Left unfettered (无拘无束), Anthony Konieczka, 9 years old, would happily thumb away at his Boy Advance or PlayStation 2 from the minute he gets up to the moment he crawls into bed, 14 bleary-eyed (睡眼惺忪的) hours later.
Anthony’s basement is stocked with traditional toys—board s, puzzles, art supplies—and as far as he is concerned, they are relics of Christmases past. His sister Michaely, 6 years old, still likes dressing her Barbies. But once she starts playing Boy it’s hard to get her away.
Play patterns like this could grab another Christmas for the toy department. Through September, toy sales were down 5% compared with the first nine months of last year, according to the NDP Group. Meanwhile, the video- industry is heading for another record year. Thanks to hot new s like Halo 2 for the Xbox, the industry is light-years ahead of the toy business when it comes to buzz. With distractions such as instant messaging, cell phone s and iPods angling for kids’ minds and allowances, the digital revolution is life miserable for the toy industry.
While some hard-to-find toys emerge every holiday season, toymakers are heading into this one without a monster hit. Indeed, there has not been a Furby-style frenzy in years. Of 10 toy segments only two, arts and crafts and dolls, have generated sales growth over a recent 12-month period. Some of the weakest categories like construction sets and action figures are the ones aimed at boys, who suffer the most blisters from the video s. ysts expect one of the top stocking stuffers this season to be not a traditional toy but the new generation of Nintendo’s Boy, the DS, which hit stores last week.
The deeper issue is that shifts in play patterns are forcing toymakers to fight for shelf space in a tightening market. Boys in particular seem to be abandoning traditional toys at earlier ages in favor of consumer electronics, trendy video s, PC software and the Internet. The notion that kids are growing more sophisticated and tech-savvy (懂技术的), a trend called "age compression", has bedeviled toy companies for at least a decade. Action figures, for instance, used to be considered healthy for boys up to age 12. Now the items are mainly marketed to boys 4 to 6. A recent study found that nearly half of the U.S. children start on video s at 4 to 5 years old—and 20% at age 3 or younger.
Toy companies, of course, have long seen this coming. Mattel attempted to get into educational software in the late 1990s, spending $3.6 million to buy the Learning Company. But it turned out to be a blunder and led to more than $400 million in losses. Later on Mattel got back to building basic brands like Barbie and Hot Wheels. But Barbie’s sales slump may also be a victim of kids growing older at younger ages.
Several of the toys expected to sell well this season are, in fact, those that incorporate video gaming and DVD technologies. Mattel’s Fisher-Price introduced a system called InteracTV this year, featuring DVDs with characters like Dora the explorer. Hasbro came out with a portable color video player called VideoNow and has been putting classic s like Battleship and Yahtzee into hand-held electronic format. The sales of construction sets are decreasing because