“I mean come on, The Hunger Games series is a rip off of Battle Royale, and Fortnite, PUBG, APexL, and the rest shamelessly copied the movie setting, all billions worth for free, not one cent was paid to the original Japanese creator of BR.”

No body thinks any of this. You cannot copywrite concepts (Battle Royale), and this is where you seem to be lost on your first paragraph.

Considering the last time they made a Unicron toy, it shelfwarmed for years, I can understand the trepidation. 

The toy industry just doesn’t work that way anymore.   Stores don’t want to dedicate large amounts of space to Playsets and large toys, so this would always be an online only toy.    It makes sense to gauge if people want it by doing crowd funding instead of making as thousand and never selling them.  

For some things, yes. But action figures and this market in general is very finicky. Especially once you surpass the $100 mark. Your comment is pretty funny because the kickstarter is failing which proves, yes, they DO need to do glorified preorders to see if there’s a market for it because it is by no means a…

This is actually the ideal example of when an established company should use crowdfunding.

For projects of this scale, you need to crowdfund. Especially with the loss of major toy stores like Toys R Us, to dwindling local comic book stores that won’t just stock up on a high ticket item like this, you need to crowdfund.

The Titan sized guys never seem to sell as much as you’d think they would because of their size/price. About a year after they come out, they’re pretty much always half off until the stock runs low. You can get Trypticon for $70 right now on BBTS - https://www.bigbadtoystore.com/Product/VariationDetails/54487

There are several billion dollar companies that use crowdfunding to gauge the market and mitigate risk.

Eh, this is the perfect use of the crowd-funding model. They’re still a business, and businesses need to make money. A Unicron of this size is a niche of a niche product. The resources required to put this into production aren’t worth the effort without the guaranteed sales, and there isn’t a retail outlet in the…

Normally I would agree, but this is the kind of thing that they’d lose a ton of money on if they actually shipped them to stores (the kind of thing that would never get made), so it’s neat seeing them do stuff like this. I’d much rather pledge my money to a well known company that is guaranteed to actually follow…

Imagine thinking Kotaku should be in the business of providing good PR to streamers instead of reporting on game-related news.

Because people are idiots that feel like some asshat saying their user name out load gives them some sort of validation.

Why do people donate to sleazebags who already have way too much money from being a sleazebag?

Isnt that what all the streamers do now?

Or, we could just ignore streamers altogether and maybe they'll go the fuck away.

The purpose is most people are dumb, and will give away their money cause they are dumb.

Fuck this scumbag.  

I’d rather know how stupid gaming culture is, thank you.

Very specific hardware configurations prevent direct emulation most of the time.
As close as modern systems are to PCs, they are still vastly different. The OG Xbox was an Intel-based machine with Nvidia Graphics. Mostly off the shelf, but the Mobo was a specific config to the OG Xbox.
The Xbox 360 was an IBM 3 ghz Pow…