Upgrading Your Upgrade

I’m fascinated by the add-on/upgrade market.  And entire niche market has arisen in the Transformers word; all based around making your great Transformers figures even better.  The add-on market has its roots in the kitbashing world.  Kitbashing involves taking an existing figure and either adding to or taking away from the figure to enhance its overall appearance or functionality.  For those brave souls, willing to risk their toys for the ultimate prize, the reward came in not only the finished artful product but also the knowledge that they had a now one-of-a-kind figure.  The first company to really find a way to market this hobby was ReproLabels.  They gave both kitbashers and refurbishers the ability to enhance their figures, either with custom sets of sticker or complete factory sticker sets.

Later, individuals like the Lukis brothers came up with the concept of the add-on set.  Their first sets, made back in the early 2000’s, involved stands and weapons for various Beast Machines figures.  It was only recently that this market started to really take off.  With the introduction of companies like FansProject and iGear, we are starting to see full on, production upgrade and add-on kits designed to enhance the existing figures.

One such popular item as been the “City Commander” set from FansProject.  This is an armor set, originally designed for the Classics Ultra Mangus, in order to give him a more show like appearance.  This item was so popular that is has been reissued in several different colors and is even now seeing additional changes from FansProject and released in the original Ultra Magnus colors.

But now, in an interesting marketing move, iGear has come out with an upgrade for the upgrade.  That is to say, iGear is offering an alternate head mold designed to replace the existing one on the City Commander set.  Personally, I don’t know that I like this actual head mold, but just the brilliance of trying to profit off of a popular product of one of your seeming competitors is sheer genius.  So far, this field is unregulated; Hasbro has seemingly turned a blind eye to these products.  Does FansProject have enough of an ownership of this product that it might want to try to keep iGear out of its toy line or do neither of these companies really have the right to do what they are doing?

Personally, I’m all for the free market and letting these companies compete openly with each other.  Maybe FansProject doesn’t care and hopefully they don’t.  The last thing the upgrade market needs is a nasty legal battle that will mostly likely see the end of all of these products.  But what do you think?  Are these products a waste of money?  Are they an infringement on Hasbro’s IP?  Or are they just another way for collectors to enjoy their products with no real harm to anybody?