First, I think you're kinda crazy to think a winter Flint wouldn't be released, especially since winter Lady Jaye is certain to unlock. They're not going to leave that fruit dangling.
We don't have any data to be sure either way. It hasn't happened in any HasLab yet, as far as I'm aware.
I can say there are people at companies like Mattel and Hasbro that obsess over things like the dangling carrot. For it to be effective, you cannot give them the carrot if they don't run on the treadmill, as it were. There are absolutely people at both companies that WILL advocate for not releasing things that didn't unlock, if for no other reason than to use it as a threat next time ("remember what happened last time - if you don't unlock all tiers, then you won't get this or that item"). This isn't my guess. This is 100% fact.
That doesn't mean those people will win the argument. But they exist and their voices have the weight of titles and large paychecks behind them.
Who knows what kind of lessons if any will be learned by Hasbro. Who even knows what kind of lessons they should learn, other than maybe do some more advertising for their next Hasbro campaign and reveal some tie-in products, ie more snow-based figures (Snow Job reissue, Polar Battle Bear reveal) which would help sell the Snow Cat. Otherwise, what lessons are there? Certainly, snow-based items (and other environmentally themed) probably don't sell as well as general weather ones. I don't think they needed to learn this from a Haslab. Maybe the next Haslab has a lower price. Maybe they just switch to made-to-order items, like the Marvel Legends has done. Steering away from more arctic themed stuff isn't that radical of a shift for the line, since there's not really that huge well of characters or vehicles to pull from. Just not sure what will be learned
I think the lessons have been all over this thread lots already. Success or failure, just the tempo of this campaign should be teaching them all the things many of us have already talked about; synergy, not overloading HasLabs all at the same time, not burying your HasLab with other shit on your website, etc etc. There's been lots.
The issue with 'lessons learned' in the corporate world is they're usually the wrong lessons. And that is specifically what I'm talking about here. If a new Baroness underperforms at retail, it would never be because they made a sub-par action figure, and always be because 'it's a girl figure and we should make less girl figures because boy Classified collectors don't actually want them even if they bitch online about not getting enough female characters.'
If a SnowCat does badly, it will always be because 'we shouldn't make winter-themed stuff' or 'no one wants half-track vehicles' or some other nonsense. It would never be because -they did something poorly- which led to poor performance. That's what I mean by learning the wrong lessons. And it's INSANELY common in toy companies. I have it on very good authority that Mattel learned -tons- of the wrong lessons from various issues around and during MOTUC. The Star Sisters, for example, behind held up as proof that people don't want POP figures in MOTUC. That's a true thing that was said out loud by someone important (to my understanding - I wasn't there).
Edit: I also wanted to point out the distinct possibility that if we get close enough and have good enough momentum going toward Flint -- Hasbro may very well artificially increase the funding numbers to push us over the final line JUST to be able to call this yet another full success and not come up, you know, 2-300 backers shy of hitting all tiers (and risk people starting to drop off in the last hour or so if Flint isn't funded yet). It's a perfect face-saving move, as it makes them look like, actually, they did everything right and this thing hit every tier exactly as they expected it to, of course. And a few hundred fewer units sold actually means nothing to Hasbro in the grand scheme of things, so it really doesn't matter if they fudge the numbers a bit. The reality is that they're never going to make the exact number that gets backed any way.
And, bonus, this type of crowdfunding has no third party auditor and fuckin' ZERO transparency, so we'd never know if the numbers are fake anyway.
Double-edit: 25 backers to Jaye.
