Board Thread:General Nerf discussion/@comment-25547368-20160109205258/@comment-2234967-20160110002131

Generally a blaster's copyright date is the year before its release, when it was in the process of being created and worked on by toy engineers at Hasbro. It's hard to distinguish if this is also the case for older blasters, as we have less info on when it was released, but this is definitely the case for modern releases.