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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain, for someone outside the AFoL community, what the downside to this acquisition is? What do people fear will change? What kind of innovation are fans looking for that Lego isn’t providing?

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.

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> what have they been innovating in where Billund has been stagnant?

The quality / price ratio. Chinese knockoffs are 90% of the quality for 25% of the price.

> 90% of the quality

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.

In my experience, yes. I’ve purchased a few sets and have been pleased.

Care to name the brand?

I have purchased Lepin. I think they're not selling under that brand anymore, I think they sell as King / Queen / Jack? Also for technic sets, I have heard that Decool is even better than Lepin, although they don't seem to have the largest technic sets. You can get them off of AliExpress, or via private sellers at r/lepin.

Maybe I'm out of touch with current lego prices, but the prices on the Lepin webstore look very high for what I expected. $70 for a small house? Isn't that about the same as lego?

Lepin doesn't have a webstore. There are a lot of webstores that claim that they're Lepin, but afaik they're all 3rd party resellers.

They are far from 90% of the quality. The production standards at Lego are decades ahead of anything a Chinese company has produced so far in terms of tolerances, durability and quality control.

> They are far from 90% of the quality.

I don’t know what to tell you, besides that they were for me.

Really? A friend of mine has a house full of the Lepin kits and they look indistinguishable to me. Apparently there's very occasionally a piece which doesn't snap tightly enough and needs a bit of glue or something, but then I have an official Lego kit (little VW convertible thing) on my shelf which falls apart if nudged too hard so Lego's not perfect either.

As usual, you are both right. There are terrible knockoffs and there are the ones that even people very well versed in all things Lego have a hard time telling from the original when just given two otherwise identical bricks.

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