Replicators - ending starvation and poverty;
Transporters - trivializing the cost of transporting anything or anyone; and
Holodecks - allowing anyone to experience virtually anything as if real.
If you want to add a fourth, something like Matrix-style brain uploads, presumably to allow later re-download into a fresh "shell," that would effectively confer immortality as well. Humanity would never again suffer for want nor lose our loved ones to the scourge of death.
I will physically die before these come to pass, and that's a shame, because I want to, you know, not die. But I am comforted in some small measure knowing that at least one of these technologies is well into development, and by that I mean the baby steps being taken toward replicators, by means of 3-D printers.
This isn't an article about 3-D printers. You can find out more about those elsewhere and honestly I don't care that much about them as I have only marginal use for their output.
This article is more of a quick riff on what 3-D printers mean for my industry, for the greater toy and game industry overall, and when we might feel that effect. In particular, for miniature wargames, where they are seeing their first pronounced adoption.
First of all, I am reliably informed that the output of the best 3-D printers on the market is substantially lower resolution and quality than anything Games Workshop is squirting in Nottingham or what WizKids is freighting out of Shenzhen. There is no threat to the meat of our current product offerings; available minis are simply better right now, and to replicate their quality would cost considerably more at the consumer level than just buying what's already in mass production.
However, 3-D printers are already highly relevant for terrain, necessary wargame components where resolution is less important than quantity and coverage. Wargamers the world over are making copious terrain at the cost of electricity and filament and capital equipment depreciation and even though it feels like one of the "craft" elements of the category is going to get lost in the transition, the end result is more people being able to engage, which I favor.
It's only a matter of time before it goes farther.
Resolution is hardly essential for printing coarser toys aimed at younger audiences. Right now such toys are typically produced in China for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to 3-D print them, so there's no urgency upstairs at Hasbro or Mattel, and there shouldn't be.
What about parts and hardware that are out of production? 3-D printers are starting to become a bigger and bigger deal in the pinball and arcade restoration hobbies, where there are parts that are literally antique and have not been produced since Jimmy Carter was still calling the shots in Georgia. As tensile strength improves we're seeing the technology used for vehicle parts as well, though mostly low-impact hardware so far, and not motor components. Yet.
This is setting up an eventual showdown in the world of intellectual property. The cost continues to drop to make ever-newer objects via 3-D printer. Nobody cares about the old pinball machine parts because they are (mostly) out of patent, out of copyright, and the addressable audience is niche. What happens when some hot toy or game or gadget is being duplicated immediately, and not just in bootleg-producing factories in southeast Asia, but by consumers in their living rooms in a nigh-unenforceable tsunami of, well, piracy?
Has anything like this happened before?
Turns out...
So, here we are a decade and a half later and the music industry is changed forever in the wake of it becoming possible to effectively infinitely duplicate its copyrighted core product in an ordinary household using consumer-grade gear.
The situation was so drastic, so sudden, and so immediately obvious once the technology hit a threshold that was "close enough" -- by which we mean garbage-bitrate MP3s on peer-to-peer client programs -- that the number of people paying full price for the "real thing" plummeted and never recovered.
Unless your daily bread came from the music industry both then and now, I can't imagine you see things today as worse. The consumer landscape for music (and movies, for that matter, which followed suit a few years later as computing horsepower and internet bandwidth caught up) has never been friendlier or more cost-effective when done legally than it is now. I wrote about this recently here on The Backstage Pass; the value now is in being legit and letting someone else do the heavy lifting and bring the content to you. It is a time of immense plenty even without piracy.
So it will be in the post-Replicator era. There won't be as much money to be made in selling plastic bits as such, but they'll still find a way to monetize the Delivery Of Game Entertainment Content. Maybe it will be some sort of analogue of music or movie streaming. Meepleflix. Muluu. Amazon Prime. Whatever.
Presently, my daily bread comes from the Selling Game Things Industry. And if we reach that tipping point with 3-D printing where the toboggan ride down must inexorably begin and set off the chain reaction that will eventually resolve, well. Let's be honest here, even if we're not talking about wargames but just focusing on regular tabletop: Printing up a bunch of meeples and a game board ain't exactly gonna be a challenge. I know the outcome will ultimately be better for the consumer when the dust clears. I just have to look out for that whole part where the floor falls out from under my livelihood. Nobody wants to be the last person standing when the music stops.
Anyone who wants to get busy on the whole brain-upload thing, I'd appreciate it.
No comments:
Post a Comment