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Media licensing has been the greatest boost to profits for Lego while simultaneously causing a shift away from creative/imaginative building. Meaning, more people (adults) than ever are buying lego sets but they build what’s on the box and then it sits on a shelf forever, instead of modifying the initial build or taking it apart and making something new.
I’m not trying to criticize anyone’s hobby, and I too have purchased an expensive licensed lego set, built it, and let it collect dust on my shelf. It’s such an expensive way to get or build a model of something though. I much prefer making my own creations. And i could take apart this cool, big, expensive batmobile, but I don’t because it reminds me of a movie i like. Contrast this with my lego space sets, which i took apart almost immediately after building in order to build an even cooler, bigger space station with.
My kids do the same - they ask for Lego Minecraft sets or Lego Ninjago sets or whatever, build them and stick them on the shelf. They’re horrified by my suggestion that they tear them down and build other random things with the bits. And, of course, a lot of the bits nowadays are so specialized that they have limited uses. When I was a kid most of my lego was just standard blocks.
I was a K’Nex kid more than a LEGO kid, but I remember both my K’Nex and LEGO sets coming with manuals that had directions for making dozens of things, all from the same set. That shit was awesome, and was a really good way to teach you the creativity and skills to go off script and make your own creations. Buying a LEGO set intended to make one specific thing seems counter to the original purpose of the toy.
Agreed, but what I’ve heard through is that Lego’s finances were really struggling till taking the franchising deals. Given how good the quality of Lego always seems to be compared to cheaper brands, whilst I’d like old-style creative building (and cheaper!) Lego, I feel an unusual sympathy for them getting a bunch of money from these deals.
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Hmm, this set is US$679.99 and 9090 pieces. The average for new sets is US$0.10/piece (ten cents per brick, expect higher rates for licensed IP), so at ~$0.074 per this set is actually beating the ratio. Yes it’s expensive but it’s probably priced fairly given the size.
And yet Chinese brick companies can do it for a fraction of the price.
Edit: Lego fanbois downvoting are hilarious, enjoy getting ripped off.
Oceangate made one I believe as well, fairly realistic too, only off by about 500 meters
I mean… yes, sort of? I actually have a couple of those, I just put together a bonsai tree set from “JIANPINWORLD” a few days ago. It’s a nice set design, but the quality is… not good. The fit of the pieces reminds me of Megablocks sets from the 90s, which is to say that the brick tightness is very hit-or-miss. The set involved putting little flower pieces onto sticks, but the holes in the flower pieces varied considerably, sometimes too tight to fit on the stick and sometimes too loose to stay attached. There were small hook parts, two of which cracked in half while tying to connect them, and there were no spare parts included. The coloration of the pieces is inconsistent. The instructions are also poorly laid out and badly printed.
The sets you’re talking about are very much an example of “you get what you pay for”.
Never heard of JIANPINWORLD sounds like a rebrand set. There’s various tiers of quality, anything that uses bricks made from GoBricks bricks like Mould King, Cada, Pantasy are top tier, tbh Jie Star are excellent too and Reobrix which use Jie Star bricks. Consistency and clutch are all fine. Stickers and minifigs can sometimes be a bit lacking, but if you value those at £-5-600 more power to you.
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While I do think Lego is too expensive you have to remember that these Chinese knock offs don’t have any design cost (model wise and packaging/manuals) or licencing cost they have to earn back. Just copy the design and produce some cheap, knock off (sometimes lower quality) bricks.
For clone kits, no doubt Lego have some licensing costs, but £3-400 per set on bigger sets? Titanic has zero licensing costs. Same goes for design costs, Cada, Pantasy, Mould King, Reobrix etc are paying designers for original IP and are still a lot cheaper than Lego original IP.
I’ve got 2x Reobrix 8 stud wide cars and 2 x Mould King 8 stud wide cars in the backlog, all 4 are boxed (in higher quality boxes than Lego provided) with manuals, all 4 shipped from China for ~£30 all are original IP. The Mould King cars even come with display cases!
I’ve also got a Reobrix T6 shuttle waiting to go, around £120 shipped (shipping price varies through the year, it’s high ATM), it’s been highly reviewed, it’s by a known MOC designer who got paid, 5k+ pieces.
I’m eyeing up a Baka Rocinante at the minute 6k+ pieces, shipping is high so it’d be £150 or so shipped, but that’ll likely come down. I’ve not built Baka before but some of their other sets look phenomenal. Their Rivendell is stunning looking (and not a clone set).
I’m not saying Lego don’t make a good product, but they are taking the micky with pricing - just look at the price of the X-Jet, £80 retail and under 500 pieces.
Edit: as for the bricks being knock-off I’m not sure Lego a a leg to stand on in that regard, they’re clearly a knock-off of Kiddicraft bricks.
Turns out production costs are lower if you use slaves
Got any evidence for that or do you mean the robots at the highly automated factory?
You realise Lego make bricks in China too, right?
Oh Im sorry, it is obviously unheard of for Chinese companies to use slaves, especially if we look at their supply chains.
It’s not unheard of for anyone using Chinese manufacturing, like Lego, to have slaves in the supply chain.
I have both bought and been given some of these “knockoff” sets, and while the resulting build. The resulting build is pretty, but fragile. The tolerances on the bricks are bad, to the point that some required a lot of force to join, and others are so loose that they can barely carry the weight of the bricks on top. I have also consistently found at least 1 brick that wasn’t molded fully, and was therefore useless, with no spares. The colors are also usually quite uneven. The instructions are usually fairly easy to follow. But the build methods are bad. I often see bricks stacked directly on top of other bricks, with no interlocking, resulting in whole walls being able to easily fall over.
The knockoff are fine if you don’t have the money to spend on Lego, but you really also get what you pay for.
I strongly disagree in general, some manufacturers are terrible - but this is only characteristic of the cheapest sets. Good quality sets are fantastic, I’ve built multiple 1-5k+ sets from china and none of what you’re describing is true of them. I’ve seen poorer quality, but it’s always on the cheapest of the cheap, 1k+ sets for £15.
Minifigs and stickers are often lacking, I’ll grant you that.
Lego is also not the be all and end all of quality - broken brown bricks, mould marks and colour mismatches I’ve all seen on genuine Lego sets.
To say you get what you pay for is patently wrong, 98%+ of the quality for 20% of the price.
I own that set and added a light kit to it. It’s one of the few sets that aren’t a pain to build with multiple people. The main box has three smaller boxes that are essentially their own set. The ship when complete can be displayed as three individual sections or snapped together. The light kit I bought is also three separate powered systems. I just have them all plugged into a powered usb hub with a splitter. I also liked that the instructions have little facts about the titanic all throughout. Building the outer hull gets repetitive…I did the last 2-3 panels of it from memory.
Damn that looks massive, ig the 1k makes sense then. Also where are the sections separated? Is it like where the actual titanic broke or like ship sections?
It sits behind my couch because it is 53 inches (135cm) long and nearly 18 inches(44cm) to the top of the masts. It has a clever pin system that you pull up from the top deck to unlock the sections from one another. It has details in the cross section for the different floors and such. Nothing too fancy but it’s there. It also does have a rotating engine that is hooked to the rear propellers. The easiest way to show where it separates (and more of its scale) is just to post one of legos images.
It sort of tracks though for price per piece (a flawed but still useful metric). It’s got 9090 pieces, which makes the price per piece about 11c.
Which is about the average.AUD also doesn’t seem to be losing out in the currency conversion - it’s currently 680usd, which converts to more than 1000aud.
Still could never afford to drop a grand on a Lego set.
To be fair to Lego, which I agree is crazy expensive, they have tighter tolerances in flaws than NASA does. I work in manufacturing, through a different type, and tolerances that tight mean a huge amount of your production becomes scrap.
You could discuss the whether perfectionism is worth the waste, and that’s a valid point, but Lego is at least delivering a solid product
What a rediculous, and untrue, comparison to make. NASA (1) isn’t a consumer manufacturing company, (2) makes an absolutely insane variety of types science experiments from space telescopes to supersonic planes, (3) absolutely makes/uses parts with orders of magnitude tighter tolerances than Lego holds.
This. Lego has amazing tolerance for a toy, but isn’t leading across the whole of the injection molding industry.
They make plastic though. Surely they recycle the scrap
Lego bricks are made using virgin plastic, which I assume means all scrap is not recycled and used to make more Lego.
Some parts, like flexible parts and transparent parts are made using more sustainable materials, whether that consists of some recycled material or plant derived plastics.
When trying to find differences between virgin and recycled scap plastic all I get is AI crap product comparison sites and various companies trying to sell their recycling system…
What downsides is there to recycling your own plastic scrap, which you have had full control over the entire time. I would imagine trying to color match with consumer waste plastic is a nightmare, same with moisture (at least that’s an issue when printing). But if you have a bunch of plastic in an homogeneous color and you grind it up to make something of the same color, and you’ve had the scraps in a controlled environment, then what more issues are there?
The plastic will be grounded up and re-used, that’s 100%, but it still requires quite a bit of virgin pellets to be mixed in. Here’s why:
- Used plastic is dirty. Even if it just came off the belt as a brand new part, it already has dust, oil and other residue. Just a little bit, but it’s not as good as a virgin material.
- You cannot grind down parts into perfect pellets, and that will cause feed rate variations.
- Additives inside like dyes degrade when heated. Multiple extrusions will change product appearance.
This, unfortunately much of what is given to a recycling plant is still ultimately thrown out, there are some exceptions, metals for instance
Still takes time to run the recycling systems and therefor money.
Also, think of it this way - you spend $X per 1000 bricks, but you can only sell 10% of those bricks. The remaining bricks get melted down at a cost of $Y. You then spend $9X/10 to produce another 900 bricks, of which only 90 are sellable. Rinse and repeat until all bricks are viable. You’ll have spent a hell of a lot of money producing the later batches.
Lego’s competition has been improving their quality in the last few years, to a point where I’d argue some are on par or better (Cobi, Mould King, Xingbao).
At the same time Lego has started to produce in China like almost any other competitor and their quality has lapsed somewhat. Especially color accuracy has allegedly been shite, even in some VERY expensive sets.
Lego just isn’t worth an almost 100% premium, imo. If you’re in Europe check out Bluebrixx and Cobi. One makes licensed Star Trek sets, the other licensed cars like Škoda, Opel, Fiat, and others.
This is news to me, but I have been away from things for a while.
Once I worked out that Lego work to the same tolerances as the transistors in a Pentium II CPU. It’s probably a better example than NASA as NASA makes huge things that don’t require submillimetre tolerances and tiny precise instruments that couldn’t have been made a couple of decades ago.
Except there are competitors by now with equally good tolerances and overall part quality that still cost half as much, so that can’t really be the reason
I guess I’ve been out of it too long - I’ve always found knockoff brands just don’t have the same precision and quality.
To be fair, it’s still hit or miss, you need to do a little research to know what you’re getting, but it has gotten sooo much better in the last couple of years. At this point, any brand that uses pieces made by gobricks is going to give you excellent piece quality rivaling or even surpassing that of Lego in some aspects. My recommendations if you want to check it out are Pantasy and Funwhole, both make great original sets with high quality prints, the latter even with fully integrated light kits. Those are not the only options, but the best ones at the moment in my opinion
Edit to add: as said a lot has happened just in the last few years, so to get a good picture of the current quality landscape, even with the brands I mentioned it’s a good idea to stick to their newer sets for now, since you might still get earlier generations of bricks that are not quite as good with the older models that have been sitting on shelves for some time
Thank you for the really informative comment. I’ll keep that in mind when I have some money to spend :-)
So much that it’s been used to make precision scientific equipment when the normal equipment would cost far far more.
I dare say that Fischertechnic/Meccano would’ve been a more durable solution in all those cases.
Even when I have extra income, I just cannot bring myself to spend several hundred dollars on Lego. They had this Batman shadowbox set that was fucking DOPE and yeah, I could have saved up to buy it, but if I did I know it wouldn’t make me happy knowing how much I’d spent on it, I’d just always think omg, I dropped hundreds of dollars on this, am I an idiot?
Something that I came up with during the pandemic was to buy, build, and then resell full kits in basically new condition on a site called Bricklink. It’s like eBay for LEGO only, with an insane number of filtering options and seller base (FFS I found kits for sale I played with as a kid lol).
Doesn’t quite work out to “free” and it’s a bit of a hassle, but it solves that problem for me of wanting to enjoy a big involved build, but being a (boringly) sane adult who can’t justify spending hundreds of dollars on tiny plastic (magnificently designed, engineered, and mfg’ed) bricks.
Edit: Check it out lol
That is pretty fucking sick
There are also few sites that let you rent the different sets. My brother’s used NetBricks and it sounded like it could be another option if the buying/selling thing makes it too much.
From what he told me is you pick a set/s online, the kit comes in the mail, build and enjoy it for a bit, then you would tear it down completely when you are bored of it, stuff all of it in a special zip lock bag and send it back for your next set. He told me they go over all the returned pieces to look for damaged/missing parts, “sanitize” (probably just wash them) them, and repackage them for the next renter.
Oh hell yeah! I had a feeling something like this might exist. I’ll have to give it a try, thanks!
This is awesome! Thanks for the link!
When you resell, do you generally do a profit on it ?
Well, no, there’s a ton of sellers. If you want it to actually sell, you take a bit of a loss. Think of it like an annoyingly involved rental program.
I think some kits can get more expensive than retail due to rarity or something, but I wasn’t looking at any of that, just wanted an affordable way to build some cool kits.
Understood. But it’s a cool idea, I’ve always preferred building the model than play with it 🙂
For some people I could see it as a fun thing/whatever. I always see the end result being: now where do I put this… These things are huge (comparatively) and I would have to empty out a whole shelf somewhere just to house it.
Lego products based on popular IPs are expensive from what I’ve noticed.
I was buying one set a year to do when the rains come here in mid-fall. And then $400 sets starting showing up. Now I no longer buy LEGO.
I honestly don’t get what companies are thinking with these prices. They’re all raising prices, despite reporting record breaking profits, and for me the experience has been the same as yours, I just buy less or stop buying completely.
How long until we can torrent a set and print it in 3D?
You already can, the shape of the Lego brick fell into public domain, you can find legal knock off of their design (on AliExpress for example). The problem is that plastic and electricity cost so much you don’t save a lot compared to an industrialised environment.
You wouldn’t download a brick.
Mono-color style probably significantly sooner than full color.
You see what you want to see?
Maybe I dont get the joke, but Duplo is part of Lego…
@reddthat Too real.
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