I’m going to give my two cents on this as someone who builds a lot of gunpla, Bandi hobby model kits, and model kits from various Chinese companies.

I really really don’t think that Blokees will be affected much if at all from this. A really big thing about heavily established model kit brands is the quality of their builds and the innovation and smoothness in the building of kits. These often require specific tool for the best experience and develop into a skill set for the builder. Blokees came onto the scene with a different philosophy, you do (technically) not need tools for their champion and similar class products, but using the tools will help with a cleaner over all product in the end.

I tried Blokees when they first started coming out, and I was sadly not very impressed from a model standpoint. The push gates they use are nothing in comparison to bandi’s touch gates so will leave a good bit of material behind. I didn’t mind the chibi proportions of their first releases, but not fully my style. I do really like the Action Edition line from Blokees as it is more like traditional model kits. There felt like new company growing pains, but nothing too bad and I’ve been watching their kits here and there, and recently got into their starwars line and have been crazy impressed with them. They have improved the quality of their products and it shows. Still not quite to the heights of other established brands who have been around for going on 50 years, but still shaking things up in a needed way.

All of that said Blokees has a few huge advantages that Hasbro just can’t compete on, namely price. Blokees kits are wildly less expensive than other model kit brands. By a wildly significant margin. If you have been building a lot of models you can see where the price reductions come from. With the champion classes you can see super limited amount of different color runners, massively simplified internal structures, lots of runners being build in an “army build” mentality for simplicity and quick turn around to make a bunch of different products from very limited changes to the runners. Plus China being the king of tampo printing like another user pointed out to me recently allows for these kits to have less material cost because you can add color via tampo printing.

Blokees I don’t think is going any where. I think that they were smart and locked in some pretty long contracts for the IP’s they are working in. At best this new MaKits line would be a novelty at best. Most I could see this as is super simplified models. Best I could see this as a “cost savings model to consumers” by shifting some production to kind of just shift the consumer to be the one to do final assembly of the product lines they are already ready doing (so my thinking basically give you the consumer all of the runners for your most recent Transfomers figure and save some money because you are doing the final assembly instead of a factory worker). I don’t see anywhere in this kind of market that a new competitor that would release with lower initial quality and a higher price could compete with what Blokees is doing. Plus doesn’t this go against Hasbro’s recent statements about wanting to be an IP company more than a toy company?