So this is pretty interesting when you think about it. We’re at a time in the history of yoyos where manufacturing is not available to just large companies or people with large amounts of money, but to everyone now. As a result, there have been huge leaps in the quality and design of yoyos. Every shape has been explored, unique combinations of metals have been tried. In fact, the community has even started to move back to modernizing yoyos of the past. My Independent design was one of those, an attempt at making the Freehand Zero better. The Grail and Markmont Classic, some of the most popular yoyos on the market right now, took what people thought was a boring generic shape and turned them into some performance monsters. Bimetals are available as much as any other yoyo, Side Effects were one of the most innovative ideas to come to the history of the toy. So the question is, how much further can yoyo designing be pushed? Innovative is a design like Kyo’s Death Robot MG, taking full advantage of the materials. Yea, someone can produce their crazy design that has 5 different metals on the yoyo, or a yoyo that has a hole through the hub, but is that actually innovative, or just a misguided attempt at creating something unique? Personally in my opinion, yoyo designs have reached their peak. There’s not going to be many yoyos that will be produced and will be better performers than a yoyo such as the Draupnir.
No they are not.
Very helpful reply! If everyone else was as helpful as you there wouldn’t be any war or starvation!
We probably can’t make large improvements in terms of performance, but aesthetics for yoyos are far from the end of innovation.
I think there’s still a lot to explore. Even though a lot of yoyos can look superficially similar, there are a lot of things to tweak even amongst existing design variables. The entire guts of a yoyo has a number of minuscule changes that can be applied, affecting the response, gap, bearing seat, and so on. There are also extremes of width, weight, weight distribution, and diameter that have barely been examined by more than a handful of designs. You can’t maximize all the performance attributes at the same time, so there’s a lot of room to explore.
This isn’t even considering new things that haven’t even been tried in a yoyo yet. We don’t even know what they might be!
I think that as we see these nascent yoyo companies grow and mature, we’ll see a lot more stuff that pushes the envelope in yoyo design, both in performance & aesthetics.
This discussion reminds me of a paragraph I read in an old computer architecture textbook. The hypothesis was that CPU clock speeds would continue to rise until 9 or 10 GHz before hitting a power usage wall that couldn’t be dissipated with existing heatsink technology. This was before the proliferation of many-core architectures that obviated the need for high clock speeds to improve performance.
I don’t think that’s really a question that has a known answer. Lots of innovation comes from ideas that may not have happened yet. Pretend for a moment that One Drop side effects hadn’t been invented yet. We may have very well had this same conversation. Then some time in the future side effects happen.
Every big change just is a misguided attempt until it becomes a real innovation. Steve Brown taking the string off his finger was just a fun random thing to try until it sparked everyone’s imagination and became a whole subsection of yoyoing. Hubstacks took off at one point, Nine Dragons never really did.
There is more out there. It just takes creative people willing to take a chance. Yoyoing is full of those people.
Technically the 9 Dragons did take off… just as a different yoyo called the Overthrow haha
The quick answer is no. People are working on many things that most people never hear about.
Only polished yoyos… because you can only polish them so much.
And besides being shiny; polishing offers very little advantage worth the effort.
An innovation is just an experiment that became popular and stood the test of time. As long as companies experiment with their designs, there will always be opportunities for innovation.
Irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial.
Zero percent accurate in relation to reality.
Besides the shells; the Overthrow and the 9 Dragons are completely different in performance objectives and should not even be compared.
It’s the ultimate irony that sarcasm is lost on the most sarcastic member of the community.
I think we as a community are just in a groove. I designed yoyos for awhile and there are so many different shapes and different sizes to play with. The shapes are almost unlimited, all we have to do is be patient and wait for a break in what we know consider normal.
Being shiny is its own reward! 
I think as of around 2015-ish we entered the golden era of yo-yo… everything has kinda plateaued, we have many platonic ideals of “excellent” yo-yos to choose from, there are (almost) no “bad” yo-yos out there, and everything is so cheap. The $30 Colossus IV stil blows my mind. I have no idea how they get complex and beautiful splashes down to that price point. Or, y’know, you could save $2 and get a boring old solid 
I highly agree… when i started designing in 2014 you could easily charge 100 dollars a metal yoyo. I stepped out of the community in 2016 and when i came back i was shocked to see the prices and the different shapes being used. Its pretty crazy to see how far its come.
Manufacturing used to be much more expensive.
Oh yeah. The teh kauw cost me pretty much my entire collection and savings to make 20. I still also am owed money by people who bought teh kauw. With china machining you can make way bigger productions and if you know what your doing you can have some insanely good quality. However, im still not sure of the whole china vs us made argument is still going on…
Don’t look at the mirror.
Look through the mirror.
I have a Masters Degree from MYOWN Institute.
Perception can be as shallow as perspective is deep.
Basing a conclusion on an assumption is not a good bet.