That's fair. I only directed that toward you because it was you I was quoting. I don't actually keep a record of what anybody says about anything, so that was unfair of me.
I think maybe it was just the wording getting mixed up a bit. I had said answers 'people like me' would want (I.E. people with legitimate complaints about the product) and it could have come off as 'people that hate on Super7 a lot' - which can absolutely be a totally different issue.
I hope you understand where I'm coming from, though, with the Rocker Leo example I gave of one question I legitimately would like answered and would be more than willing to pose in a respectful way. I think there are questions worth asking and questions worth being answered.
Honestly I think companies don't answer questions that make their company look bad. I can't really disagree with that I suppose, when I think about their perspective. Like "hey Brian, why do your figures kind of suck some times?" "well, it's because we don't pay our factory workers enough to make a better product. This way, we keep more money in house. Chuh-ching. Or we don't have the experience or connections in China to make a decent figure. Or we don't think they suck because we don't put these things in cool poses, it's box to shelf baybee. Or we don't really think about action figure connoisseurs when we make them, we think about kitsch collectors" "Hey Brian, are you going to change any of that?" "Uh maybe. I got in trouble and now the turtles have double joints. Kind of a crapshoot here really"
I totally get where you're coming from. And you're not entirely wrong in my opinion. But also, that's only one method of thought from a PR standpoint. I run a small company. I cannot imagine having customers complaining about me with things that are obvious issues (people are always going to complain, and you can't and shouldn't respond to every subjective whine about character selection or whatever). If we had defective product by any measure and everyone seemed to acknowledge it on some level, I would WANT to get out ahead of that and do some damage control.
In fact, I would argue that Super7's complete lack of damage control is the reason they're seemingly in a pretty bad position right now. You can only ignore complaints from your customers for so long before they stop being your customers. How many people on this board alone can raise their hands if they stopped buying S7 product or vastly decreased how much S7 product they buy, based solely on S7 ignoring ongoing quality control and pricing complaints?
If Brian wasn't a fucking idiot, he'd be able to write up a reasonable response to a lot of the complaints (maybe not all of them) that could calm people down, maybe even turn some opinions, OR at least offer some extra helpings of goodwill and grace. He chooses not to even acknowledge that anything could be wrong with his product because he's arrogant, not because it's a bad idea to do it.
Watch: "Yeah, I hear you. We're just as disappointed as you guys when a figure comes out with looser joints than we anticipated. There's a lot of challenges with tolerances and sometimes we don't catch that the factory got it wrong before it's too late. We do see it. We hear you guys. We're doing our best to make sure this gets corrected going forward, which is why you see it sometimes and not other times. We're going to continue to press on this issue until it's a thing of the past. We appreciate everyone sticking with us and all of the feedback on what's important to you guys for your collections."
I wrote that in two fucking seconds, while one of my cats was actively trying to put his head in my mouth for some reason, and (if I may say so myself), it's literally better PR than anything I've ever fucking heard Brian say since the first day I ever heard that Super7 existed.
Hasbro is similar, but those guys hang out with more wild cards like Unparalleled Wade and Shartimus who kind of exactly ask "hey why do your figures kind of suck some times?" The answers they get are always non answers though so there's no real point in asking them, they just probably do it so they don't get called a shill like Veebs. The guys will say "we can't talk about that" or "there's stuff behind the scenes".
Yeah, that's the fan side of the problem; asking a question like a complete fucking twat gets you treated like a twat. Also, no one named Shartimus deserves to be taken seriously at any time. I wouldn't take that guy seriously at his own funeral.
It's all about how you ask, and I've seen the ML guys be way more receptive to criticism when it's polite and constructive than just Sharty bitching about hip movement on his Spider-Man or whatever the fuck. Also, the Marvel guys do a lot of livestreams where they DO say things like 'you guys were all online asking us for X so we did X.' Yeah, we asked for it like a year and a half ago, but they're -actively acknowledging- what fans are talking about, which is way more than Super7 ever does.
And man.. do you remember the days when Jesse Falcon actually posted daily on Fwoosh? You could pretty much argue with that guy and he'd stand there and take it and defend why they do X or Y. It was great. We talked about wrist articulation once and it only took them like 10 years to follow through on it.