I’m currently working on a story focused around the inner workings of Hasbio during the development of the fluffy pony (main characters thus far are one of the lab teams and a regional executive staring at the project’s numerous flaws beyond the ones inherent to the creatures themselves), and I’m left wondering as to what general consensus is regarding the company’s plans to make a profit off them.
3 Likes
From what I know, common canon is that the ones released where meant to be sterilized so you couldn’t breed them and had to buy them from Hasbio, so imagine if there were limited edition dog breeds. I think there’s also a common canon that the fluffy kibble and beds and stuff was designed to bleed any fluffy owner’s wallet further.
So expensive limited edition dog breed that resembles your child’s favorite TV character, with special food and stuff recommended for said dog breed. Easy money right there! (Then the non-fixed fluffies got out.)
8 Likes
The idea would have been non-reproducing fluffies you’d have to get thru the parent company, which would profit off the projected demand for talking pets.
But privately, I always figured that the Hasbio lead dev was a madman stringing the parent company along with promises of lucrative government contracts just so they would fund his half insane/half brilliant genetics research.
But before it could all come crashing down, PETA shat the bed with their now legendary break-in, and the scheming got lost in the wreckage.
4 Likes
That does make a fair bit of sense, though part of me can’t help but wonder if the idea of cloning them or using, say, pigs as surrogate “mothers” for crossed any executive’s mind. Come to think of it, why aren’t cloned fluffies more of a thing? I mean, there’re plenty of story opportunities in the concept— for example, “classism” between vat-grown and naturally born fluffies.
2 Likes
Cloning is a lot more expensive than just breeding them, I imagine it was expensive enough to just create the initial ones so Hasbio wouldn’t be keen on repeating the process when there was a cheaper solution. Then fluffies became so common there was no reason to clone them, since anyone can print 20 fluffies just by having an unfixed mare for a month or two, so the only reason to clone or genetically engineer a fluffy is to make it look exactly the way you want it. Which I do believe there are some stories about.
3 Likes
The PETA break-in stuff is one of those things I dislike quite a lot. Even as a throwaway gag I don’t care for it.
Insane hyper inflation, random hard to replicate foodstuffs so hasbio premium chow always tastes “best”, and usually some sort of brainwashing to recognise precise hasbio branded beds balls etc. As being better in that garish flashy kids would love it way.
2 Likes
They’re an easy punching bag when it comes to shitting the bed on animal conservation though admitedly how it’s depicted would fit alf more… which peta funded but not the same.
2 Likes
Going off traditional hive. Once Hasbio cracked making a stable batch that could breed and showed them to the public. They saw Dollar signs because everyone wanted a fluffy. The demand scaled based on the color of the fluffy but even a badly colored brown or green was going to cost the same amount as a decent used car, the demand was that great. And with how cheap fluffies were to reproduce since they didn’t have a lot of human labor involved (As fluffies knew how to raise their own offspring without much human intervention), Hasbio could easily make a ridiculous amount of profit even off the worst colored ones.
Selling the accessories and food on top was just more revenue on top for them. And since fluffies were only sold from Hasbio. They could control the flow like making sure every foal was spayed or neutered on the way out so that no one could replicate breeding outside of their walls.
They had it all figured out how to make money from fluffies.
“The Breach” destroyed them overnight because the way the eco-terrorists “Freed” the fluffies meant that anyone could grab one off the street or a few weeks/months down the line, Grab one from a backyard breeder. So there was no money to be made from the fluffies themselves when you could literally just pick one up off the street and take it home. That destroyed Hasbio and they collapsed as even the accessories and food were not going to be enough to make up the gigantic loss of profit from the fluffy sales.
1 Like
If it’s going to be during development, either the science is common and just another GMO being sent to the market or Hasbio is full of crazy megalomaniacs intent on playing God first, and making a profitable product last.
As has been said here, the original Hasbio plan was to make very, very expensive biotoys that were sterile. I believe that they also had long-term plans for tiers of fluffies, fashion breeds, etc.
After the breech Hasbio had a lot of legal trouble, as well as one of public perception of their product. Think of them as a Car Dealership. They are selling you new product you can only get from them, or used products that have been vetted. You can get perks but you have to bring them into the “Dealership” aka an official HasBio store.
Their primary source of income now are fluffy accessories, fluffy repairs, Fluff TV, and new/used fluffies that have a reputation of being better than home-bred ones or third party industrial breeders. Hasbio spends a lot of money on PR designed to malign others and also ferals.
Even that didn’t cut the mustard. All of the top scientists spread to the corners of the earth or entered into a witness program. Each scientist had their own special field and were never allowed to work directly with another one… this was Hasbios way to protect the secrets of how fluffies were designed. Hasbio was liquidated and the brand was sold at a fraction of a cost.
Now HasBio has no secrets about how fluffies are engineered but they also have the rights to that information if found (the NDAs signed by scientists don’t apply to HasBio no matter who owns it).
They are still profitable, and honestly, possibly more profitable than before if it wasn’t for legal fees.
The “very, very expensive” part is what’s mind-boggling, though. On the one hand, yes, they do need to cover the expense of developing the damn thing in the first place, but on the other, you could buy an actual pony for a fraction of the price going by some headcanons (to put things in perspective, an IRL Shetland pony generally costs between $500 and $1,500.) Even factoring in other fluffy-related sources of revenue (accessories, FluffTV, food, etc.), I just can’t help but shake the feeling that fluffies were either a) intended to be a niche product aimed at the very wealthy, or b) the whole project was a massive scam.
1 Like
You probably got exposed to a lot of the stories showing the drawbacks of a fluffy and are asking “How could they be so expensive at first? They are horribly flawed”.
In theory. A talking, “intelligent”, living “Bio toy” that knows how to essentially train itself and is the perfect companion for a small child because it will never hit back is a goldmine. Better than any pet or even any pony because it only takes up one room of the house and is easily entertained, guaranteed housebroken most of the time and has absolutely no chance of it doing any damage to a child.
That’s why Hasbio could charge so much for a Fluffy Pony. It was theoretically the closest you’d get to “Perfect pet” and the units Hasbio were ready to ship before the breach were as close as they could get barring some flaws. They had faults like they were hopelessly naive, their intelligence had a finite limit. They had a fragile body. And the “Compact design” meant they had a shorter intestine, a smaller bladder, and a smaller bowel so they needed to go to the toilet frequently and had smelly shits. But people said “Holy shit. A talking mini horse pig thing thats like the cartoon ones on TV. I want one” so Hasbio were able to charge as much as they could get away with. Especially when they discovered people would pay more for “Exotic” colors.
There’s been different interpretations as well like Hasbio had government contracts to conduct research in the background on functions Hasbio built into the fluffies DNA like “Quick clotting” (Where if a fluffy suffered a cut. It would clot up at a rapid pace to stem bleeding) that allowed it to recover from injuries faster so they were making a lot of shady money as well doing ethically dubious research on bio-organisms. Also why in most headcanons that all the scientists on the project went dark when Hasbio collapsed and there was no attempts to fix fluffies. Everyone had NDAs and they were lethally enforced by the Pentagon after.
2 Likes
Super niche yeah. It’s still an animal that talks and can have intelligent conversation. Some think the poor would go for broke trying to look rich.
1 Like