what not for the franchise as a whole, that's at least ~1.2 million USD in the bag. That is a LOT of money, no matter how you slice it. And then you add on the yen, so even taking into account the rough 75 JPY - 1.00 USD back in 2012, that is close to one hundred million yen, for an anime that for all intents and purposes, was not that good, didn't burn up any charts or make headlines, or do much to attract attention and new customers to the brand, at least not as much as it could have or Konami would liked it to.

Assuming Konami were wanting to make a profit off of this, this means that they were aiming to make more than 1.2m USD/100m JPY in the foreseeable future to make up for it. Yes, this is probably an exaggeration and there's likely a lot of things like investments and hard financial math I'm missing, but my point stands. The anime was not something that succeeded, at least in the sense of promoting the franchise and making Konami money. Looking at the Battle Masters games - a typical PSP game (at least as of 2005) cost 900,000 JPY to develop, which is $800k to $900k USD. And again this is ignoring advertising and marketing, which are expensive in their own rights. And they made two of these things, and let's assume for a moment that it takes $1 million straight to make a PC game like Battle Rondo.

2007 - Battle Rondo starts
2010 - Battle Masters is released (~900k USD)
2011 - Battle Rondo ends, Battle Masters Mk 2 is released. Moon Angel (40 minutes total or so) is released. Let's be generous and say half the work was done for Mk2 from the original game (450k USD) and 40 minutes breaks down into two standard anime episodes (200k USD)
2012 - Busou Shinki TV goes on and finishes, with an OVA later (~1,300k USD)

While a gross simplification, this comes out to 2.86 million USD, or as of right now, 292 million yen.

Now, it was also mentioned that Busou Shinki was competing with other products like the figma line. I took a quick gander at them, and well... beyond hitting what's hot and getting an advantage that way, an average figma seems to retail around 3,200 yen give or take. From what I can find of Busou Shinki prices before the hike thanks to the secondhand market, they retailed at more than double that. A figure that's soaring in popularity or is in the public consciousness at the moment, with comparable detail and craftsmanship against a figure that not many people know about and has more of a niche charm to it at double the former's price. Frankly, that's a onesided slaughter more than a fight.

Who knows how much it cost them with this factory thing. But I don't think we need to look at that to realize a possibility that we might not want to. It might have been sustainable before, it might have been rather popular among a decent percent of its target population to have a nice profit margin. But as it seems, at least from here, Konami tried pushing it as hard as they could to stir up interest and get some money flowing, but it failed to meet expectations. The production of new figures and news came to a grinding halt. For the first time prototypes of Shinki weren't released as official products. There has been no effort on Konami's part to push this envelope further in the two years since everything stopped, not even making announcements at festivals. The biggest news we get are diorama things and contests for plush dolls.

It might be on hiatus, it might be simple honest difficulty, but there's an equally good chance that Konami doesn't see the franchise as valuable or viable at this point in time, and thus are quietly ignoring its existence while they focus on what brings in the cash. Because really let's face it - that's the bottom line.

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Re: looking for news.

Post by Klinkin » Wed Feb 26, 2014 11:23 am

While I agree that Konami's trying to sweep the Shinki franchise under the rug, somewhat, I disagree that the franchise isn't viable. Your calculations completely forgot something very important: the anime and the games are products on their own. I haven't checked the numbers recently, but from what I saw a while ago, the anime, while a critical flop, was decidedly middle-of-the-pack when it came to DVD sales, meaning it was likely either making a small profit or a small loss; it wasn't a particularly high-production anime, so I'm guessing it made a small profit. I'm almost certain the games also made a profit; again, I don't have the hard numbers to back that up, but at the very least, if they made a second game, then the first must have done well enough to deserve a sequel.

As for the prices on the secondhand market: no, Konami doesn't get a cut of secondhand Shinki sales. That would be absurd, from a legal standpoint. However, secondhand sales are a good indicator of demand; if Shinki are going for two, three times their original price on the secondhand market, then there's a very good chance that there will be plenty of people willing to buy more if Konami released more at market price.

I don't think the figma line is a good comparison for competing with the Shinki line; AGP would be a better one, both in terms of kit size and general theme. So far, AGPs seem to run only a little cheaper than Shinki, and earlier ones suffered from issues with quality control. Currently, the line suffers from an inability to make anything that's not another darn Gundam.

Honestly? I cannot see how it as a good business move to kill the line, especially when Konami did. They missed a rather large influx they could have gotten from the anime. It doesn't make logical sense...but then again, from what I've heard, Japanese businesses do this sometimes. You get weird choices, like Capcom deciding to cancel Megaman Legends 3. I'm not going to go into politics and claim that business from any other country are better, but Japanese culture has some decidedly weird values that don't always mesh with business. My best guess, and this is only a guess, would be that the current factory in China Konami had leased out to manufacture Shinki started seeing thefts off the line under the guise of "factory rejects," and after Konami confirmed that, they cut off ties with that factory, but due to the economy, had a hard time finding a new factory to produce Shinki. Why they would still be having that hard a time now, though, I have no idea. It's entirely possible this is an honor issue, too; if they start making Shinki again from a different factory, they have to admit that the old factory was crap. Who knows. However, I'm pretty sure it's not a business decision that lead to the Shinki line being closed down.
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