Why are toys such a bad business?
<i>This locks toy companies into a challenging bet. Every year, they have to a) predict trends, b) invent them, and c) commit capital to them. All without knowing how the rest of the year will turn out. Since toy trends exist, but don’t last for very long, they have to invent new products every year—but the technological state of the art doesn’t advance very fast. It has all the volatility of tech, without the progress.</i><p>Insightful post. This succinctly explains why most toys are movie-related. It's the easiest trend to predict.<p>EDIT: This article keeps getting better and better. I had no idea Skyrim was almost set in Game of Thrones. <a href="https://www.tor.com/2011/09/16/how-skyrim-was-almost-set-in-westeros/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tor.com/2011/09/16/how-skyrim-was-almost-set-in-...</a> It left me wanting more.<p>The author is apparently Byrne Hobart, and they've written a variety of things: <a href="https://diff.substack.com/people/112633-byrne-hobart" rel="nofollow">https://diff.substack.com/people/112633-byrne-hobart</a> Looks like I'll be spending too much time reading them.<p>They also write a post ... <i>double checks</i> ... every day?! For a week straight, sometimes? Wow.<p>Sadly, most of their work appears to be locked behind a $20/mo paywall. It all looks very interesting though: <a href="https://diff.substack.com/p/dropbox-information-asymmetry-and" rel="nofollow">https://diff.substack.com/p/dropbox-information-asymmetry-an...</a>