>>11373522For as long as there have been armies, there have been army men toys. Play has always been imitation of what adults do: girls play as mothers with dolls and pretend to do household chores and cooking; boys play at building things or at war. The latter can be split up further: grunts play with action figures and toy weapons; generals play with army men. There can only ever be a relatively small percentage of generals compared to grunts, perhaps the markets have caught on to this unconsciously.
Not that they haven't tried what you suggested - there's been Starcraft, Fallout, Star Wars and superheroes army men but they never really took off. The increasingly short attention spans of new generations of consumer require much more instant gratification than that provided by a handful of little statues. Even before smartphones , social media and normie internet started ruining everything the average child would be comparable to Toy Story's Andy, where his Bucket-o-Soldiers was just one toy out of many and was never as prominent as his action figure favorites.
