I'm curious and I would think that Mattel would be too as to whether or not the continuing escalation of prices for action figures is affecting your collecting.

Personally, I am no longer buying entire waves, but only selected figures.

im fine with the price of Matty's toys. $20 for the 6" figures is great! they are a bussiness like any other bussiness and they bring out great quality toys and $20 is great! and the 12" Ghostbusters for $60 is fine too. i actually expected they would be more. and apparently the 12" Tytus is going to be $40! now that is more than fair! i cant stand people complaining about paying $20 for any 6" figures. if the people complaining can't afford $20 get another hobby! lol

I'm halfway okay with the rising costs, but the QC is still poor on these figures. It's harder for me now to risk 16+ bucks on something that has a good shot of having a stuck limb, or a way to loose limb, etc.

I am thoroughly disgusted with the current price of action figures, but that comes with the benefit of 17 years of collecting for perspective. This used to be a relatively inexpensive hobby. Hot Wheels collectors don’t know how lucky they are -- still just $1 per car.

In recent years, I have bought fewer new figures at retail, focusing instead on bargains and vintage items at toy shows and flea markets, plus some very limited buying on Ebay. I essentially have the money at this point to buy whatever I want, but I inevitably feel dissatisfied after pricey retail purchases.

A decade ago, I was fine with spending $30 on a deluxe GI Joe, but for that money I got a high-quality, fully articulated 12” figure with a sewn uniform, numerous accessories and nice packaging.

Here I am in 2010, faced with the reality of dropping nearly $30 (with shipping) to get the Matty exclusive JLU Lobo figure. It’s madness, but I will take the plunge because advance photos look promising, and Lobo is a figure I have wanted since the Superman animated series.

At the retail level, toy manufacturers have used the volatility of the oil market as an excuse to explode unit prices, citing cost increases due to more expensive plastic. In recent months, some figure prices are dropping across multiple retailers, in lines such as Star Wars and Marvel Universe. On the other hand, the 2010 JLU singles came with a staggering 80-percent price increase ($4.99 to $8.99), but this could just be Mattel’s sleazy precursor to dumping Target as an exclusive distributor for JLU and moving the entire line to the Matty site, with singles at $10 each, perhaps as much as $15 each, based on a recent AFI interview with Mattel’s ToyGuru.

The collector’s specialty toy market, as it relates to figures, took off at the end of the 1990s with the initial offerings from DC Direct. It has grown into a monster, with virtually every major toy company getting in on the action.

The greedy cynics who fill out the executive ranks at toy companies like Mattel realize that they have collectors by the shorties and can charge exorbitant prices for their exclusive items. As it stands, the collector’s market is an appalling scam, just another stinking byproduct of the internet. It threatens to ruin toy collecting for years to come, if the death blow hasn’t been dealt already.

I've gone from buying every figure in a wave to being very picky about which ones I pick up. I like how quick companies were to raise prices when "oil went up", but somehow when oil came back down.. the prices just kept going up.

It doesn't really have too much to do with the price of oil, it's has WAAAAY more to do with China closing a bunch of factories in the last couple years due to all the numerous product recalls. Fewer factories means higher production costs.

Slowly but surely, the rising prices drive out the "collecting for fun" people, and bring in the speculators (who DON'T buy all the figures, just the "hard to get ones", which then speeds the end of the line....)

But, NOW, the overall price hikes are keeping kids from enjoying the toys, which...well, aren't toys for kids???? (Even us "adult children"???)

Well I guess that the rising cost of toys today has mostly to do with the fact that Plastic, Oil, Taxes, paint, Paint sealer, And Saleries have all gone up, but what can I do it is after all these modern day times that we are starting to see certain figures that we have all at one point in our lives or another prayed to have. I.E MOTU, Ghostbusters, And DC to name a few.

The rising cost is extremely rough for me since I am a completionist. I thank God every day that I after I gave up on Star Wars around the time Episode 2 came out. They way Hasbro pumps out Star Wars figures you would have to be Bill Gates to have a complete set of them. That is why MOTUC are so great. I can afford one or two figures per month. I love the DC Infintes and Marvel Universe figures but I have all but quite trying to collect them. I just can't see $8.00 for the Marvel Universe figures when I was buying the Marvel Legends a few years ago at $6.00 a piece. I am a die-hard GIJoe collector. If not for Ross and TJMaxx getting Joes in for $3 to $4, my wife would divorce me.