it's probably a factor, but idk if it's a big one outside of mlp. in general it's been widely noted that toy companies are shifting focus more towards adult collectors in an age when kids are buying fewer toys. the typical oversimplified answer is that kids these days have minecraft and youtube and ipads and shit and therefore don't find physical toys as fun as previous generations did. this is one reason why that whole "toys to life" trend was so big for a while, with toys effectively being sold as physical dlc for games and apps. kids do still love toys, of course (my nephew loves ninjago), but i definitely believe that they're buying less of them - especially when they keep getting more and more expensive. and hell, a lot of parents are probably gauging how much fun a kid will get out of three $20 action figures vs. a $60 game and deciding that the toys aren't worth it, especially in this economy

meanwhile, companies have realized that nostalgic adult collectors have way more money to blow on toys than kids. at first you'd get some high end collectibles made just for adults - fancy little statues, prop replicas, masterpiece transformers, things like that. but now it's expanded to lots of the "main" toylines too. transformers generations figures are still designed to be kid-friendly, and i'm sure some kids still buy them, but they're sure as fuck not making figures of tarn and jhiaxus and redoing the 1984-86 cast over and over to get them as close to the animation models as possible because that's what 7-year-olds want. and so naturally now they're going all-in with other adult nerd collector shit like magic and dnd

there's also the speculation markets that have gone completely insane in the last few years, and the fact that childhood nostalgia has basically become the only game in town when it comes to mass market pop culture, and the push towards big multimedia franchises over just toys for toys' sake, and the tabletop gaming boom, and and a lot of other factors. bronies may have helped expedite the process, but i think we would've ended up here regardless

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second part of the ask for reference (i didn't want my actual response to be excluded from the twitter preview lol)

"(cont that previous ask) like it's no secret that, on the whole, MLPG4's brony oriented merch made more money that their actual kids toys so maybe their thought process is "well those bronies that keep giving us tons of money really like writing fallout/mass effect crossover fanfic shit, and our next MLP thing isn't gonna appeal to them but we don't wanna lose that demographic so let's hire Drew Karpyshyn and Marcus Lehto to make is some fallout/mass effect/Halo type stuff)"