Richard Gottlieb

Play Platforms
June 1, 2008

I have been thinking about the electronic gaming industry and how much success has come their way through collaboration. A hardware producer like Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft makes the gaming hardware and any number of software producers create and market games to play on them. It makes me wonder if this open and collaborative approach to business rather than the secretive and closed model so common in the toy industry is, at least in part, what makes that industry so successful. 

I began thinking about whether we have ever had open source play platforms in the toy industry. I came up with three but they have been around so long that we don’t even think about them as play platforms. Here are the three examples I thought of:

• The 64 square, two color playing surface lends itself to checkers, chess and any number of arcane games.
• 52 pieces of cardboard with numbers and pictures on them have been the platform for anything from Bridge to Poker to Hearts.
• Two stakes hammered into the ground have been a play platform for anything from horseshoes to quoits. 

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the toy industry went back to the future? What would happen if some clever toy inventor set his or her sights on creating the next big three-dimensional play platform and some enterprising toy company figured out a new business model that would allow it to license its platform to those who want to create and sell play variations for it?

Posted by Richard Gottlieb on June 1, 2008 | Comments (0)