The LEGO Group acquires BrickLink
brickset.com
brickset.com
I'm sorry for Bricklink, may you rest in peace!
Maybe it's LEGO attempt to clutch at any straw and they finally trying to be better, but I really doubt it. LEGO has moved themself into a position where they are really cornered. No innovation, fat price tags on everything... – There is a German guy who had a LEGO store in Frankfurt, called "Held der Steine" (hero of the bricks). His YouTube account is quite popular and became a meme in Germany. LEGO sued him for having something which somehow resembled a LEGO brick in his logo. On his channel he reviewes all the "new" stuff LEGO is putting on the market; and he's showing how desastrous the Danish company became. They simply don't care anymore at all as it seems.
Now he's also presenting all the Chinese stuff as well – they are actually ahead in the game already.
There's plenty of other examples of this in the NBA itself (with their half-baked streaming options) which I'm sure exists in most other sports.
One big one is they should have a library of every game ever for a subscription fee or individual access fee - it's pretty much impossible besides bittorrent or DailyMotion to find old classic games online (even from 2012 playoff finals).
They are all just throwing money into a dumpster fire by trying to live in the past generation of media.
This is just like how we all had to wait for a decade to get decent websites from every major retail-facing corporation, instead of a non-interactive static glorified contact form website. I expect it will take another decade for the big media companies to get proper leadership.
On the other hand, the NFL does a good job of making highlights available on their own site very fast, and there are a lot of youtubers using NFL film access to do in-depth breakdowns of players and games.
I’m also particularly curious what you mean about Chinese products – what have they been innovating in where Billund has been stagnant? I confess my only familiarity there has been in trying to separate knock-offs from genuine out-of-production sets on eBay.
The quality / price ratio. Chinese knockoffs are 90% of the quality for 25% of the price.
Hm, are they? I haven't actually tried recent Chinese knockoffs specifically, but historically, "almost as good as Lego" is pretty disappointing. That last mile (last micrometer?) has always set Lego apart.
I don’t know what to tell you, besides that they were for me.
LEGO's finally been realizing that they should target adults over the last several years, and have been seemingly successful. I know more adults with recent LEGO sets now than ever.
This is probably going to kill BrickArms. Most of their sales are through BrickLink.
https://www.brothers-brick.com/2019/11/26/news-the-lego-grou...
Also I don't think LEGO wants to be in the business of selling models of actual named firearms. I think there is a massive divide between selling models of real life firearms versus models of firearms from films/entertainment IP. Context matters a lot.
Change the names to something generic. Problem solved. It's worked for dozens of popular video games, and BrickArms are much lower-detail even than those.
When Lego's stance was "we don't make violent toys, period," that was something I could respect even if it wasn't my preference. Now their stance is "we don't make violent toys unless they're more than 100 years old or from the future or from Indiana Jones," and it's impossible to take that as anything but empty moralizing. They have, again, made sets with Nazi soldiers and recognizably modern firearms. For them to now say they won't endorse "guns and things that are potentially particularly connected to things like warfare and violence" rings utterly hollow.
Not true. They did not sue him, they just informed him nicely. Also, he in fact had a logo newly registrated for his businss which was resembling an old trademark of lego. This was not about his youtube-channel but his attempt to make a serious business of it. So this was just problem between two companies making money, totally normal and AFAIK demanded by law.
That guy was just spinniung tales and profiting on this to push his own business by playing the poor victim of a hobby-channel.
So they decide to piss him off over such a triviality? That's a terrible decision; if the guy's an enthusiast with an audience, you try to put him on a payroll and go full market fanfare for you; making him change his logo and pissing him off in the process has zero opportunities to increase profit for LEGO in any way and lots of ways to backfire.
Prices have been about the same at 10c/brick or lower for pretty much forever. It's more that kits are getting more detailed than ever.
Not sure they will be interested in keeping that alive. Additionally I am guessing they will remove BrickArms content from Bricklink at some point.
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Will this have any impact on BrickLink's independence?
> Yes, and no. BrickLink will no longer be an "unofficial" marketplace and will need to be conscious of the fact that it is representing the LEGO brand in a much more direct way than before. However, BrickLink's target audience (AFOLs) will remain unchanged, and the BrickLink brand itself will remain intact.
Source: https://www.bricklink.com/r3/announcement/lego_bl_faq.page
Here are some GBC examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWd3vgLaA_M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9_b6PzrqyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpBa59oOjVc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XqnTFSPG1I
See also: http://www.greatballcontraption.com/wiki/Main_Page
I hold the Lego Group in high esteem as a company (no affiliation, just a lifelong fan) and I hope that they will do well by this acquisition. However, it also raises questions about the economic and social effects on niche resale communities when the original producer also owns the aftermarket. What would it be like if Nike or Adidas purchased reselling platforms like StockX? What if, back in the bubble, the company behind Beanie Babies had owned the aftermarket platform? IDK how it changes incentives for the company or the market participants, but it's interesting to think about. I would appreciate any insights on the question.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/lego-coll...
If you receive the Lego catalogs, it's pretty evident that they're targeting all demographics now. The ultimate collector line of sets is aimed pretty squarely at the "investment" market and people with more money than sense. They recently started putting out sets for the nostalgia and pop culture markets with sets for the Flintstones, Steam Boat Willie, Stranger Things, and Friends.
You know when you're actively selling a toy set for a late 90s sitcom popular among 40 something single women that you're pandering to everyone. Honestly I'm surprised there isn't a Gilmore Girls set yet.
My four year old has the Summer, Fall, Late Holiday, and Christmas catalogs splayed out on the counter with all the sets she wants circled. Not surprisingly the following sets aren't on her shopping list:
4784 piece Imperial Star Destroyer
4108 piece Liebherr R 9800 Excavator
3306 piece 1989 Batmobile
2287 piece The Updside Down
1197 piece Trafalgar Square
1023 piece Harley-Davidson Fat Boy
826 piece Vestas Wind Turbine
I am a little offended she doesn't have the new Slave 1 set on her list though.
He'd still be doing it, too, if he'd not run out of room to build :P
("Age 16+" LEGOs really just require ... typical age 6-7 spatial skills plus not screaming in terror when you see thousands of pieces).
I definitely wanted to buy some sets to build, but they were out of production, and had outrageous prices.
I even had a spreadsheet trying to find nice sets with good pieces per dollar ratio, but the out of production sets had consistently poor one.
The Ghostbusters headquarters for example is a really nice set. In my national eBay shop, there are zero used sets available - only new ones. This is a clear example where collectors are depriving actual users of opportunity.
Before 75192 dropped, 10179 could get up to $8000. Now, it can be found for $2000-ish.
For example, I wanted to get the Saturn V kit for my (adult) brother, and I was afraid it would be gone from stores and cost 500%. But no, there it was at lego.com, along with the moon lander kit as well--easy holiday shopping. Thank you Lego.
I think the idea (buying LEGO as an investment) is stupid but your argument doesn’t even match the numbers he mentioned.
10x over 30 years is just my baseline figure of what a reasonable investment looks like. Anything that gets bigger faster is probably risky as all get out, if not an outright scam or bubble.
Completely ignoring the time variable, I don't think it's crazy to say something 6x bigger is an order of magnitude bigger. I'm curious what other people consider a cutoff for this though.
That just doesn't seem right to me, though. My non-rigorous intuition would put the cutoff at 7.
[Edit:] A nice consequence of that limit is that 3.16 and 3.14 are almost the same number, so pi sits nicely on the border between this order of magnitude and the next, so you can approximate it as either one or ten, depending on what makes your estimate look better.
Gets weird thinking about 9 being both one number less and one order of magnitude less than 10, while 99 is both 89 more and the same order of magnitude, but it's supposed to be a rough approximation.
The problem isn't that a thing, somewhere, increased 6x in 10 years.
The problem is getting into the mindset where you think, "This is going to increase 6x in 10 years, or 10x in 10 years, or 2x in one year."
Once you start thinking that way, there's no point in putting $500 into the investment and accepting the measly $2500 payoff. You should put in $5000 and make $25,000, or take out a second mortgage so you can put $500,000 into the investment and retire in 10 years on your $2,500,000 gains.
Hell, some of the time your crazy investment will pay off and you will get rich! But most of the time your great investment opportunity will go bust and you will too.
That is the greedy mindset to avoid, if you don't want to find yourself skipping from one get-rich scheme to another, losing money the entire time, but thinking you're just one good payday from an easy life.
I bring it up apropos this thread because any time someone says, "If I had invested in X, Y years ago, I would have Z dollars now!!!", that's the beginning of the road to madness.
I did say, “I think investing in LEGO is a stupid idea”.
GI joes were collectable in the 90s, and I'm pretty sure almost no GI joes made in the 90s are valuable now. Same with baseball cards.
Legos have value now that were bought long ago or in special circumstances, but the vast majority will be worth less in the future than today.
More than I thought. $1000+ is pretty impressive:
I use the more conservative numbers partially to account a little for inflation (inflation-adjusted, the S&P returns over the last 30 years are more like 8x, so honestly I'm not even pessimistic enough with that number), but mostly because I am using the numbers as a way to manage my own expectations about investment growth over time.
If I invest $10,000 today for my retirement 30 years hence, I'll have $100,000 in 30 years; if I want to invest for 30 years and then live for 30 years off the income, I should plan to put away 1/10th of my desired 30-years-from-now income per year. Easy peasy. I shouldn't, say, expect to put away 1/4 of my paycheck for five years and retire to live off the dividend income in perpetuity (for most combinations of "income" and "expenses"); compound interest doesn't work that fast.
Regarding short-term risks ... I'll confess to buying the odd long-shot stock and lottery ticket, but frankly once you begin managing your risk it becomes a lot less exciting -- risk management dilutes the gains as well as the losses.
I don't believe that that is the case ... Alpha/Beta/ArabianNights versions of currently printed cards are quite a bit more valuable ...
Mass customization is hard.
Lego started off on the theft of IP, as a company they've been absolutely ruthless in enforcing their fraudulently obtained patents. They then attempted to whitewash this.
They're a great toy, and there is a lot of good about them but their origin story and quite a lot of their behavior is not nearly as nice as they'd like you to believe.
Hilary Fisher, and not Ole Kirk Christiansen should get the credit for the brick.
http://hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Ima...
Pretty sure there's a little more of the tale on the site.
I have a bit of a thing against Lego's popularity given how litigious they are, and how they themselves got started.
Sounds like this wasn't wholly related to LEGO, if it all.
Like any good idea, invention is not even half of the battle -- marketing reigns supreme.
Page's suicide was unconnected, and I'm not sure he knew of the Lego counterfeiting, or the full extent of it at the time.
As a 70s kid I played with my father's Bayko sets and what I think may have been American Plastic Bricks (maybe with a different name) that were in a big box at my grandma's house. These products did specialised pieces years before Lego though you were restricted to building houses.
There were plenty of others along the same lines that were building, house building or brick toys, but none had the self-assembly of the gripping pegs in the plastic bricks that became the Kiddicraft innovation, later copied by Lego. Earlier sets used, like Bayko, different materials and approaches to assembly and go back into the inter-war years, perhaps even pre-WW1.
Kiddicraft and Lego stem from injection moulding.
He did lots of little simple things, like just delete all data after 30-days. This decision alone saved an incredible amount of complexity (and was charmingly naive).
I've always been a minimalist myself, but I'd never seen minimalism taken so far. This was a very active, very data-intensive webapp that served the whole world basically running on two machines. It was a the webapp version of that 'aha' moment you get when you see what someone can do with 1k or 10k of code in code golf or the demoscene. We all pay a very heavy price for collaborating on software!
If they crack down on reselling parts someone will just create a new platform doing that. What might be lost is some of the custom builds stuff and "automatically find parts" functionality. At last for some time.
Through they might put up a bit more quality assurance, i.e. follow complains about non-official LEGO parts being sold and similar. It also prevents the platforms from starting to sell non-Lego blocks and figures.
Through we probably can be sure that militaria LEGO builds are not unlikely to disappear.
My concern would be that Lego will make BrickLink the "approved" community and resale site and make it harder for alternatives to exist.
I hope I'm wrong, but I cant help but think that because the resale/collector value of Lego increases it would make sense for Lego to try and control that market.
There already is https://brickowl.com
Gonna miss you Bricklink, its was good while it lasted.
I actually trust the TLG to do good here. They have had a bunch of exposure to the "internet people", over the years. I think they'll handle this well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms#History
> The original Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System was born out of a collaboration between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Lego group. In 1985, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, then Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of The Lego Group, heard of the work of MIT's Seymour Papert and was struck by how similar his goals of learning through building were to those of The Lego Group’s newly formed educational division. The Lego Group began a partnership with Papert’s Media Lab, funding their research and sharing ideas.
Also, if TLG fucks this up: It's not like it's that hard for someone to create a new bricklink-like brick trading site.
That was my first thought.
https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?/forums/topic/174...
I wonder if Lego will clamp down on that and ensure everything is genuine.
I hate them with a passion because there is no way to automate that part of the recognition process with sufficient reliability.
Our love and appreciation for adult fans of LEGO. They have always been very important to us and have contributed so much to helping us build the brand.
Their original tact was --
Also, computer and video games haven’t exactly done to the toy market what digital photography did to the film market.
I surely dont know something about how all this works both officially and unofficially
The problem is the perception by many that this is a kids toy. I have a 5 year old daughter, so even that excuse barely works :D
Those sets have larger parts and can be build within the attention span of a child. And they are mostly something hands on like cars or planes that the kids like to play with.
Then even larger sets can be cool for children. I just bought and build the current moon station but that turned out to be not as good looking as I imagined. But my daughters (4 and 6) immediately took control of it. Especially the pizza dispenser was a highlight for them.
It's insane to consider how massive Lego has become. In my mind, the 1980s are still the golden age of Lego: every set was iconic, at least in my mind. Many of the current themes were started in the early 1980s. At some point, ver a decade ago, I feared they'd lost their way and making sets of questionable design that seemed to have forgotten what Lego was about, but now they're back. They're just doing everything: the Creator line that's about building stuff, the City line has more than just police and firefighters now, there's a new, more realistic space line (part of City actually), the different look of the friends line, but also (finally!) more female minifigs in other lines. There's tons of licenses, collectibles, programmable Lego of several kinds, mobile games, the cool stuff coming from Ideas, etc. The only thing I kinda miss is their Lego boardgame line. But other than that, it seems they're hitting every market at once, from every possible angle, and they're surprisingly effective at it. I think they surpassed Hasbro as the largest toy maker in the world, didn't they?
A few years ago, Jacques Mattheij accidentally won a lot more bulk lego auctions than he meant to. His story of sorting through them with a homemade hopper/camera/ML/computer vision showed up on HN.
It's still a good read today. It begins at:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/