Lego sales topple as children turn away from the building bricks | Hacker News Reader

Lego sales topple as children turn away from the building bricks

telegraph.co.uk

30 pointsleothekim35 comments

I would argue that they don't really make Legos anymore anyway. Almost every piece is specialized for design you buy. So it may as well be an DYI action figure. There's no creativity in using the set to build your own things. No re-usability. That and the price.

Not entirely true. They separated a separate line out for that: Lego Classic.

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/Classic

The large, multicolor set runs about $48 in stores.

Not even remotely true. Have you walked down the Lego aisle of a Target, Wal-mart, or a toy store? Lego has tons of sets with bulk generic pieces, as well as sets that come with plans for 2 or 3 different objects. They have licensed sets too—but that's just it, they have a lot more sets than they used to. They make sets for many different people.

When i bought sets for my son (5) i was worried he would break them and I would have to put them back together. The best thing that has happened is i let him destroy them and now he takes the pieces and builds his own things using creativity and engineering. Best thing to do is to let go.

> I would argue that they don't really make Legos anymore anyway. Almost every piece is specialized for design you buy.

Even the specialized sets have a fairly small share of specialized pieces, and they still sell generic, non-specialized sets.

Plus, even the “specialized” pieces are (by design) easy to repurpose.

After helping my 4 year old build dozens of kits over the past year or two I've noticed many patterns of use with those 'specialized' pieces. They're absolutely reusable, to the degree that by looking at a box I can pretty much know that it's going to have a couple of [whatever] because it has arm or leg joints, a turret, etc.

What I have seen is that the parts that come with typical kits are WAY more advanced than the race cars, castles and pirate ships I used to have. I'd say a good percentage of the bricks used to be bricks I'd only see in the advanced Technic kits from back in my day.

I will say though that I went and bought a bucket of generic bricks because a lot of the bricks that come with the standard kits today aren't super awesome for a four year old that wants to build simple buildings and stuff like that.

My 12 year old self agreed with you. The Technical sets and Space sets were cool in a way, but had too many pre-fab parts! Lego just wasn't want it used to be. Might as well build models! And the prices, wow.

This was about 1980, by the way.

My kids loved to play Minecraft too until they found out about mods and now they have no fun doing regular creative stuff in vanilla MC anymore.

I think that also goes hand-in-hand with the trend for kids to just stare at screens all day and not really do things.

My oldest son just began his first year in public school at 8th grade (he was homeschooled until now) and they had a puzzle challenge and all the other kids took like 20 minutes to do a 50 piece puzzle.

My son told me how surprised he was and I had to explain to him that those other kids in class probably just sit and stare at a screen all day, just like he notices they do on their bus ride.

Kids these days don't go out and play nearly as much, they don't go exploring the neighborhood during summer or evenings, they don't play with LEGOs, they don't do puzzles, they don't just sit and read a good book, they aren't prepared to understand so many aspects of life that us older generations take for granted.

I know the whole "kids these days" is a cliche, but in this case these are actually legitimately huge changes happening in society and culture, on the scale of electricity and trains: having the entire internet at your fingertips pretty much 24/7 even from a young age is going to change future generations in gigantic ways that I don't think society really understands, and which I definitely think the mass media and society in general is financially incentivized to keep quiet about or try to ignore.

I think good leadership is a very important key to solving this kind of issue. School administrators could make rules that you can't use screens on school grounds or on the bus rides. Instead you have to turn and actually talk to the people sitting next to you.

Families especially need strong leaders, and I know this is controversial, because I grew up 100% indoctrinated into the belief that families should be a democracy and that parents should just let kids figure out everything on their own. But as a father of 5, I see their need for structure and rules even if they are unpopular or don't sound as fun.

For example, for a year or so we did 500 piece puzzles together as a family every other night, while one of us read a book to everyone else. We could pause the book and talk about what we were reading, and it was a generally good time.

Sure, they sometimes would complain and argue that they would rather watch Sonic Boom or play their 3DS or whatever, but enforcing the rule was good for them and now they look back on those days with nostalgia, and I really see many legitimate ways that it benefited them as people in general.

I hope they had a choice what to do in their spare time each night. That sounds painful and awful if they didn't.

I didn't mean the whole night. But a good solid 30 minutes of spending time like this together before their bed time (they were no older than 8) helped them unwind before bed from a fun day of doing schoolwork and playing outside and climbing trees and riding bikes and stuff. EDIT: also this was when I had a 3 hour roundtrip commute to Chicago and got home at 7pm every night, so I didn't get to see them. It was a good way to have us all spend time together every night relaxing and having opportunities to talk about our days and stuff.

> just like he notices they do on their bus ride.

Wow, this never occurred to me for some reason. I'm only 26, but remember all the conversations and jokes happening on the bus rides every day to and from school. Shame to hear that is fading away, too.

What if your son was just smarter than the other kids?

It could be. But it could also be that they all have the same potential of intelligence (roughly), and that it's just he's hit more of his potential than they have, through utilizing and practicing the skills. Kind of like how my brother is better than me at basketball, but I could be as good as him if I actually tried.

I always wondered how LEGO managed to grow so much - their products are too good! They spend an insane amount of work on quality and durability of their pieces. When I was a kid, I had pieces that were nearly 20 years old that still looked and acted brand new. There's now an entire secondary market of used pieces since they basically last forever. Why buy new unless you are looking for some new, gimmicky set?

When I was a kid, I also took a book and a small set of bricks everywhere I went. These days, all I ever see kids have are tablets. When I do see toys, they are cheaper, more gimmicky, and more likely to be designed to sit on a shelf than to play with.

Or families sets are currently 4 generations old (with each one adding some). In some cases they were stored terribly like in a garage.

Even with a mix of the newer set types it's not that bad since instructions rarely follow everything. So the kid doesn't know what they're missing, but can still find some interesting pieces to figure out how to use.

The number of people with significant disposable income grew by several billion over the last 5 or 6 decades.

My kids love LEGO, but the price of buying new sets seems very high and off putting to me. So instead only buy sets at xmas

Same. Lego is fantastic and a wonderful high-quality toy, but it's so darn expensive. Couple that with the heavy focus on kits that contain specialized parts and step-by-step instructions for how to put them together, and you're not really looking at a toy anymore. It's basically a Star Wars themed model car that you're going to put on display instead of actually play with.

Damn, my parent came to that conclusion in the early 90s. I guess it's only gotten worse.

They are compatible knock-offs from China, not as good of a quality but given the price it's a good deal.

The cost of Lego pieces has tracked with inflation since at least the 1980's. The going rate of a piece is ~$.10. IMO, what you are seeing isn't that Lego's are getting more expensive relative to their past prices, they are getting more expensive relative to other forms of entertainment. A simple example is videogames have generally cost $50-$60 since the 1980's which means that they are relatively cheaper today.

Lego is so versatile and fun, but I wish they weren't so expensive, which might or might not be justified by their high quality. I wanted to make a small PC Case (similar to Google's first server rack made out of Lego), but the cost was too prohibitive.

Holy smokes I had no idea about that story. Thanks for getting me started down a rabbit hole of the lore around Google's origin.

Lego is still fantastic toys . Unfortunately they are quite expensive compared to other options but they last a lifetime. My son plays with lego blocks I played as a kid.

I think its a case of parents kinda seeing they're getting ripped off over some of their prices.

New Millennium Falcon is Lego’s biggest set ever = $799.99

https://www.polygon.com/2017/8/31/16234672/star-wars-millenn...

And maybe games like Minecraft have a more cost effective block building experience.

Well, that's the biggest set ever, in # of pieces as well as price. So the set comes out to about 10.5¢ per piece, which is roughly the same price as their smaller sets, too.

If you're interested in Lego, and what goes behind the scenes, I can recommend "The secret world of Lego"[0], a documentary that goes behind the scenes and more specifically how they handle Christmas sales.

[0]: http://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=The_Secret_World_of_Lego

Do you want to buy 100 pieces of Lego, or infinity pieces of minecraft blocks?

Sorta off-topic, but the 20 bucks for Minecraft might have been one of my best investments ever, considering the value per hour of gameplay.

Speaking as the father of a 9-year old boy, LEGO sets feel very very expensive. (Even though realistically speaking I can afford them!) I can only imagine how expensive they must feel to someone with a lower income level.

Buying from a used LEGO shop doesn't seem to offer much of a discount either. I found cases where it was even more expensive, since they deal with collectible sets.

I would like to build some serious Technic stuff with kids, but I find it quite annoying that you can't get a good set of basic parts for a reasonable price.

This is one area where Lego is sorely lacking. I've started looking into the knock-off Lego brands to get affordable Technic pieces—sadly, they don't make sets of bulk technic pieces, either. But at least the sets are more affordable.

It may have something to do with globalization. Legos are quite expensive, and the Chinese manage to sell them at 1/3 of the original price (while still getting reasonable net margin I believe). Their quality is comparable - not identical, but not too far off. Many Lego fans are buying these. I don't believe this is the main factor, but I wonder how much it influenced Lego's current financial result. I know people who buy Lego clones exclusively.

It's all my fault. I've been eyeing a few sets but I haven't bought any of them... yet.

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