I love this new section, "Brainstorming for Playmobil" - thanks, Sylvia, for setting it up! And thanks also to cachalote, Gustavo, and anyone else who may have inspired it.
Now we know that Playmobil will do a PCC and we have seen their point of view (from the official meeting re-cap document available here:
Tiermann's post titled "PCC Business Plan - White Paper - Meeting Recap" ) and we also know that it will still be some time before the club gets going. There is no harm in talking about what we hope the club will be or how we would like it to be in the future. We can also acknowledge that there are many things that a club may never provide, and discuss how we might accomplish those tasks independently. For my own part, I never expected a collector's club to be the be-all and end-all of Playmobil fan-dom - I always expected that a club offered by Playmobil would have many limits (and I have no problem with that.)
One recent discussion topic that I am especially interested in is the concept of Playmobil as a building toy. I thought that Amir's (Socrates') white paper on Playmobil as a construction toy was excellent! Playmobil's reaction was disappointing but not surprising. As others have already said, Playmobil is a successful business and, if they don't see the construction potential and continue to make ever-larger set pieces, etc., etc., well that is what they will do and they will probably continue to be successful (at least for a while.) On the other hand, there are other market changes that they could respond to in the future. Remember, before the Playmobil toy line was launched in the mid-70s, Geobra made beach pails, toy telephones, and hula hoops. We don't need to persuade them to stop making those sets that we don't especially care for, we just need to find a way to convince them to expand their product base to include the things we want them to produce. We have a lot of control over one possible market change that may begin when the PCC is launched:
A possible scenario:
1) The PCC begins and everyone starts posting photos and videos of their custom creations in the "Presentation/Foto Gallery of collectors pieces/displays/dioramas/films/movies/foto stories" (as described in the meeting recap.)
2) There will be many postings of large and impressive buildings - mostly constructed with Steck and SystemX pieces. The vast majority of those pieces are no longer issued in sets and may no longer be offered by DS.
3) People will see Daniela's awesome opera house or a beautiful and complex Victorian display by Emma or Playmovictorian or any number of amazing castle structures by Macgayver, Vauban, and so many others (whose names I can't think of right now.
)
4) People will start to ask Playmobil, "How can I order this amazing set that I just saw in the Fan Gallery?"
5) Playmobil will realize that there is money to be made by selling new Steck and SystemX sets (and individual parts) - not as a set to be sold in all retail stores, but as a "Collector's Edition" set available exclusively online.
6) This will also lead to the development a CAD (Computer Aided Design) system which will allow people to make their own designs and generate a list of parts needed for each design. It will also allow people to inventory their own sets and parts so that people can see what parts they need to order from DS.
7) World peace will be achieved.
