How Lego went from designing playthemes for creative play and building in adventurous imaginary worlds, to replicating real-world 1:1 objects like cameras, typewriters and vintage game consoles as collectible plastic pieces sitting on the shelves of bored adults...
offering both fame and a small fortune — 1 percent of net sales — to anyone who can convince 10,000 peers and The Lego Group that their set deserves to exist
This isn't entirely true. Plenty of LEGO Ideas designs get to the 10k threshold, then LEGO vetoes them for one reason or another. The decision process is completely opaque; more often than not, they basically just say "the design didn't pass internal review." Never mind that most Ideas sets get a significant design overhaul before reaching production anyway.
Some of that is due to reasons they cannot say. They've developed a policy of "no current IP currently produced by the Lego Group". So even if a set gets past the 10,000 mark, if it's a minifig scale Death Star, it's not being made.
So if it's a set they currently have IP rights for, but have not announced sets for, they'll generally turn it down. But they can't say it's because they've recently acquired the IP rights to Sonic the Hedgehog.
They also have a loose "no contemporary war toys" policy. I say loose because the Indiana Jones line kind of pushes on that a bit. But that's right around the cutoff for them. But you definitely won't see an F16 fighter jet anytime soon.
According to gpt-4, a minifig scale Death Star I would be over 2 miles in diameter
Seems reasonable to me. Let’s start building.
The problem is that according to Science™ (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20578627) with a tower of 2.17miles you start to get materials failure on the bricks. You might be able to engineer around this, but I suspect that the minifig-scale deathstar would cause the bottom bricks to melt.
Bummer.
That's true if you build the station on the planet, but I think the station is designed to be constructed in orbit in the first place. Its self-gravity should be negligible. Problem solved!
That's no moon...
That’s your mother!
I think we can get support for a 2 mile large Lego Death Star hauled up by NASA and assembled in orbit - write your congressman now !
We just need 10k votes, right? Or is there more to it than that?
Maybe in this hypothetical we could reduce weight by making it the 2nd Death Star? A lot of that was skeletal superstructure.
The second Death Star was also about 33% bigger in diameter, though.
I'm really starting to run out of space in my home for these big Lego sets.
a 2 mile deathstar gives you the chance to flip this around - get space for your home in a big lego set
And at some point you're going to be standing there trying to figure out if it still brings you Joy
I had the same thoughts when I was thinking of "how can I make myself an Enterprise 2 years back. I hope that a Lego AI* will help me get the individual parts needed AND the manual to build it myself, and to work around the IP issues name it "Green Spaceship" (and I will simply order the Grey pieces instead of the Green.
I see on my bookmarks I got a https://ideas.lego.com/projects/a056ebf2-163e-4aa0-b005-02b0.... I remember finding out who that C3Brix is and contacted him, but never got a response.
People will have better chance coming up with their own generic design than an IP-owned.
But you definitely won't see an F16 fighter jet anytime soon.
Considering some Lego AI* that will be 'smart' enough when fed the full library of Lego bricks dimensions, it should be able to build ANY 3D design or using 'many' 2D (photos/drawings) of a 'thing' and generate the 'shopping list' and the manual.
I don't know how happy would Lego be then (as Lego bricks must be somehow their IP), but it would be GREAT if someone built that.. I would happily pay $100 to generate stuff some some Star Trek iconic designs (Dyson sphere, all the Enterprises, the Voyager, etc.)
Space Fights are good, but Space Trips are better!!! (https://xkcd.com/1563/)
*ACTUALLY, now that I'm thinking about it I will try with Bard and ChatGPT and see what comes out
EDIT: I saw others had the same idea in other comments.. I'll add a reminder on my Calendar in 6 months from now to see what's been going on for this topic
EDIT2: I just asked Bard and it came up with 5 suggestions, listed below:
1. Mecabricks Mecabricks is a web-based software that allows you to create LEGO models from scratch or import photos and dimensions. It has a large library of LEGO bricks and pieces, and it can generate step-by-step instructions for your models. Image of Mecabricks website Opens in a new window www.stonewars.de Mecabricks website
2. Rebrickable Rebrickable is another web-based software that can help you create LEGO models from photos. It has a similar interface to Mecabricks, but it also has a feature that allows you to search for existing LEGO models that match your photo. Image of Rebrickable website Opens in a new window www.reddit.com Rebrickable website
3. Brick-A-Pic Brick-A-Pic is a web app that converts photos into LEGO mosaics. It can be used to create custom LEGO artwork or to recreate logos, portraits, and other images. Image of BrickAPic website Opens in a new window wired.jp BrickAPic website
4. Art4Bricks Art4Bricks is a company that specializes in creating custom LEGO mosaics. You can upload a photo to their website and they will create a custom design for you. They will also sell you the LEGO bricks and instructions you need to build the mosaic.
5. LEGO Mosaic Maker The LEGO Mosaic Maker is an official LEGO product that allows you to create LEGO mosaics from photos. It comes with a set of 4,702 LEGO bricks in 5 colors, and it includes instructions for creating 15 different mosaic designs.
I will start checking them out later today..
I don‘t know if you‘re interested but this company makes Star Trek sets
The idea of a Lego AI sounds amazing... just thought of what might happen if you took a photo of your pieces then said "I like original Star Wars, make me a series of spaceships from that" and it outputted step by step instructions to create them. So cool. Sure, something seems a bit lost in the creative flailing that is the growth path of young Lego-ists, but it would be really cool.
As for the IP around lego bricks, an instruction set would be copyrightable, the brick system is patentable (but the patents on most of the bricks would be expired now which is why there are generic brick sets available), and they can do a trademark that would provide limited protection, but mostly for the brand, not for the bricks themselves (I remember being at the Lakland workshop back in the 90s and they were talking about how the Fender lawyers came and told them how they needed to redesign their headstock as to not violate Fender’s trademarks/design patents on the headstock shape, and there would be some similar protection potentially available to Lego, but again, the existence of generic bricks tells me that it doesn’t apply to the bricks).
So the bottom line is that Lego cannot keep you from publishing plans and parts lists for your own Lego sets. Heck, you could even, if you were sufficiently funded, manufacture the set yourself. You just couldn’t use the Lego brandname at all.
They did recently produce a set loosely based on the F-35 Lightning ("Blue Power Jet").
Exactly. It kinda, sorta is close to one and there's no ordinance.
Not too long ago, they yanked a V-22 Osprey set because of their "no military vehicles" policy.
I'm still baffled that the Coast Guard didn't go all-in on that --- maybe if they had, it would have been acceptable in that livery.
Nothing baffling there. The Osprey isn't very good for its design use case that happened once in 1980, but it makes up for that by being even worse at everything else.
I assume they don’t have infinite capacity either. So even without rights conflicts, if they can only ramp up say 10 sets at a time, and they’re working on eight for a new campaign, they’re going to be pickier about the final two.
Lego may sell a hundred different sets at the same time, but if they run out of one they aren’t going to get more tomorrow. It’s on a manufacturing schedule. They may have all of the yellow 1x6 bricks you could ever need, but they still have to fire up the part picker, the bag sealers, and order new boxes and booklets from the printers. Plus there’s that weird part that is only in three current sets, they have to make more of them, and the first gap in the schedule is next Thursday.
That’s why it says “and the Lego Group” - you have to do the 10k and pass internal design review.
But then the 10k is meaningless.
"Anyone who can convince the Lego Group", that could be said of any product/company!
It's like saying "anyone who can convince Netflix can launch a new TV Show".
It's just screening the clearly not-good-enough designs so that Lego employees don't have to review everything.
it also shows the market potential: 10000 people would buy this set. sure not all of them will buy it, but it's certainly a useful metric.
It’s not meaningless, it’s just an initial filter to show there’s at least some amount of interest in it.
No sense reviewing proposals for sets that can’t even get 10,000 people interested.
I'm still waiting for my Saturn V Gantry. https://ideas.lego.com/projects/a88109ec-9970-4fe1-98b4-9bd5...
BTW: https://www.bricklink.com/v3/studio/design.page?idModel=1603... or other, similar models there.
Bricklink is perhaps secretly (or perhaps not) owned by LEGO itself so they can have their hand in the pocket of the used / resale market. People will upload full MOCs (My Own Creation) there and you can purchase the sets piece-wise. Usually even more expensive than if you wait and buy a set through LEGO but for stuff like this it's worth it.
Bricklink has been acquired by Lego 4 years ago, I don't think that's a secret at all !
which was one of the better things that could have happened after Daniel Jezek passed. lego has been a good steward of it since.
"Convincing" the Lego Group implies that there's dialogue.
There is, but it seems like it's between Lego and the rightsholder.
I don’t think it implies that. The 10k votes, parts list, photos, impetus, and lore/background is the “convincing”.
A speech, a monologue, can be convincing.
"Lego is 'proud' to announce Lego McLegoface Mark XVI. Apparently you guys still think this joke is funny."
Also the final product often looks very different (usually a lot smaller) then the submission.
most Ideas sets get a significant design overhaul before reaching production anyway.
Often it's an improvement, but lots of people are disappointed that the new Orient Express[0] is nothing like the original Ideas design[1].
[0] https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/the-orient-express-train-...
[1] https://ideas.lego.com/projects/568ee861-3b62-413a-9432-ce1d...
"Never mind that most Ideas sets get a significant design overhaul before reaching production anyway."
You've answered your own question -- selection criteria extend beyond physical design.
I think it's possible you did not continue reading the article. This is all covered.
This is literally what the whole article was about. Not only does the quote itself contain that context "and the lego group", but the very next paragraph is "And then… nothing. The Tintin votes dried up, and Lego rejected both his fan-favorite Avatar and Polar Express ideas. The company never says why it rejects an Ideas submission, only that deciding factors include everything from “playability” and “brand fit” to the difficulties in licensing another company’s IP."
Lego have stated that they have to keep using oil based plastic (ABS) because their attempt at "sustainable" plastics has failed. Specifically they've said they need Lego to "last generations". That sentence should set off alarm bells for environmentalists, it's not recycling if Lego is mostly dumped after a kid grows up.
Lasting generations sounds like BS to me given the arguments against fossil fuel plastic production, banning forever plastics from the environment, and sea and environmental pollution caused by items like bricks or bags.
Why should Lego last generations? A PLA type plastic would be non toxic, break down easier and importantly for Lego, also encourage replacement purchases.
Lego that lasts 10-15 years, with a discount replacement programme, to my mind, is better than 100+ year old Lego killing animals that eat it, or taking up space in landfills.
Anecdotally, most kids don't want old Lego, (just look online at the moms selling old unwanted Lego cheap without instructions or boxes) they want the latest sets, so the justification isn't there either.
Your anecdote is not an anecdote, it's a made up fact.
My son is way more excited by my old sets with pirates, astronauts and castles than he is by the latest franchised crap like marvel, Harry Potter and all.
Here, at least mine is a real anecdote.
My son is not. He'd prefer the Batman and Spiderman sets as opposed to the random old pieces his grand parents keep offering him. Any kid who tells you they'd prefer old stuff to new is lying, otherwise Lego'd be selling that old stuff rather than the cross franchising they do today.
Maybe you should then question your parenting. I would be so distressed if my kid was incapable of creating original play without the support of a franchised movie.
Also, no my son is not lying to me.
You think someone's parenting abilities are in question because a child prefers new superhero Legos over more generic older sets?
Yes I just wrote it above. What part left you with a doubt?
I do think that it is indeed concerning when imitation is the only play a kid is able to perform. When a kid can only enjoy Spiderman lego sets that's because all they can play is basically an imitation of the movies they've seen.
Oh wow, yikes.
What part left you with a doubt?
HN rules suggest "assuming good intent." I tried my best with your comment but saw absolutely none, so figured I'd double check to see if i was missing something. Guess not.
Where was the bad intent in my comment?
Giving an opinion is bad intent?
Did I insult anyone or sid anything inflammatory? Maybe you got mixed up with the parent who called my kid a liar.
When a kid can only enjoy Spiderman lego sets that's because all they can play is basically an imitation of the movies they've seen.
Not necessarily; just because they only do imitative play with Lego doesn't mean they only do imitative play more generally.
He'd prefer the Batman and Spiderman sets as opposed to the random old pieces his grand parents keep offering him.
Good for him.
Any kid who tells you they'd prefer old stuff to new is lying,
The issue isn't preferring old stuff to new as much as preferring what Lego used to make more of vs. what they currently make more of, but, no, neither of those preferences is nonexistent in individuals.
otherwise Lego'd be selling that old stuff rather than the cross franchising they do today.
No, aggregate market demand, weighted by who has money to spend (and people who aren't even kids), doesn't indicate any kid with contrary stated preference is lying. Humans aren't mental carbon copy clones in slightly different fleshsuits.
Oh wow. Not often I get as triggered by a comment where someone is wrong on the Internet as this. This has to be some of the dumbest drivel I've ever read in a comment about Lego.
The Lego sets I got as a kid in the 80s, have been built and has been (and is!) being played with by my ten year old daugher. Classics such as 6080 and 40567. Or lego space stuff such as 6980, 6940, 6783 or a variety of the others she's been playing with.
One of the big appeals of LEGO is that it's generational. It is that the plastics produced 30, 40, 50 years ago is just as good today in 2023, as it was in 1986. The utter baloney you're coughing up would ruin one of the main great points about LEGO. It would render it not generational toys but yet another bunch of bollocks that expires after a few years.
And shove your anecdotes. I doubt you've got kids.
How mature. I doubt you're older than 15 with a response like that.
15 years is not "bunch of bollocks that expires" - that's a pretty good lifetime for any modern plastic toy, and if the plastic is something like PLA, will just break down to sugars.
What you fail to understand is the ABS plastic is just adding to the pool of what will all become trash eventually, in 100 years we'll have a larger pile of this junk, whereas using a biodegradable plastic the total amount may remain the same or have declined.
You do you though, continue to buy new plastic bags at the supermarket, favour plastic packaging, plastic cup straws, all because you can "re-use" them. Oh wait, they've banned them for a reason.
You do you though, continue to buy new plastic bags at the supermarket, favour plastic packaging, plastic cup straws, all because you can "re-use" them.
You're comparing Lego to things that are pretty much designed to be single-use, and that's part of why you're getting a lot of people arguing with you. As many have pointed out, Lego is not single use. First, kids can play with them for _years_. That's longer than a lot of stuff that kids play with. But also, because they're high quality and they do last a long time, they're great for actually passing down to younger generations. I'm in my 40's now and recently passed the legos I had as a child on to my niece and nephew. I'm sure they'll get passed on to another generation at some point. There's a _huge_ amount value in products that are so incredibly reusable.
I'm 44.
Since '86, I've noticed that I've lost a 3 gray 2x1 full size bricks for the Castle, two bricks for one of the spaceships. Every single other model has all their bricks.
I despise the "planned obsolesce" bollocks some folks are hell bent on pushing into everything. I cheer on lego not to subscribe to it. I, and lots and lots of other brickheads would probably abandon them in an instant if they did.
I need to add another reply to this drivel, to point out that No, I do not buy plastic packaging, plastic cup straws, or other silly plastic products that are essentially one-use.
LEGO is not one-use. The entire point of lego is to NOT be one-use. I'm starting to suspect you think the purpose of lego is to buy a lego model, build it, play a bit with the result, and then it's "done".
That's not how it works. Those bricks add to the pile of bricks you've got, to build creatively from. After a while, those 'piles' of bricks get changed to well sorted drawings, with different drawers for different bricks. ;) We use something like this:
https://www.plasticboxshop.co.uk/craft-storage-boxes-c4/comp...
for storing different sized legos, to easily find what you're looking for.
Yeah, my kids visited their great-grandmother in Australia a few years back, and out came the 1960s legos. Great fun was had.
The fact that Lego is making a decision that is directly against their own financial interest should unring the bell. Making quality things that last forever is the Reduce and Reuse of the recycle triangle. All of my childhood Legos are now owned by my nieces and nephews.
But Lego has now revealed that after more than two years of testing, it had found that using recycled PET didn't reduce carbon emissions.
It said the reason for that was because extra steps were required in the production process, which meant it needed to use more energy.
That's a really good point, it had crossed my mind. I do wonder if at some point Lego will change to some sort of subscriber model to keep shareholders happy. The Lego company seems to be one of the last "good" companies to not want to fleece customers, and that would be down to their part family ownership I suppose. Pessimistically I think "all good things...".
Fortunately, the "shareholders" are a couple of the grandchildren of the founder; it is entirely family owned, not publicly traded.
Exactly. Reduce and Reuse Are the only valid paths for plastic and Lego is the most reusable. Recycling plastic is bullshit and single-use plastics should be banned.
Lego is basically irrelevant when it comes to fossil fuel consumption or environmental plastic pollution. I’m glad they decided not to make their product worse for no point.
I wish “environmentalists” would keep their focus on things that will actually make a difference, as opposed to insisting on these performative sacrifices that make our world poorer, duller or less capable without meaningfully helping the environment.
I wish “environmentalists” would keep their focus on things that will actually make a difference, as opposed to insisting on these performative sacrifices that make our world poorer, duller or less capable without meaningfully helping the environment.
I agree with this a great deal. Environmentalists tend to forget that lots of people just do not care about the environment, and if you want to make meaningful differences then you have to appeal to those people on other grounds. For example, LED bulbs are a success because they are just better than incandescents in almost every way. Conversely, paper straws suck ass at the basic job of being a straw, and so I actively avoid any restaurant I know which uses them.
Most people don't have anything against the environment. If you give them an environmentally friendly way to do something that's just as good as (or even better than) the old way, they're going to be fine with switching. But you have to put in the effort to make it an actual attractive solution, and not expect people to be happy with a bad substitute just because it's better for the environment.
They'll get there, the first stab just wasn't great. That said, LEGO truly is multi-generational. My kids are playing with my childhood LEGO and it looks close to new.
I’ve put my old lego in the dishwasher (you can use a “net”) and it comes out like new.
? It's the one toy that does have a substantial long term resale market. Not everything needs to be ephemeral. It's just ABS, it's not asbestos.
Bricks also do get worse with time. I remember getting some old Lego as a child and finding the pieces barely stuck together. Having old bricks mixed with new ones, my designs would often "fail" at older pieces first.
Lego has got to be the lowest on the list for me as far as concern about plastic use. Who throws away Lego? Post a couple pounds of Lego on FB marketplace and see how fast it sells.
Some of our Lego is from the 1950s, and my daughter is the third generation playing with it. Surely 60+ years of use is a pretty good run for something made of plastic.
Further context:
https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b...
The footprint over the lifetime is higher. Seems like an entirely reasonable decision.
It’s true that on environmental timescales, all plastic is bad. But Lego is probably the most durable and reusable use of plastic for entertainment we have today.
Whatever logic brought you to the conclusion that reselling a thing means it’s no longer wanted is completely backwards. The fact you are seeing tons of Lego for sale online is because it’s so damn desired and valuable. Landfills are not filled with Lego. They’re filled with textiles from the fast-fashion industry and single-use plastics.
...if Lego is mostly dumped after a kid grows up... Anecdotally, most kids don't want old Lego
This is entirely wrong.
Nearly all the toys from my own childhood wound up in the garbage or Goodwill at one point or another... except the Legos. Kids want to build gigantic castles and spaceports of their own -- 20x larger than any sets Lego sells -- and those gigantic environments require having a ton of random assorted pieces.
Legos seem to be the one toy that doesn't get dumped.
just look online at the moms selling old unwanted Lego cheap
That actually shows the opposite of what you're trying to say. They're not tossing them in the garbage, they are selling them, because they're still perfectly desirable. (Because not everyone winds up with grandkids to give them to, or wants to hold onto them until then.)
Because they build a reputation of good quality plastic pieces that fit very snug together for, like they said, generations. New type os plastic seens to not be like that and the final product was not really good. If its really true or not, i don't know, but that was their justification.
I am confused by the statement about "frames", where each design team gets a limited amount of "new" bricks they are able to introduce. Yet all of the internaly come in all colors available.
This, the colourful internals, are what defines lego for me nowadays. I wonder: had they kept the system of gray and black axels, one for even length unit one for odd, and the standardized blue and black pins while keeping every other part the default black, would they have more frames available for "custom" parts?
In my mind having two blue bricks where there should only be one is unacceptable for the price that lego is inevitably going to charge.
I am confused by the statement about "frames", where each design team gets a limited amount of "new" bricks they are able to introduce. Yet all of the internaly come in all colors available.
LEGO has a large part catalog -- a lot of different molds that define the shapes. They also have each part available in some selection of colors. If you need an existing part in a new color, it's not terribly expensive to spin up a production line for it because the molds are ready. There may need to be adjustments to the color chemistry for the specific part (some colors are more brittle/fragile, others may require different processes -- transparent parts for example.)
If you need to spin up a new mold, that's where it gets complicated and expensive.
As for the internals, they largely come from the existing part:existing color matrix. Over the years LEGO has created a lot of colors, but in reality not every part is available in every color, and if you buy enough LEGO sets you notice that a lot of the internals tend to actually use similar color schemes. Technic axles and pins are now even largely standardized to specific colors. High friction 2x pins are always black, low friction 2x pins are beige..etc.
In my mind having two blue bricks where there should only be one is unacceptable for the price that lego is inevitably going to charge.
LEGO used to do a lot more custom one-off pieces for sets in the 90's and early 2000's, and it was one of the factors in them nearly being bankrupted. Reducing their part catalog and going to using more small pieces to build up assemblies instead of just molding them as a single piece helped them get out of that predicament. And as an AFOL, I prefer that they use more pieces to 'brick build' things -- not only do you see some really cool building techniques, but there's also so much more that you could possibly use them for. There's also a large spectrum of complexity in the sets. Smaller sets for younger children will use larger simpler parts and less complicated building techniques. The sets that really go all out on details with tiny pieces are usually designed for adults (and a few very lucky kids.)
This, the colourful internals, are what defines lego for me nowadays
The internals used to be much more monochrome, but one of the things LEGO tries to improve is the build experience. It's much easier to tell which pieces is supposed to go exactly where when they're all different sizes and colors. Heck, it's still a problem sometimes with sets that heavily use a single color, like some of the batman ones in recent years. There are places in the instructions manual where it's almost impossible to tell the placement of pieces because it's just one big nearly-black mass of bricks both on the table in front of you, and in the pictures in the instructions.
LEGO used to do a lot more custom one-off pieces for sets in the 90's and early 2000's, and it was one of the factors in them nearly being bankrupted. Reducing their part catalog and going to using more small pieces to build up assemblies instead of just molding them as a single piece helped them get out of that predicament.
it was hard to collect and build through that period, especially as so many specialty parts just kept appearing with every set. the intervening years, except for the constant changes of motors and electrification, seemed to put this into check and make for some fun and interesting builds.
unfortunately, from the perspective of someone who puts together 10-12 sets/year, it appears that we are heading back into that specialized time again; maybe not as bad with intricate specialty parts, but the number of new (2023) parts in the last two sets that I've put together has been quite high. those sets were the bat cave shadow box and the orient express.
I understand the appeal of SNOT, but the sheer number of new SNOT elements is craziness.
The internals used to be much more monochrome, but one of the things LEGO tries to improve is the build experience. It's much easier to tell which pieces is supposed to go exactly where when they're all different sizes and colors.
they've also improved the printing of the instructions over the years, as well as better differentiation through outlines of what is new. that was very obvious when my father and I put together 7 holiday sets I had collected over 20 years last holiday season. each newer set was a good improvement.
they've also improved the printing of the instructions over the years, as well as better differentiation through outlines of what is new. that was very obvious when my father and I put together 7 holiday sets I had collected over 20 years last holiday season. each newer set was a good improvement.
They have, but they still have problems with sets that have large chunks of the same color, especially when it comes to stuff like tiling or greebling, like the UCS Batman Tumbler. And certain colors still seem problematic. The old UCS Sandcrawler set is the one that stands out in my mind, that reddish-brown color made a lot of the instructions very difficult to read; That was like 10 years ago now, but even the more recent Bonsai tree also had that problem.
They have, but they still have problems with sets that have large chunks of the same color, especially when it comes to stuff like tiling or greebling, like the UCS Batman Tumbler.
the batcave shadow box definitely suffered with it a bit, but at least it was an interesting and challenging build. unlike the new orient express train, which was ... not what I'd expect from lego.
unlike the new orient express train, which was ... not what I'd expect from lego.
Incidentally, this is how I've felt about a lot of the bigger sets from LEGO recently. A decade or so ago, I used to basically buy every >$100 set LEGO put out every year, sans a few themes -- I've got a few large storage bins filled with just the instructions from these sets. But some of the massive sets LEGO has been putting out recently, like the Coliseum or the new Eiffel Tower set just don't seem like particularly fun builds. I think the first time I noticed this was putting together the 10253 Big Ben set. It just didn't feel like fun stacking those tiny pieces together, repeated like 30-40x for each little subassembly. But since then, there has definitely been a creep of the builds for larger sets being a little less fun and more tedious. It can be a good way to relax if you just want to kind of zone out for a while and do stuff with your hands, but that's not my style.
Of course, then they put out something like the Concorde which looks like a very fun build, so at least some of the LEGO designers got their heads on straight.
I have mostly built the modular sets (and designed my own), but missed a couple in the 2010's. also a big train fan (have built many of my own train cars), or have built more fun things like the ghostbusters fire station and car. I never got into the architecture sets though.
I plan on taking some time one of these weekends to build a large outdoor track layout to run on, but am waiting on some more after-market track to arrive.
By outdoor track, I assume you mean still a LEGO one? What after-market track are you using?
still l-gauge. I have tracks and motors running back to the 9v days, plus the newer non-powered track. outdoor (covered patio area) for the extra room, because I want to build a pretty large layout for fun.
as for after-market track: https://trixbrix.eu and https://www.bricktracks.com/products (they have very little in stock right now). quality seems good on both.
I built both the Titanic and the Eiffel tower. They both felt pretty repetitive.
On the other hand, these models are a marvel. Particular the Eiffel Tower. Everytime I look at it im just awed at how beautifully intricate it looks.
I think there's sets and sets, the lion knights castle was incredibly fun to build and had so many secrets and mechanisms.
So all in all, I'm really happy with these big Lego sets. I really like the Eiffel Tower. Once you see it in person you see how impressive it is. Also, I don't particularly mind the repetition... It took me a few days to assemble the tower, I watched tv, listened to podcasts, etc.
Despite my braying, I largely agree with this still. That's also what I ended up doing while putting together these sets. We managed to squeeze in all 4 seasons of Battlestar Galactica while putting together the Titanic and Eiffel Tower sets.
Those extremely expensive sets depicting famous things are all beginner sets, building-wise.
If some regular person just had their first and only trip on the Orient Express, or has always dreamed about making that trip: this is the target market. You cannot in general expect these people to have build a single Lego set, yet, so they are huge, sprawling, expensive, but totally uninteresting if you've ever built more than "put this 2 by 4 brick on that 2 by 4 brick".
Yet all of the internaly come in all colors available
Since those already exist, they probably don't count as new frames. It seems like you "spend" frames on new pieces you want to introduce, but there's a large stock of evergreen pieces you can pick from.
Yeah, I think the best way to think about the frames is "do we already have a mold for this piece / have we done the engineering for it" if so then it's not new, just a new colorway.
According to the article, a new color requires spending a frame:
Want a part in a different color? That costs designers a frame. A new piece? Spend some frames. Bring back an old out-of-print piece? That’s a frame, too.
This makes sense, since a new color requires dedicated storage space (which frames are intended to control).
Lego nearly went bankrupt in the early 2000s. Part of the problem is that they had way too many colors of way too many bricks (and way too many patterned bricks). Each unique brick/color/pattern had to be binned/stored separately. So the inventory took up a lot of space, all those warehouses cost $$$.
So Lego re-tooled to reduce the overall number of bricks in inventory. Instead of building bricks in many colors and patterns, they now build bricks in a fewer colors and even fewer patterns.
A big part of what they do to plan for the year is figure out what bricks/colors/patterns will be used. The designers are then told "design sets using these color bricks". If you pay attention, you'll notice that the colors of the Modular City sets change yearly, mainly to keep up with the colors being chosen for the other new Lego sets.
This is why there are so many stickers in the newers sets. Lego can't afford to make every part in a printed pattern -- it's a lot cheaper for them to keep sheets of stickers on the shelf than full bins of printed bricks.
This is where the idea of "frames" comes from -- it's their internal credit system that lets the designers budget for what bricks/colors they really need, and at what expense to the other sets they're making.
The designers likely spend big on special parts for the new Star Wars or Marvel set. As I said before, this comes at the price that the other sets have to be designed using the bricks that are on hand.
It's part of the great "brick reduction" done in the early 2000s because the number of simultaneous parts was getting too high. So they hand out "chits" called frames to the teams that they can "spend" to get a part in a color that isn't available yet, etc.
The teams can swap and barter frames if they convince another team it would be useful. There was a good description of it in https://unbound.com/books/lego - the Secret Life of Lego Bricks.
Why aren't we building "products" from lego rather than seeing them as toys? The promise of 3D-printers haven't really played out, but it would be interesting if we had a material like lego to build some of the things we need. Lego is infinitely customizable and each brick would be potentially useful in any product that you would build. Of course there are some obvious downsides but I think the idea of an ecosystem of standardized, "open" and adaptable materials is super interesting.
The promise of 3D-printers haven't really played out
Huh?
I assume he means in the idea of printing daily household items instead of buying them, printing houses, etc.
Which doesn't make sense, either. 3d printers are the ultimate bracket makers. I've used mine numerous times for things like broken sliding light switches or really anything small and made of plastic that breaks.
3D printing is much more versatile than LEGO. Take just a random example: a cup holder for in the car. Using 3D printing, it would look and work similar to the ones you can buy in a store. Using LEGO would make it very bulky, aesthetically not so great, and also it would fall apart easily.
I think the original commenter above has simply never used a 3D printer for anything practical.
Jekca dabbles with this idea. They sell Lego-like parts that lock together with a tiny wrench:
At one point they sold a set around building toddler-sized furniture that could be disassembled and repurposed as the kids grow up. Now it looks like the closest thing they offer is desk organizers (which is still cool).
Jekca dabbles with this idea. They sell Lego-like parts that lock together with a tiny wrench:
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that before. This page has an illustration of how the locking system works:
The concrete walls of my house already resemble a 4x2 block, although slightly higher in the body relative to the “pins” on top.
Or are you referring to something else? Lego is plastic. Houses need wood or concrete and all kinds of isolation etc.
I would guess the commenter is referring to prototyping.
Me too! There have been a few experiments in this but none have caught on. Here's a nice article that explores the idea: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/12/how-to-make-everyt...
Thanks, this was exactly what I was looking for!
There are tons of plans available online for LEGO "products". Stands for smartphones and tablets and headphones are the first thing that comes to mind and I've seen a lot of those. Pencil holders and such are popular as well.
Ｉ actually toyed with the idea with the Technic "bricks" that give much much more flexibility.
I can vouch for the versatility, it kinda works for a headphone hanger, or a cup holder, small foldable desk racks etc. But then these components are too light and don't have enough strength to keep shape for months. Many of the parts bent over time, some broke under abuse.
Also for these kind of use pieces are big and finding a compact build is really a chalenge. I ended up using a ton of custom built third party pieces.
I'd definitely try with a 3d printing next, it will allow for smaller parts at least, and probably cost way less in materials (Lego are overpriced for that)
The promise of 3D-printers haven't really played out
I don't know what you think the "promise of 3D-printers" was but if you think it hasn't played out then probably you had unreasonable expectations.
Why aren't we building "products" from lego rather than seeing them as toys?
Would you buy such a product? They would be much larger than the same thing not made out of lego. They would shatter in your bag during transportation. They would be more awkward to use because of the rectangular shape of the bricks. They would collect dirt in all the crevices/studs.
Look around your home or recent purchase history, which products would be improved by making them out of lego?
Lego is heavy, bulky, expensive, and falls apart when you move it. What are you thinking we’d manufacture from it?
Could you give some examples of things you envision being built this way?
And could you give some examples of where 3D printing isn't working for you?
It's hard for me to figure out what's motivating this suggestion without specific examples.
The expense.
That said, I have made a couple of things as prototypes, mostly for archery:
- spine testing jig (had to use a bunch of washers on a bolt for the two-pound weight though)
- fletching jig
Also some small desk accessories --- a tablet stand w/ pen holder, a rack for a CD-player --- the two stacks of bricks holding up a wooden shelf are still on place though.
I've purchased a lot of Lego Duplo for my nephew, really fun sets.
Duplo come from the latin word "duplus", which means double.
Duplo bricks are double the size of lego bricks. This make the sets compatible.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fg...
https://www.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/6m4wsm/mind_blown_30_...
And the short-lived LEGO Quatro brick was...you guessed it...four times larger than a regular LEGO brick. Still compatible with both other sets.
I think these are biggest ones you can buy (or used to) not sure on the size comparison - at a guess x8 to x10
45003: Soft Starter Set https://www.rapidonline.com/45003-lego-soft-starter-set-70-1...
I had loads of fun playing with these in the lego centre (forget the kids!)
That softness is critical. Not for the kids, but for the adults who have to clean up after them.
Stepping barefoot onto a Lego brick hurts, but stepping barefoot onto a Duplo brick is much worse. Those things look innocent enough, but in the dark they turn into veritable caltrops!
You think so? The Lego bricks have sharper edges and also I think that you put the same weight (of your body) on a comparatively larger area on the Duplos, so less pain. But, well, who am I to argue about your experience. (Never stepped on either of these in our living room although we had both systems).
They have those soft ones at Legoland. They put them in the water park (they float!). I'm not sure they're compatible with regular bricks though.
They are probably partially compatible. With Duplo for example, it's easy enough to stack Duplo on top of regular LEGO bricks, but not the other way around. For stacking regular bricks on top of Duplo, you need to have bricks of the proper multiple in each dimension -- they need to be full height and a multiple of 2 in the other dimensions. The Quatro bricks are compatible in the same way -- you can easily stack them on top of Duplo or regular bricks, but not the other way around; You probably also need to do a transition layer from Quatro to Duplo to regular bricks.
I've seen people use Duplo and Quatro for space-filling when they needed a large amount of structural brick somewhere that won't be seen in the final model. Think having a LEGO city setup that has an underground level.
And the even shorter lived LEGO Octro brick was… you guessed it… 8 times larger than a regular LEGO brick.
Checkout the compatible “Marble Run” from Hubelino. Good build quality and loads of fun. Not affiliated.
3D printing similar parts is a fun option too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb1c3VqqfTE
As an aside, standard marbles are almost exactly 2 Lego studs wide, which makes it easy to build marble runs using just standard Lego pieces. For instance, you can build a marble lifting tower for the start of a marble run that uses a 2-stud by 2-stud hole in a 4x4 (or 6x6 for strength) tower.
I mean the System in LEGO System in Play extends to the entire LEGO universe. Shouldn't be a surprise that they are compatible.
Obligatory quatro is twice bigger yet (and all are compatible together!)
Also Wikipedia mentions duplex and not duplus, but whatever
There is also Primo (first) for really little kids, pre verbal even) which is 2x Duplo and yes, can interlock with normal Lego bricks.
ETA: looks like it was unfortunately discontinued: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Baby . This Lego was great for my kid to learn motor skills like orientation, insertion, and removal (along with things like wooden veggies that connected with velcro).
Fun, but I really wish I could keep reading without having to scroll through unknown amounts of pictures horizontally.
Rule #1 of web development: Don't mess with scroll.
Product pages that require 50 revolutions of the mouse wheel to reach the spec sheet due to some embedded animation is the most frustrating web experience.
The scrolling makes me feel uneasy; in my head the columns are all offset by the scroll amount and I'm reading some weird zig-zag layout.
News organizations across the board have gotten into this bizarre arms race with "interactive" multimedia... and I genuinely have no idea why they think readers want it! The Verge in particular always has dozens of comments complaining about how distracting and unreadable some of their UI choices are.
I suspect part of the answer is similar to Facebook's "pivot to video" - some unscrupulous company has gaslit news executives into thinking that "interactive content" is the future of journalism, and are selling frameworks / consulting services / etc. (Though part of the problem with The Verge is Nilay Patel himself. Nilay seems like a good egg, but he has been obstinate and arrogant about The Verge's UI changes. Can't argue with taste...)
Thanks. Came here to comment exactly this. Not very UX interested but are there more people who are annoyed by this horizontal scrolling image galleries? Same with the movie streaming websites... For me it seems to be counter intuitive to go horizontally while navigating vertically.
Seriously. I probably in the HN minority in that I don't mind when vertical scroll results in animations that break up the text (e.g. Apple product pages or fancy NYT articles)...
...but when the animations turn into horizontal scrolling while I'm moving my fingers vertically on my trackpad, I hate it. It breaks my brain and makes me angry at the designer.
especially because on a Mac scrolling horizontally coincides with the back/fwd gestures. I never even realised this until this article...
Ah, there was more to the article? I gave up after a few photo's..
I wonder when are we going to see a LLM to build Lego Sets out of a prompt. Maybe is already out there?
surely you've seen all the LLM generated fake lego images?
https://www.core77.com/posts/126450/People-Easily-Fooled-by-...
quote from the instagram you linked: "I had a LEGO employee tell me that they had 10 customers ask about “upcoming” LEGO sets that ended up being AI."
Sounds like an excellent way to validate demand then?
I would totally buy that metal press
llm to 3d printer ?
Perhaps using something like:
Not quite there but close :-D -> ChatGPT 3.5 Promt give me instructions on how to build an iPhone 15 Pro out of lego bricks
There's a company that makes sports stadiums out of "brxlz" (brick pixels) and at first I thought they were just knockoff legos.
After building a stadium I figured out it's basically just a low resolution 3d model of the stadium that you sort of 3d print layer by layer.
https://www.foco.com/collections/brxlz
Not nearly as nice as lego, but the final product is pretty cool.
The use of colourful bricks in areas that won't be seen is an amazing improvement I discovered when my kids began getting Lego.
Last week I rebuilt two of my most cherished childhood sets[1] and oh my goodness how did I ever do this as an 8-year-old? Every step in the booklet is a minigame of "figure out what changed" and then an eye exam of determining precisely where each piece went.
Ha! This is really cool! I found some of my old pieces a while ago and tried to remember where the reddish neon stuff was from... :)
Nice! The same pieces are also used in some deep sea pirate diver sets.
Oh my. I remember those sets! They were glorious indeed.
Do you have the lego number of those sets? Or the name?
Ps: I’m now taking a picture of every lego box I buy for my kids. That way I have an archive with all the numbers. That way we can always download the booklets years later, or catalogue the collection with rebrickable
Behold in all their glory: https://www.toysperiod.com/lego-set-reference/space/ice-plan...
And: https://www.toysperiod.com/lego-set-reference/space/space-po...
love the snow space lego sets, I had that one too
I agree, the instructions have improved greatly over the years. I just rebuilt some of my childhood sets from the late 80's and early 90's (mostly Town theme) and I was struggling at times. My 6 year old son does well with pretty much all the modern instructions regardless of the age (City, Batman, Speed, Technic, Jurassic Park themes).
The article is fine, but the image implementation on this website did dampen the experience somewhat.
The scroll-jacking images are disorienting. Kind of reminds me of some of the more egregious scrolly-telling visualizations.
I couldnt figure out how to scroll them the first time around
I remembering learning about Polaroids from Lego Magazine's "no Polaroid pictures" for submissions back in the day, so really neat to see it as a set now.
This is so odd to me as someone who grew up in what was perhaps peak Polaroid era. I remember house-shopping in the early 90s and taking a Polaroid camera with me to take pictures of the houses I saw. The other place it was really wonderful was when I traveled to Chiapas and Guatemala at about that same time with a Polaroid and was able to give family pictures to Guatemalan refugees on the spot as a way of providing some small joy for them.
All of this research and they spell it “Lego” instead of the correct “LEGO”
Only extreme pedants (and Lego's employees, cause the company has obvious incentives to be pedantic about this) care about that distinction. It's not a big deal.
I detest what Lego has become. I cringe when I see most of the sets are a movie themed fad which won't fit well with the rest of your Lego. It's very clear Lego profits more when the planet is filled up with more plastic crap. So I stick to the classic ones which are timeless and versatile. I guess the themed sets are designed for man-children collectors.
Have you seen the “space” theme for next year?
It is the closest thing to a return to form I have seen in recent years with focus on play features and story telling without media tie in.
https://ramblingbrick.com/2023/12/03/there-is-space-for-ever...
Interesting read.
I guess I'm out $90 Jan 1st, lol. This set is amazing.
Lego is so simple, and yet so genius.
Verge article on Lego Polaroid stuff? Yeah, it's got details but kinda skips the tough bits. Marc, the dude who made it, got lots of no before this one clicked. They ain't show much how tough it is to kick off your Lego idea. Sort a paints a wonky picture for peeps thinkin' 'bout jumping into Lego design.
Fortunately they also still sell the creative play and building blocks and not all kids built canned sets.
The problem is that Lego somehow had to survive and they had some pretty tough times, this was their solution. On the one hand I'm disappointed, just like you. On the other I see my kids make the most fantastic stuff with regular bricks so I'll forgive them.
My kids when 7 or older played more creative with Dublplo blocks than their Lego sets.
Duplo is interesting, it allows kids to quickly build pretty massive stuff if they have enough of it. But mine were done with it relatively fast and we ended up donating it to other people.
We have a large box of duplos but my three-year-old isn't interested at all, maybe showed some interest a while ago, but mostly to build the tallest tower. Now it's time for the real legos, but I'm not sure if we'll even get any if she won't play with them.
My 2 year old daughter hasn’t really shown any interest either.
It’s weird, as a kid I wasn’t really into building stuff. Lego, wood blocks, etc. The only exception was “forts” in my woods. I could play with my Power Rangers toys for hours.
As an adult, though, I’m into it.
Primo and Quattro are also interesting but much more rare.
Modulex, that's rare!!
If you find some keep it.
Duplo is also from Lego. It's basically just larger blocks: https://www.lego.com/da-dk/themes/duplo
And it's compatible (2:1). So if you want to fill something large in a color or do some vast ice landscape, just get Duplo blocks and build away.
There's also quattro, which is 2x duplo, and compatible
Duplo seems much more in the spirit of Lego sets from the '80s. Builds used fewer, but larger pieces. I enjoyed playing with the older sets because you could tear them apart and put them back together much more easily.
Newer sets look nice, but IMO are much less fun to play with. My kids still like building Lego sets, but our Duplos get played with more often.
Odd comment in the context of the thread since Duplo is also LEGO
Side note, have you seen Magna-Tiles? My 4yo son loves them. They have magnets along the edges so you can easily stick pieces together and build structures. They are bigger than regular LEGOs, more along the lines of Duplo. And they can be pricey, but they are tons of fun for little ones! Especially when their favorite thing is to knock down whatever you build.
Even as an adult, Duplo is underrated. It's a lot of fun to noodle around with creating things in Duplo because there are more constraints and you can build a rough simulacrum of something in only a few minutes.
Bionicle/Hero Factory was by far the best they had for creative play. They cancelled it many moons ago, and now we have to buy 'em used for our kids.
On the whole it's a disappointing downward trajectory.
I disagree with this premise. Play comes in countless forms, and I think this statement places roleplay above other forms of youthful creativity. For some kids, the roleplay of Lego action figures was a huge draw. Other kids play in different ways.
Some kids (like me) enjoyed Bionicle at first, but got bored of action figures by age ~8. Bionicle's lack of compatibility with most other Lego products meant that I was left with a bunch of parts I never really played with much (except for the ripcord disk-launcher things. I still get a kick out of those!) For me, the next chapter was Technic, because I liked making things that move. Fast forward a bit, and Technic led to Mindstorms, Mindstorms led to FIRST Robotics and Arduino, and now I'm a firmware engineer.
Does Technic have less creative value than Bionicle? I think that's an impossible question to answer. It depends on the kid. Any given object has as much creative power as a child's mind projects into it.
Yes and no.
On one hand, today's Lego action figures are pathetic compared to the Bionicle/Hero Factory heyday. It's also easy to mock cheap, commercialized dust collectors like the Brickheadz series. Part of me is sad to see Mindstorms dying off, but I also recognize that, even at its peak (NXT), it was totally inaccessible to most kids.
On the other hand, some things have gotten a lot better than they were 20 years ago. Lego's "Friends" theme is by far the best girl-targeted product line they've ever made. Belleville was the "girl" product line of my youth, and it was was cynical, condescending trash that was so thematically paper-thin that even my 6-year-old little sister saw straight through it.
Almost identical pathway here, except with some Spybotics thrown in around the same time as Bionicle. I sometimes wish Mindstorms had that level of world building...
Funny, you couldn't pay my kids to play with those! But they never seem to have enough 2x4s...
Emphasis on "creative". Bionicle was was their product line that was simple enough for a child to have a complete mental model of it, and at the same time complex enough that they could build their own "real" adult sets, something that isn't obviously a throwaway pile of bricks.
Sadly what I see is Lego producing sets, even for kids, which consists of an endless amount of tiny bricks which is impossible to build stuff with quickly. It's absolutely wonderful when you want to build highly detailed reproductions.
What you can do, as you say, is to go get sets/buckets of classic bricks and use those, but the sets are getting annoying. As a kid I have pretty large number of various Lego sets and I mostly mixed and matched to build rough castles, space stations, house whatever, but you can do that with modern sets, to many tiny tiny bricks and very few blocks suitable for a five year old who just wants to build a house.
I get that Lego would have gone out of business if they had continued to produce the type of sets I played with in the 1980s, but it's barely a children's toy any more. Don't get me wrong, it's great that they can make things that brings joy to adults but I just feel that they've done it at the cost of the youngest children.
Also, the display pieces are often terribly unstable and a pain to keep clean. The Lego flowers are basically junk and you shouldn't buy them. They aren't nearly stable enough to have on display and they will certainly break when you try to clean them.
You can think of the advanced ones as more like puzzles you can display once you're done. Kids still like them. Even the finicky themed ones in our house get built then torn down to be rebuilt into fantastical mashups from my kid's imagination.
I think a lot of adults have overly fond memories of using the basic blocks to build relatively basic things. Also kids today can (and do) that in Minecraft now.
The best way to buy Lego is just to buy bulk dumps from families that stopped playing with them. It's going to be piles of unsorted bricks of all kinds and that in itself is a stimulus for creativity.
Just go on ebay or the local equivalent and search for 'pounds lego' or 'kilo lego' and you should be all set.
You're looking for the Minecraft sets. If you don't especially like Minecraft, throw away the one or two figures and enjoy the cool 2 by 4 bricks, just as they were in your childhood.
Bonus: every detail is printed, no stickers anywhere.
What exactly is the disappointment? That they also target adults?
Also, after being build as canned sets, the canned sets can become more distinct parts for creative building.
At least, that's what happens with my kids.
The classic brick buckets are still widely available, right next to all the themed sets and the replica sets (which are explicitly marketed to adults). Not sure what the complaint is here, that the general public don't share your taste?
I share part of his sentiment, there was a different culture with lego before. Now, afaik, LEGO cannot make enough money this way so they pivot into marketable sets with higher profits or sales figures. But this still causes a brand perception shift.
The patents for their core IP expired. You can legally sell generic compatible lego blocks now. So to maintain mindshare they have to do licensed movie tie-ins, their own movies and other such stuff.
I get why but it feels less timeless than it used to, perhaps with less emphasis on creativity-led play. But what do I know - I'm a grownup.
Even today the LEGO-compatible knock-offs are complete junk, my kids occasionally end up picking up a loose bag for £1 from the local charity shop. Pieces don't stick together properly (with each other, let alone LEGO pieces); legs, arms, and hands come off the minifigs; etc. You can instantly tell — even ignoring the assault rifles that would never make it in a LEGO box.
Nowadays there are several "knock-offs" on the market with higher quality and at a cheaper price.
I'm often stumped by the high level engineering that went into these "toys".
In the age of Megabloks, Lego still had the moat of their pieces actually being fit for purpose. Megabloks were ass, and even a kid could instantly tell.
And their directions were always a ton better, for sets—though they used to be more like spot-the-difference puzzles than they are now, which I credit with my burying the needle on a spatial reasoning test in high school, so I’m kinda sad they lost that perhaps-accidental pedagogical value in the shift to the you-can-follow-them-in-your-sleep, modern style of directions.
But maybe the knockoff competitors aren’t as obviously-shit as they were in the earlier days?
The knock-offs I’ve handled recently are still terrible. They don’t fit well. No satisfying click. The colors feel off..
I wanted to like the cheaper brands but none of them have the same Lego engineering quality. We dusted off some of my old lego and the bricks still fit perfectly with the new bricks 30+ years later!
yeah that's what i meant, we're aware of their struggle, but without shooting them, it also feel different
It bugged me 20 years ago as a kid. I just wanted more stuff like Rock Raiders.
"They're miners... in space! They mine green Energy Crystals!" That's all you need. There was a K'nex mining set about the same time. Good stuff.
Then I realized that most of the catalog was like, Lego Harry Potter. Yeah, I really am complaining about what everyone else buys. I was up to my nose in Harry Potter merch already, I owned all 7 books. I wanted more Rock Raiders and Insectoids.
Same, except I wanted more m-tron. Put space rocks in a box, lift it up with a magnet, fly off. Great fun!
Heck, my kindergarten daughter likes that formula. I'm pretty sure there is a marketable business somewhere in there, but maybe not at sufficient scale
Even the assortment of pieces in the Classic 1000+ piece buckets doesn't allow you to build interesting custom creations resembling buildings or vehicles. Instead of a large number of doors, windows, roof elements, wheels and sidewall elements, you get mostly purple, orange, pink, cyan and bright yellow 4x2s and 2x2s, and a large number of tiny specific pieces.
The themed playsets aimed at 5+ children are leaning towards detailed modeling with many tiny 1x1 pieces.
The one-off nostalgia-driven sets like the Lion King's Castle, the remake of Eldorado Fortress and the Galaxy Explorer are intentionally released as one-off sets with a time distance in the release date, and not as a part of a regular play theme.
Every now and then I see a set that looks like it’s actually for kids to play with. More exposed nubs, spaces big enough for kid fingers to fit into (so many feature only tiny spaces now, even for a kid!) and builds that don’t look so fiddly that they’d be impossible to repair after rough play or accidental damage without starting over.
But yeah, even like 90% of the ones that appear to be marketed to kids suck for kids to play with, now. They look nice on the box, and on a shelf, though, and I guess that’s what shifts units.
The age recommendations on lego kits are pretty accurate in my experience. As in, kids in that age range can handle the kid without trouble and it suits their interests.
For example, they really like those tiny little inside thingies.
That's exactly what was in buckets of Legos that I got as a kid in the 90s, so I don't think much has changed. It was almost entirely 4x2s and 2x2s of different colors back then, too.
One of the more interesting experimentations was Lego Architecture Studio.
All white (well, some translucent for glass/windows), 1200+ pieces, no instructions, but a book discussing some general architecture and building principles particularly with respect to Lego:
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Architecture-Studio-Building-Blo...
One of my favorite sets, though architecture in general is a particularly interest/hobby of mine.
There are some good, versatile Classic buckets. The recently announced Creative Vehicles (11036) comes with instructions for 8 vehicles and instructions for another 10 vehicles will be available on the website. It'll be fantastic for kids who love building different types of cars, buses, etc.
Kids are playing wrong. They use lego as toy and not as classroom educational item.
Nah it's just the usual cynical HN comment.
These sets are not creative play toys, they're highly-detailed 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. That is their appeal, and you can make the same argument about a traditional wood/cardboard jigsaw puzzle:
"Kids should be learning how to paint with oil paints or watercolours, not snapping together these pre-painted jigsaw puzzles!"
I think the real difference here is that we've transitioned from more of a mixed/manual labour economy to a mental/emotional labour economy. People get off work and they just want to come home and do something relaxing and not mentally taxing. Putting together a Lego set is like that. It takes more thought than watching TV, but not much. Coming up with something interesting and creative from a bucket of random Legos is different, and most people lose interest.
I think your argument in quotes is a good one. :) Following a set of pre-defined instructions is not a creative act. It's not bad to build a puzzle, but I would argue that it's not nearly as meaningful of an experience as painting - or any other creative activity for that matter.
I think learning to oil paint could be a very meaningful experience. Relaxing to watching Bob Ross videos and paint along with him.
I do also feel there is this sort of "cult" of self-improvement going around. Like if you're not spending every waking minute of your life learning some new skill or marketing yourself or trying to get a promotion, then you're wasting your time. It's very toxic.
Doing things that you find relaxing should be accepted, even if they don't teach you anything or improve you in any way.
I think you're making the mistake of assuming that your values are universal. I don't think there's anything intrinsically meaningful about painting, or doing any other creative activity. If someone enjoys those things, that's awesome - but not everyone does, and there's nothing wrong with that.
No, but building sets does have other benefits.
There's some zen to the act, like model or puzzle building. But you can also observe and learn techniques to add to your own builds.
Knowing all the ways Bionicles are put together can help you turn a Porsche into a full transforming Autobot Jazz.
It isn't even a puzzle if you've been given the instructions on how to build it.
Well yeah, you gotta grow the business, as any good visitor of this site knows. You can only sell so many $30 buckets of loosely assorted pieces intended for children.
There's much more money to be made in $200 sets with the popular IP of the day or $500 collector sets for adults.
Well. You have to exist, which means you compete, which might mean you grow.
Why growth? At some point you would eventually hit perfect saturation anyway, the steady state where everyone already is buying your product to the extent anyone can buy it. I get that losing business is bad, and it's better to "overcorrect" to growth, but as long as you compete enough to keep approximately same market share against other competitors, selling inflation adjusted $30 buckets of bricks to each generation of kids with profit sounds like perfectly good business. Owner of the business would receive steady income selling the inflation adjusted $30 buckets.
I'd imagine you'd hit problems when the buckets of bricks you are selling are ~eternal and number of kids is no longer growing, so nobody needs new ones.
You'd have to grow because there are competitors that would do your thing and the new thing, so customers would go to them instead.
As long as the population is growing, if your business isn’t you’re effectively shrinking.
Plus image of Megablocks did Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. They’d overtake Lego in a minute.
When kids grow up into adults, they do not always become massively different persons in their core. Oftentimes, creative kids grow up into creative adults. Their hobbies often remain or they still look back fondly on their old hobbies. And when they are bored, they sometimes go back to their old hobbies, due to nostalgia. You see it everywhere, in music people listen to, books they read, etc
All of that is ok. Plus, majority of lego kits go to kids.
Why do you think they stopped designing sets for creative play? They still sell bulk lego. They still sell non-licensed play sets like space, city, castle, etc. And even the licensed sets are great for creativity because I doubt a kid's not going to shatter their set and start making their own damn spaceship because it has "Star Wars" on the box. None of that has stopped just because they also sell display pieces that are wildly popular and intended for adults.
Like seriously go to any store that sells Lego and you'll see that a good 80% of it is bulk or play sets. There are a lot of things to be critical of lego for...the pricing, the over-reliance on licensed sets, too many god-damned stickers, etc. But this really isn't one of them at all.
Absolutely agree… I think in early 2000 they found a nice sweet spot where you bought a set to build a particular object, but all of them featured a fairly common set of pieces. So after a while of having it in the shelve it could be repurposed.
Entertained all the way to a totalitarian state.
If only they had all kinds of different product line for different people!
This is from the Ideas line where they take fan submissions and turn them into sets. Complain about what you perceive to be a change in direction, but unless you were buying older sets, you are part of the reason for that change
I don't think they went from one to the other, more like they expanded to include sets that adults would be interested in. The way I look at it, the higher end collectable pieces subsidize the lower cost sets and "brick boxes" for the younger generation.
My granddaughter and I build a ton of 'boring adult sets' together, and then she gets to take them home, tear them apart, and make anything she wants with the pieces. But she also loves Minecraft (she's 8) and we buy the Minecraft specific sets as well. It is quite possible to do all the things, it's not necessarily an either/or scenario like many people like to present as their argument against something.