Community efforts can never compete with direct vendor support. It never has and never will. Also if vendors perceive a figure to be a community effort, they will stay away. They will only invest in a figure that has a strong backing and reputation. If SM is going to just offload these figures to the community like all figures before, nothing is going to change, and they will get just as much direct support as previous community projects, which isn't much in the commercial sense of things. That is not how you grow your market. Your aim is to get content developers onboard with your figures, because direct support changes the perception of a figure in this industry. If people only see content coming from the community, it will be perceived as market dead, and that does not attract more people to it.

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