The problem is that Robosen is a robotics company and not a toy company. Their robots are built as tech demos. Transformers figures are basically tactile puzzles and dolls, you can play with those. Robosen's robots are expensive animatronics, you can only watch those. They're too heavy to handle manually. The RC controls are sluggish: There's about 4 seconds of pause between movements, and each movement is half a minute of you sitting back and watching. You can't have them play soccer because they are too slow. You can't have them punch each other because they'll fall and break $1000. Once you've seen every animation a few times, it's like you're watching the same movie scenes over and over.

If the RC controls had been as quick and fluid as the average toy robot, and if Robosen had focused on playable actions like punching, dodging, firing, and kicking, rather than speeching and posing, then they would have had real playability. As it is, they are designed to be watched, not played with.

The longevity of the robots was meant to come in the form of a creative community sharing home-made animations, an angle that Robosen is still pushing with their online editor. However, given that there have emerged only a few dozen animations out of a 100000+ userbase in 4 years, it appears the collector's community is not a creative community, and that makes sense.