Rant: Leaked new product info

I'm sure there are more important issues in the world to take a stand on however:) 

A certain unreleased blaster which is getting a whole lot of net time is often causing issues with Nerf bloggers all over the world- on one hand you want to be the blog who scoops the latest info on the thing you love and are most passionate about; on the other hand you also don't want to upset the hand that feeds you by writing from unofficial sources and giving away possible product info.

Alas... from what I can gather, Nerf does not 'feed' non US bloggers. Several of the prominent American Nerf blogs have a really good relationship with Hasbro, to the extent that Nerf sends them releases of new products, invites them to launches and so forth. While I think it'd be fantastic to have that relationship with Nerf, it just doesn't really happen to those of us on the other side of the world. We don't get information or press releases to work with, and most of the "official" information is incredibly out of date (OMG there's a automatic machine gun called the VULCAN? whoooah).

Australia is generally pretty late with their product releases (if released at all) and every Nerf blaster I have, I have paid for myself. Most of the time, that comes at a higher-than-reasonable price with excessive shipping costs from overseas just so I can get my hands on one. This act in itself is "frowned upon"- I am supposed to accept what companies want to sell me domestically and pretend anything overseas doesn't exist. That's something that used to be a whole lot easier before this thing called the Internet was available. I don't want to buy domestically 10 Mavericks or pay 89 dollars for another Raider that has been out for almost two years and I bought for 35 and pretend that's all that's available to me.

I've been reading a fair amount of articles related leaked new product info and how these leaks are generally frowned upon from the manufacturers (can anyone say "iphone 4?"); the world of Nerf is no different, and you can just take one look at the official Nerf Facebook page to see how much frowning they're doing. I agree that it's their official page, and they are allowed to dictate what content is accessible and discussed on the page, and what isn't so I've got no beef with that and have always abided by those rules.

But to be honest, as someone who loves Nerf a whole lot more than an adult male probably should and enjoys not only playing with it but writing about it; anything I find and hear about Nerf is going to end up on here. Not because I want to be a trouble maker, but because I'm wanting to fill the gap for quality information to my local domestic market. 

Urban Taggers isn't the source for official Nerf information- it's a fan page dedicated to a love of toys, and we'll report any info we can find about your favourite hand held blasters. I don't want to take this all so seriously. If I wanted to shoot real guns I'd have joined the Australian Army and if I wanted to write serious news articles I would have been a journalist. :)