What Happened with Lego

I recently got back into Lego via buying Avengers related sets. I'm in my mid 40s and our kid has moved out.

I didn't set out to do this, but I've found that assembling Lego sets and idly putting together my own creations has really helped with anxiety. Just being able to follow the instructions and sort through different bricks is an exercise in Zen and mindfulness that I hadn't realized would be so effective.

Similar with jigsaw puzzles my wife and I assemble together, Lego takes me away from work and life stresses for an hour or two. PC games are also a source of escape, and reading too. All of these seem more effective than watching TV or reading/commenting on Reddit.

I recently bought a Lego Avengers SHIELD Helicarrier second hand. It was already assembled but covered in dust. I've disassembled the whole thing and can't wait to spend a few hours putting together all 3,000 pieces :) https://rebrickable.com/sets/76042-1/the-shield-helicarrier/

I think my current favourite "set" was a "MOC" (my own creation) designed by someone else that I bought the pieces for. The pieces were bought from a Danish and a German seller, and were very easy to get via Brick Link. Behold, the Lego Rocinante from The Expanse: https://imgur.com/gallery/1sCBWNe

If you are looking for a hobby, getting into Lego is something I can recommend for those of us lucky enough to have disposable income. Once you start registering on www.rebrickable.com and www.bricklink.com you can catalogue your sets, see what your pieces can build, buy spare parts and discover thousands of amazing models designed by people all over the world.

Have fun building!

Really cool article. My kids have just gotten interested in LEGOs, and I have to admit I thought they must have gotten more expensive, too. I think the authors point at the end is the best explanation for this perception:

> As I showed before, LEGO has had $100+ sets for a while. However, only recently have they produced sets even more pricy than that. When we were kids, the $100 set was the pinnacle of LEGO. It was the set we all aspired to own. It was the set we all went straight to at the store. Of course we rarely ended up with that set, but that was our dream.

> Now, the dream set is closer to the $400 range. It doesn’t mean that LEGO doesn’t make sub-$100 sets. They do, and more than ever. It just means that in comparison the $25 set looks a lot smaller than it did when the largest set was only $100.

At another point in the article the author points out these new mega sets aren’t really for kids, they’re for the adults, and Legos targeted at adults didn’t really exist 20 years ago.

When I was a kid, we couldn't really afford legos. But one year my brother got a big plastic bucket of Brix Blox[1], a lego clone (but not compatible). They were just as fun as Legos to us. They weren't a kit, just a bucket of bricks to build what you want. I think it might have come with a little pamphlet of suggested designs, but we made spaceships and weird little rocket-boat things and little stormtrooper-ish guys to ride them. It's kind of weird how I can picture those little guys in my mind so perfectly all these years later. Pretty sure I could build one right now exactly as we did then, if I had some brix blox.

Edit: this is the bucket we had: https://www.cutetoyus.com/product_detail.php?c=town%20toy%20...

[1] https://www.retrothing.com/2008/07/brix-blox---leg.html

This article is like 7 years old.

Also, Lego is great. The reuse value is tremendous. The blocks can be reused so many times to build something new.

I grew up with Lego. Didn't have a huge amount of them, but what I had, I passed on. The old blocks still work fine and it was an amazingly nostalgic feeling to see e.g. my Lego Fireboat (#4025) rebuilt. The first question after building it was the same as I had: "does this really float in water"...

If you have your old blocks, the instructions are around the net. It's nice to build something from ones past.

I have a different perspective: I’d say Lego is having a hard time keeping its core principle (building stuff) while going along with the times.

In particular Lego has a “Technic” and “Boost” series that in particular allows remote control, with motors, actuators and these recent years bluetooth hubs.

The first saliant point: Lego doesn’t sell the “Control +” bluetooth hub alone, and it’s been a while now that the piece has been in sets.

You’re SOL if you break/lose the one from the set, there is no legit way to get one if you want to use it on other creations in parallel, even if it’s arguably the central piece of a lot of constructions. It’s not listed with the other bricks in the order site, and it’s not handled by sites like bricklink.

Then Bricklink: taken over by Lego, they got rid of most custom parts and anything that was extending what you could do with lego bricks ahead of what Lego publishes.

Last, their whole latest Control + app has customizations for their specific sets. For the Top Gear one for instance there’s specific mini games and efen the motor control is slightly tweaked to have a “racing” effect. This goes pretty far astray from having generic playing tools.

In general their efforts in the Power Functions/Boost/Mindstorm/NXT/Control + area seem overly proprietary, limited and way too expensive for what we get. So much that at this point third party hubs are better than Lego’s in almost every respect especially ability to use vanilla Scratch), but get limited by Lego stalling the whole ecosystem. Why is there even 4 different systems doing the same thing, it’s insane.

I guess the people staying on more classic sets feel it less heavily, but for me Lego is really lost in how they want to move forward, now that kids playing with gears and programmed parts has become realistic and commercially viable.

Fascinating stuff! I think that the author left out one crucial point: purchasing power. Per Pew Research[0], wages have not kept up with inflation. EDIT: Until recently! I do wonder if the creation. of a perception of increased expense has to do with the state of wages before the last decade.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

My uncle bought me a set of limited edition gears for Christmas when I was seven or eight ... both my uncle and my father are engineers and it was several days before I got to touch my new toys.

This article debunks the idea that the per-piece price has changed but one of the things I noticed when my kids were little was that so many of the kits came with special-purpose parts. I don't remember any kits like that when I was young - you either got more pieces or less pieces in a kit. Even my gears were simply "available" to build into whatever my imagination came up with.

Is it just me or do all of the set links 404? I guess after 6 years some link rot is to be expected.

I'd say Lego is the best deal on market for fun/price ratio. Just try go to any toy-shop and notice how bad everything else is.

Even if you going to buy RC car for kid - better buy Lego, it will be slightly more expensive but much better in quality.

Like programming - buy Lego Boost. 120$ for programming robot. Seems cheap for me.

Maybe for girls it's different, but my son do not want any other toys expect Lego.

[2013]

I was checking out some of the Lego factories in China around this time and they were definitely making more than the “signature series” (what one thinks of as variations on the classic 2x8 bricks with no movie tie-ins).

Lego absolutely is world class but they are not “best in the world”. For plastic things made an Scale one can get better quality with Swatch and more quantity with McDonalds (the largest toy producer in the world.) At this same factory I saw a line where they were making kinder egg toys with not one, not two, but six different overmold shots of different plastic colors. Injection molding tools typically cost about $5,000 - that one cost about $2,000,000. It saved Kinder about $5,000,000 in labor that would have gone to paint and stickers.

What I did like about the Lego line was they were all using Arburg injection molding machines and DuPont ABS. Most factories won’t pay the premium for foreign plastics within China.

So the price has remained constant, even if just reduced a little. That actually surprises me more than any other change; Hasn't the manufacture process changed? How the royalties on sets based on 3rd party Intellectual Property play into the costs? How the logistics costs impact the price? Has there been any impact on the Chinese knockoffs?

I recently bought some knockoff sets that are no longer made by lego. Not only they were cheaper than the second hand market which we can agree is crazy, but also they were cheaper than the retail price when lego sold them. I certainly don't notice anything wrong with the set quality, so I would expect the difference in price to be by not paying IP.

Tangent note: I really enjoy the Lego Ideas sets. Love to see innovative ideas and the sets are great quality. https://ideas.lego.com/

I think this article predates a drop in brick quality which happened in the last 5 years. I bought a number of small sets a few years ago and every single one of them had pieces that split up the side after very little use. This may have been around the time they were trying to use plant based plastics, or possibly having issues due to new factories, but I now have a perception that they are not as durable as they used to be 30 years ago.

I’m curious if this is reflected on bricklink prices. You’d probably have to be clever in how you do the analysis though.

It’s definitely one of the odder urban legends of the Hacker News set—that newer Lego sets are all licensed models that can basically be built only one way, but it’s good to see an article debunking it.

When I was a kid in the early 80s, we couldn’t afford all the toys and games that my brother and I wanted, but there was always room to squeeze in a LEGO set or two for birthday or Christmas. The rationale was, and I took it to heart, that I could build any _other_ toy that I might want. And I did. Knight Rider, GI Joe, M.A.S.K., even Transformers. Later, spy gear, project enclosures, rubber band guns, prosthetics, whatever.

I still have every LEGO I’ve ever received, going back to 1979 or so. As it happens, my parents moved across country the summer after my freshman year of college (which was fairly local to where I grew up) and they offloaded the trunks and totes to me, originally intending to save them until I was “grown up”, and I’ve hauled them around since, adding to the collection. Never even considered selling them off.

I’m not crazy about all the cross-branding these days and still have a soft spot for a bit of creativity in building real-life parts out of more standard pieces. Last week I picked up an early 70s set (#730) at a vintage store for $20. It’s amazing how basic the pieces are.

"In 1958, the modern brick design was developed". Very strange, because I definitively had Lego bricks pre 1960 in Finland. I even had some special bricks with wheels and lamps. I tried to operate the Lego lamp from 220 volt wall socket, but it destroyed the lamp and burned the wires.

Needs a 2013 in the headline. Also: All links are dead.

> New sets can sell for up to $500 retail

The current ceiling is $800 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/millennium-falcon-75192

This is a very well researched article. Personally I liked when there were less type of parts and you could combine them with your fantasy. These days there is an overflow of types. Almost multiple special bricks for every set.

Me and my brother also played with Lego since late '80s (and we too didn't have many sets). Once we moved from "Castle" to the simple "Technic" ones, I kept dreaming about getting one day the Supercar set or one of the largest ones with pneumatics... and then in, my later teens, I discovered programming - which turned out to be the ultimate, highest form of DYI activity.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to watch people who kept working with Lego into adulthood; e.g., I spent quite a few hours watching Sariel's YT videos. Friction-operated automatic transmissions and whatnot...

The Lego clones are good and cheap. I'd get those for younger kids to get used to legos, because you won't care if they break or lose pieces if it costs 1/3 of the Legos.

And you can get more sets so the overspecialization of pieces and color suites isn't as bad. The chinese knockoff of UCS Millenium Falcon is like $250.

That said, LEGO is higher quality and worth it once the kid, or adult kid, is ready for it. Legos can kind of hold their worth if you keep track of the sets for completeness, but the lego knockoff is completely worthless on the resale market, and for good reason.

The article mentions that change in perception of costs in childhood vs adulthood, but there is another possible psychological (or sociological) factor: desire for increasingly complex (== more blocks) Lego sets among customers.

This is similar (obv. not identical) to the digital authoring tools available to everyone today were only available to sophisticated content creators in the past. Of course the digital tools I have seen a massive deflation in unit costs.

What would confirm this hypothesis is a graph showing the distribution of sets sold by # blocks per set, over a long period of time.

(2013) old news

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9096253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5181406

I’m surprised the article doesn’t actually investigate inflation vs perception. This is a common effect with pretty much anything that people last experienced a decade or more prior to looking at prices again. You remember the dollar amount of the price from a long time ago, then look at the dollar amount today and think “wow that’s so much more expensive!”. In actuality, inflation over that period was 20% or more, so of course it seems more expensive than you remember.

Our family hobby is lego. We all collect sets and spend time as a family lego building. I did have some lego sets as a kid. But the sets now are amazing, and yes pricey, but the quality and enjoyment is worth it. Lots of great MOCs (My own creations) out there too that you can download the instructions for and order the parts on bricklink. It's an amazing community of Lego fans, young and old. We have a great lego city display and are getting in to lighting up sets.

When I was a kid I didn’t know there were sets. I had a big box of LEGO bits, and I made random things out of them. So I just assumed that’s what was supposed to happen.

My simple hypothesis for why Lego feels more expensive now: they are more expensive relative to other toys which have become cheaper (in every sense of the word).

The OP mentions that change in perception of costs in childhood vs adulthood, but there is another psychological (or sociological) factor: desire for increasingly complex (== more blocks) Lego sets among customers.

This is similar (obv. not identical) to the digital authoring tools available to everyone today were only available to sophisticated content creators in the past. Of course the digital tools I have seen a massive deflation in costs.

I can't remember the exact interview (I think it was a docu about the LEGO building designed by BIG on Netflix), where Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen told that the last decade LEGO is having a lot of competition from other toys, (game)computers and so on.

That's why they were forced to start selling themed series and to explore other audiences.

Edit: Netflix: LEGO house - home of the brick.

I don’t know where they come from but my nearby used book store sells gallon-sized ziploc bags filled with random legos. Most of them are old, which is awesome. You get the old space logo. I buy them on my way home. My kids have built almost a whole LEGO City out of these. Really wish LEGO brand sets these days were less thematic.

The secondhand market for Lego can be crazy.

A few years back The S*n would occasionally run promotions where they would give away free mini-figs. There was nothing particularly rare about them, and the packs were specially branded for the promotion.

A colleague of mine hoarded as many as he could and a year later was selling them for €10.00 each.

I just got out my 20-30 year old pile of about 100 Lego sets from my brothers and my childhoods and got my three year old engaged.

I proceeded to have this exact rant at my wife when looking up what today's equivalent of Ice Planet or Space Police would be. It's all just IP sets with a ton of custom pieces.

I saw a lego set at costco the other day.

It came in a rather large box and seemed to be large almost bulk quantities of generic pieces.

I actually smiled since the assembly plans come from the kids' heads, not the comic franchise or space franchise.

A super long article to identify the really obvious?

- People who grew up with Lego over time are now adults and still a market.

- Lego can serve this new market as well as the original market which still exists.

I was about to answer with right I know, how comes my kids have almost zero interest in it. I used to play entire afternoons with it, especially the Technic kind.

I'm still sad that they haven't released a generic space set in almost 2 decades. Only branded stuff like Avengers. I'm sad about that.

How much would it cost to 3d print a 100-piece lego-like set?

Everyone who i know with a 3d printer pretty much doesnt use it. It hasnt caught on at all.

(2013)

It’s a fascinating analysis all the same, and it would be just as interesting to see if the patterns have held in the years since.

If someone creates a Lego sorting machine similar to the coin redemption machines at your local supermarket, they'd make a bazillion dollars.

I can see parents like myself lining up with buckets of Legos, walking out with baggies of perfectly sorted Legos.

Better yet, dump in all your Legos, and choose the sets that they came from, and have the machine resort them into their original numbered baggies.

This would legit kill the company, I hope it never happens.

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692408

my lego...it was parked in the attic along with about a cubic yard of comics i disenterred the lego when i discovered D&D the hindsight is killer if i took the comics as well [small fortune]

but i didnt i took the lego and spraypainted it to look like stone

I was never a big lego user but as a child getting a new set of Lego was a celebration and not something that happened casually. For my kids it is just another toy they get here and there, sometimes on a whim while browsing for other things in the local Target shop or whatever. So I guess relatively it became cheap like all other commodities which are not a house. They usually just follow instructions and build it once and then abandon it, minecraft and sims replaced lego for doing more freestyle creative creations since it is faster and unlimited.

I never understood why one huge set couldn't build anything. These specialist sets that do one thing goes against what I want out of a set which is true utility and flexibility.

Lego is simply a reflection of culture(s) at large. Years ago (read: when I was a kid), you played with Lego to take a pile of nothing and use your imagination to make something. There were no wrong answers.

Today, Lego is high-priced branded 3D puzzles. Here are the pieces. They go together in a certain way. There's only one right answer. Thank you for overpaying.

Sure the shareholder are happy. But as a barometer of broader trends is a sonewhat freightening trend.

So as long as you're dividing by the number of pieces, then that means the sets cost less?

But actually the sets cost more, not less.

The article also seems to assume that the price increase is due to intrinsic manufacturing costs of adding more pieces, and is not simply a marginal increase in the wholesale price. In other words, there is no reason to assume the piece count is causal in the price from a materials perspective. There could just as well be a correlation that they know they can charge more when the piece count is higher.

What happened is they realised that franchise licenses are much more profitable that LEGO Creator or LEGO City sets. Marketing and selling sets based on media franchises turns out to be a goldmine, and more creative and imaginative toys less so. That's why every blasted new set coming out seems like it's Star Wars branded, or Harry Potter, or facking Avengers... Likewise, it has shifted from an open-ended activity and mode of creative expression (see older adverts for Lego: https://s14-eu5.startpage.com/cgi-bin/serveimage?url=https%3... or https://s14-eu5.startpage.com/cgi-bin/serveimage?url=https%3...) towards more of a "build once according to strict instructions then set aside".

It's all quite sad. But then again, at the same time, the company was in dire financial situation under the previous management. There is some chance that without this pivot towards franchises LEGO would not even exist anymore (though I doubt it honestly).