I used to print quite a lot of toys for my kids, but I stopped doing that, since it feels mostly like a waste of plastic.
3D printed toys are rarely enjoyable. The toys are usually either not interesting enough (think static, non-movable, single-color figurines like the low-poly-pokemon series), or not durable enough or both at the same time.
My kids liked the printed toys when they got them, but they barely looked at them after like 10 minutes and then they ended up rolling around the house until they broke, usually very soon.
I love 3D printing, I use it a lot for all sorts of things, but toys are just not a very good application for 3D prints, in my opinion. It’s just not worth the plastic.
Edit: Just for context: I’ve been around the block with 3D printing. I started about 7 years ago and I’ve been the 3D printer repair guy for my circle of friends ever since, fixing up everyone else’s printers. I design most of the things I print myself. The reason I am posting this is because pretty much everyone I know who has a printer and kids prints toys all the time, and any time I’m at any event where someone can shoehorn a box of give-away low-poly-pokemon in, there is one there.
IMO, this is all plastic waste and nothing else.
You’re right, and it’s the same reason 2d printers didn’t destroy the book publishing business. It only really makes sense to print things that are either highly situational one-offs for our own purposes or things that someone else created but that aren’t economically justifiable to physically distribute to us.
Commodity items like toys are made to a ridiculous level of cost and process optimization with large and highly sophisticated equipment and molds, which won’t pay for themselves until they’ve sold a hundred thousand toys or more. 3d printers are not competing with that at all. The goal is not to do the same things they already do at scale. The goal is to do the things they won’t and can’t do at scale, that would be cost-prohibitive to set up the process and molds for, that you don’t have time to set up a whole process for because you need it right now. That’s where 3d printing shines. Even companies are using it for rapid iteration because it would simply take too long to keep changing the setup on a traditional process. But it’s never going to replace or “beat” traditional manufacturing and distribution for most things that are done in bulk.
To be fair though, if almost anyone had a 3D printer, only plastics would be distributed, and only the plastic that is needed.
What I mean is that you don’t have to manufacture in advance and actually ship plastic products to every corner in the world so that these plastic garbage cab sit on shelf and then end up in a landfill after not being sold for tens of years.
Basically on-demand plastic garbage production would in most cases where the amount required is not well understood be beneficial if most people did it.
Because almost everything is made in excess, and the wasteful production is just offset in cost.
And yet on basically any convention that has anything remotely to do with making or toys or anything like that, there will be someone with a box full of low-poly-pokemon distributing these garbage-level toys to everyone willing to take one.