Sphero Discontinues Its BB-8, R2-D2, and Other Licensed Disney Products (theverge.com) 65
Sphero's hinted that it's getting out of the licensed product game, but this week CEO Paul Berberian confirmed that the company is clearing out its remaining licensed inventory and won't be restocking the supply. From a report: That means the company won't be producing any more BB-8s, R2-D2s, Lightning McQueen cars, or talking Spider-Mans. The listings for all the toys list them as "legacy products" that are no longer in production. App support will continue for "at least two years, if not longer," Berberian says. The Disney partnership lasted three years, but ultimately, the licensed toy business required more resources than it was worth, Berberian tells The Verge. These toys sold well when released with a movie, but interest waned over time as the movie became more distant, he says. Still, the company sold "millions" of BB-8s, although company data shows that the toys weren't used much after initial play time and eventually sat on shelves.
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It was never that great of a movie. Its special effects wowed audiences in the late 1970's and early 1980's and it story just held onto the nostalgia, so the kids of the time still have fond memories of it.
Sense then the High Effects movies become very common, and the latest (and prequel) movies just couldn't lean on effects to cover its other faults, because there was so much competition in the big budget high effects movies.
I think a lot of the toys sold, was from parents who think their kids would reliv
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Didn't age well (Score:2)
I still think the old Star Wars special effects are a TON better than the new ones.
Evidently you haven't seen A New Hope recently because the effects have not aged well and I'm being generous when I say that. You might appreciate them more for what they are and what went into making them but they look quite clumsy compared to the current state of the art. Some of the effects in the original trilogy have held up pretty well - particularly in Empire and RotJ but others definitely have not. The ewoks were a fail both from a story telling standpoint and from an effects standpoint. They ju
Practical effects (Score:2)
Ewoks weren't effects. They were little people in suits.
Ewoks absolutely were practical effects [wikipedia.org].
Which one looked more realistic? Ewoks or jar jar
Honestly? Jar Jar. The character was an abomination in a variety of ways but from a pure FX standpoint Jar Jar looked WAY more believable than a bunch of awkwardly moving midgets wearing teddy bear suits. At no point was I ever able to suspend disbelief that the ewoks were anything other than small humans in suits because they moved EXACTLY like a little person wearing a costume.
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State of the art (Score:2)
Heck, back in 1977 when I saw Star Wars (no "A New Hope" cr*p!) the special effects were relatively laughable.
Your opinion was not shared at the time. I saw the movie in theaters in 1977 too and the special effects were excellent for the day. I'm not sure what you think was substantially better among late 1970s movies. The special effects were considered state of the art in 1977. Hell it's what made Industrial Light and Magic what it is today. It won 6 academy awards including Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound and of course Best Visual Effects. Say wha
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I still think the old Star Wars special effects are a TON better than the new ones. Probably because they were carefully built and filmed models and not just CGI effects thrown together overseas in an animation factory.
The motions of the original X-Wings were a bit off putting to me, but the other effects (particularly interior ones) were pretty good.
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It was enormously influential. Which is to say, everything it did well was copied a million times, and when someone today watches it for the first time they have already seen those same ideas in hundreds of more recent movies. Sometimes done better. To understand why Star Wars was so regarded just think what the state of sci-fi movies was in 1977: A joke. The domain of low-budget B-movies, cliche characters and wooden acting. What Star Wars has then was groundbreaking, but today it is just routine and unrem
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But the story well sucked. Its strength was on actually caring about the movie.
Re:Face It. Star Wars Sucked! (Score:4, Funny)
Not a huge far of the genre in general, but Star Wars went downhill when they replaced Kirk with Picard
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This is Sphero, so it's just the bots. Cool toys for the modern age, even if you didn't like the new movies (BB-8 was still a cool concept). All the action figures that sold so badly Toys-R-Us went bankrupt are someone else.
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Well, that's about 90% of Christmas toys, isn't it? But they're great for geek manbabies.
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I promise, someday you'll recover from the trauma of seeing a space movie that didn't have enough people who look like you.
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You are aware that the vast majority of users don't bother to turn off their network access just to keep apps from phoning home on launch, right? :-)
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My point was that for an app whose sole purpose is to control a specific device, if the app even so much as phones home on launch, they can tell whether the user is still using the app, and if they aren't getting those pings, that's a pretty strong indication that the device is sitting on a shelf. :-)
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Of course, but that's probably 1% of users, at most. There's no way that a large enough percentage of users would shut off connectivity for the company to incorrectly believe that nearly all of the devices are sitting on the shelf when they're really in use. The average person doesn't even think about privacy, much less think about it enough to monkey around with cell phone settings to ensure it.
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What do you expect (Score:3)
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And just how long do you think that is?
Yes, it will eventually die, but when a battery lasts for years and years, it's not doing too badly.
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This is not unexpected. How long do you think a toy like that will last with a sealed-in battery that cannot be replaced without cutting the plastic? Sure, they're collectable, but the value diminished when you find out that they no longer work, and will NEVER work again.
That's not the point of the article (which is boringly un-newsworthy). It's the novelty died, not the batteries.
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Expectations (Score:2)
App support will continue for "at least two years, if not longer," Berberian says.
My first question would be what do they mean by "support"? I'd be shocked if they were providing any meaningful support as I use the term now. Not like they are going to get ongoing revenue from the apps unless they are some sort of game with in-game purchases. Given that they are selling these ultimately to children who generally don't control the credit card I can't imagine them bothering with any meaningful support.
These toys sold well when released with a movie, but interest waned over time as the movie became more distant, he says.
Were they expecting something different? That's how licensed content works as a genera
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Supported means downloadable from the app stores. So probably recompiled with new APIs as required to maintain store presence.
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The app may have some reliance on cloud communication if features were offloaded, but the actual communication with the toy is via bluetooth.
Nice choice of words ... (Score:2)
LOL. "The movies became more distant" is an interesting ambiguous choice of words ...
A longer time ago, true.
More distant from the Star Wars that we used to know, also true.
Finally real geek news on slashdot (Score:2)
I am glad I got my own bb-8
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The number of updates downloaded, the MAC addresses of all the BB8's associated with those downloads, maybe the UIN's for the tablets/phones... Pretty easy for them to get the information on how many are still in use without disclosing all your private information. I sure as hell don't want it sending back my local network information or much else, but I don't see a problem with the number of impacts registered by the accelerometer when the speed slider is set to maximum being a problem. I can think of a fe
They could have had better controls (Score:2)
This was - supposedly - not a problem as he had an iPad that we gave him some time before. Except that only newer iPads could control BB8 - older ones did not support whatever communication method was used, and could not even install the software. So we installed it on my personal smartphone as it was the only one in the