Second and Third 2017 LEGO Ideas Review - Guessing Game

[Faefrost]

On 1/23/2018 at 1:12 PM, Scarecrowman said:

I wonder how well the Old Fishing Store has been selling. It was a great set, and I would love to see any of these other seaside buildings as an official set. However, if the Old Fishing Store was a financial failure it is unlikely Lego would make another similar big set in this theme.

Just from eyeballing it, it looks like it is behaving and selling exactly the same as a typical Modular. Not an instant sellout, but steady upper end sales. I watched a number of them bought with the Downtown Diner. Figure it will do well next week with the anniversary bonus. 

[x105Black]

I love my Old Fishing Store.  I'm still building it.  Every time I watch a movie at home, I get through another bag.  I'm on the last one!

I bought it because I love the design, and it's a great set, but also because it has great parts.  I like what I'm building so much, I'm going to wish I had bought 2 when it comes time to break it down.  Maybe I will...

[Digger of Bricks]

By the way, does anyone know or have a rough idea when the deadline for the First 2018 Review Stage is? There hasn't been a blog post by Ideas staff about that yet. 

Edit: I should add that staff also haven't been doing 10K Club interviews with builders of projects within the Third 2017 Review.

Edited April 5, 2018 by Digger of Bricks

[LegoModularFan]

3 hours ago, Digger of Bricks said:

By the way, does anyone know or have a rough idea when the deadline for the First 2018 Review Stage is? There hasn't been a blog post by Ideas staff about that yet. 

Edit: I should add that staff also haven't been doing 10K Club interviews with builders of projects within the Third 2017 Review.

Feel like there’s something going on with Ideas, there haven’t been any Staff Picks for almost a week a few weeks ago, there’re much less blog posts...  I don’t understand!

[Digger of Bricks]

Over on the Ideas discussion, @parsom mentioned that the Pop-Up Book project has disappeared from the "Projects in Review" carousel at the bottom of the LEGO Ideas home page. Anyone have a clue as to what that could mean?

[Digger of Bricks]

LEGO Ideas - LEGO Ideas Third 2017 Review Results

[Robert8]

No surprise here

The Dive Shop / Boat House Diner / Lighthouse were just too similar to the Fishing Store

RobenAnne is a very skilled builder, but he really needs to try something else, because all his projects are very similar 

[Blondie-Wan]

Now that the results are known, I’ve created a poll for the next review batch. Let those guesses fly!

On 1/12/2018 at 4:29 PM, Khscarymovie4 said:

For the second one none. No real sellers here. 3rd one I believe the Pop-Up book, which is definitely the one I would love. 

You nailed it, right out of the gate!

[LucyCol]

I think most of us predicted this result.

[LegoModularFan]

No surprises. That was obvious but I'm still really glad about the pop-up book!  I need to say I'm actually kind of surprised that no projects by @Robenanne were selected this time, I thought they'd consider selecting at least one of his projects to go with the pop-up book as it's exceptional what @Robenanne achieved making three projects into one review stage... Anyway, c'est la vie... 

[VBBN]

My fiancee got me into RuPaul's Drag Race somehow, so I was secretly rooting for that one. But absolutely no surprise that the pop-up book won, I'm excited to see what they do with that design!

[Digger of Bricks]

The only project from this last review that I'm somewhat mourning the rejection of is the Jaguar E-Type Roadster. That could've been such a beauty! 

[x105Black]

Well as others have said, this is not a surprising result.  Still, I was hoping one of @Robenanne's projects would have been picked.

[Blondie-Wan]

8 hours ago, x105Black said:

Well as others have said, this is not a surprising result.  Still, I was hoping one of @Robenanne's projects would have been picked.

You and many others.

[Digger of Bricks]

12 hours ago, x105Black said:

Still, I was hoping one of @Robenanne's projects would have been picked.

As you may have read posted elsewhere, the designer of the finalized version of the upcoming Pop-up Book had this to say regarding those projects' rejection, along with some other interesting insights:

New Elementary - LEGO® IDEAS POP-UP BOOK: EXCLUSIVE SAMUEL JOHNSON INTERVIEW 

Quote

So you’re saying that this choice was almost a no-brainer.

Samuel: It’s an amazing opportunity for open creativity and storytelling. But regarding the other ones that we rejected, we would definitely have loved to expand the Old Fishing Store into a whole world. But we’ve just launched a product and don’t want to see a new product cannibalising the previous one. We really love it, and we see that the fans really love his style, but unfortunately it was the wrong timing for those ones. That being said, he’s got loads of other buildings, so there’s definitely a chance that maybe we’ll have him return as a fan designer again.

We love the car as well, but unfortunately it clashed with another product that we have coming, without saying too much. I’d personally never heard of the Christmas Story before, but just reading the comments and the online stuff about it, I realised that there’s a massive fan base. Again, it was hard for us to say no - after all, 10,000 people said ‘yeah, I’d buy that.’

You also have to remember that we have limited frames of how many sets we can make. We’re coming up to three this year, by the time Voltron comes out, and we normally do around three or four a year. We can’t push it too far, because that would mean that we’d have to take people from somewhere else - and then cannibalise another team. So there’s loads of constraints that we run with and we hope that we just give everybody the best option for what they chose. So we had an open mind for the other submissions, but the pop-up book is the model that we’ve chosen this time.

 

[Dorayaki]

Not exactly political reasons, but RuPaul's Drag Race might have problems in appealing worldwide kids who don't quite understand what drag is or just think other sets are more fun than that .

On ther other hand, we haven't seen a reality show license in LEGO if my memory works, LEGO original's World Racers actually kinda looks like a real reality show concept, so the possibility of a show that involves both challenges (that appeals kids) and buildings might work?

 

Robenanne's projects unfortunately have to meet the project series policy. He needs to come up with a different style of building project.

[x105Black]

I think they should have held one of @Robenanne's projects for a later review when the Old Fishing Store is off the shelves.  That would have avoided the cannibalization they were worried about...

[Blondie-Wan]

34 minutes ago, x105Black said:

I think they should have held one of @Robenanne's projects for a later review when the Old Fishing Store is off the shelves.  That would have avoided the cannibalization they were worried about...

I think so, too. I actually wonder why they didn’t just do that, in fact - the Old Fishing Store has now already been out several months anyway, and it would have been several more between the time they announced these results and whenever they finally released the set, especially given that they’re still waiting to release the Voltron set and could then have released the Pop-Up Book as the next after that.

I suspect another building could even have coexisted with the Old Fishing Store on shelves anyway. It’s not like there aren’t several different modular buildings out at once right now, or several different Star Wars UCS sets. But of course I’m not privy to LEGO’s sales data, and I think they also tend to be more cautious and conservative in how much they’ll release at once, given the troubles they’ve undergone at certain times in the past; companies can have long institutional memories.

(And it’s also possible the Old Fishing Store just hasn’t sold well, but that they don’t want to publicly reveal that.)

[x105Black]

7 minutes ago, Blondie-Wan said:

I suspect another building could even have coexisted with the Old Fishing Store on shelves anyway.

I agree with the whole of your post, especially this part.

[Digger of Bricks]

9 hours ago, x105Black said:

I think they should have held one of @Robenanne's projects for a later review when the Old Fishing Store is off the shelves.  That would have avoided the cannibalization they were worried about...

I'm pretty sure Lego would want to retain the individuality of each Ideas set by not approving a complimentary successor project. That's what I think their foremost reason was for rejecting those two follow-ups.