Cheap, plastic toys – no manufacturer necessary. The 2020 toy and game market is projected to be $135 billion (€112 billion), and three-dimensional (3D) printing brings those profits home. People have scoffed that 3D printers are simply toys themselves. But they probably did not realise how much money is made off playthings. Do-it-yourself (DIY) manufacturing – making goods at home with a 3D printer using open-source designs from a free online repository – has a multimillion-euro impact on the overall toy industry. A team of engineers from Michigan Technological University and the London-based company MyMiniFactory published their results on the topic in Technologies recently.

More than Monopoly money

The research team, led by Joshua Pearce, a professor of materials science and electrical engineering at Michigan Tech, focused on how much a desktop 3D printer could save consumers. "The 3D printing industry is now dominated by small, low-cost printers and as the industry grows we're going to see a lot more DIY manufacturing," Pearce said. "The evidence is just overwhelming that this makes sense from a consumers' perspective." To dig deeper into the potential savings, the study investigates the 100 most popular downloaded designs from MyMiniFactory, which is one of dozens of repositories where people freely share 3D-printable designs online. They used three different printing materials to analyse the potential costs of printing on an open-source Lulzbot 3D printer—commercial filament (spaghetti-like strands easily purchased online), pellet-extruded filament (cheaper option to make filament at home), and post-consumer waste plastic (converted to filament using a recyclebot). When a commercially available toy was available for comparison, all filament types saved consumers more than 75 per cent of the cost and the recyclebot filament saved more than 90 per cent. In total – and just using the data from 100 toys (less than one percent ofMyMiniFactory's repository)—people offset $60 million (€50 million) dollars per year in toy purchases. To Pearce, an important added value emerged as well: the ability to make novel toys and games that are not commercially available. "It's one thing to buy a toy from a store or get a commodity toy for your children. It's perhaps more valuable to get that exact, specific toy that your kid really wants that you can either design yourself or download and customise on your computer and print at home,” he said.

Lego: printed and generic

[caption id="attachment_37718" align="alignright" width="300"] CLICK TO ENLARGE Fig 1: The board game 'Save the Planet' is an open source, co-operative game that is adaptable and customisable, making it an educational tool that grows with kids and enables creative freedom with everything from its 'Good Deeds' cards to personalised game play figurines. The total cost with both 2D and 3D printing came to $2.89[/caption] Pearce and his team also used case studies to delve more into the potential impacts of 3D printing and what might drive consumers to use DIY manufacturing. They built up one example using one of the world's most famous and beloved plastic toys. "Speaking as a parent, Lego is expensive. All parents know you can't find it at garage sales; everyone hoards it like it's gold," Pearce said. "Now you can make custom compatible blocks and have that same kind of fun while playing with something you make yourself." A key aspect of DIY manufacturing is judging how well the home-printed version matches the store-bought. With building blocks, an acetone-smoothing went a long way to make recycled ABS plastic look like the brand name and generic versions—with a steep cut in price. A standard Lego block costs six US cents; the generic costs three cents and a recyclebot-sourced, 3D-printed block is half a cent. The board game ‘Save the Planet’ (Fig 1) is an open source, co-operative game that is adaptable and customisable, making it an educational tool that grows with kids and enables creative freedom with everything from its ‘Good Deeds’ cards to personalised game-play figurines. The total cost with both 2D and 3D printing came to $2.89. And as ‘The Lego Movie’ would have us all believe, playing with building blocks is not about following directions, it is about invention and creativity. Already, there are hundreds of user-designed different types of children's blocks alone. Although as most parents are probably thinking, it does not hurt to save a few pennies along the way. Pearce's team showed significant savings – typically between 40-90 per cent – even with complex toys like chess sets, maths puzzles, toy trucks, action figures and board games. The only cases in which 3D printing did not save money happened when the quality of the 3D print significantly surpassed the quality of commercial options; this was particularly true for printing large and intricate costumes and accessories that people use in cosplay to dress up as characters from movies, TV shows and videogames.

Toy and game hacks

Pearce said the data indicates that 3D printing was already having an impact on the industry and it would only grow as 3D printers become more widespread. He suggested that the best route for toy and game companies was embracing 3D printing much like Ikea encouraged ‘Ikea hacks’ with its furniture. "One way toy companies might adapt is open-sourcing some of the designs of the toys themselves and focusing on currently unprintable components or openly encouraging the maker community and open-source community to design accessories or add-ons to commercial toys to make their toys more valuable," Pearce said. "This is already happening – there are literally millions of free designs. Distributed home manufacturing is the future for toys, but also many other products. It would be a big mistake to assume 3D printers are just toys." Reference: The full paper is available for free: Emily Petersen, Romain Kidd, Joshua Pearce. 'Impact of DIY Home Manufacturing with 3D Printing on the Toy and Game Market.' Technologies, 2017; 5 (3): 45 DOI: 10.3390/technologies5030045