Mylenium

Well, here we go... Arguable. One-sided contracts putting one of the parties at a significant disadvantage are by definition nil and void in many countries under applicable laws. That's a common misperception. Just because they are big, a company like LEGO doesn't hold a different status then if you were to make a contract with another privateer or a small business. The relevant part for such discussions is the status of the "legal entity" rather than who has the bigger stick. Of course LEGO would come down with an army of lawyers and try to intimidate you, but on a formal level they may not at all be on the right side of the law. Again not entirely correct. You are agreeing to implied terms and rules, not specifically negotiated individual contractual regulations. That being the case, the pertinent question becomes how deeply you actually understood those conditions and the circumstances under which they are provided. And of course it becomes then a question whether how relevant and applicable Danish law is, even by proxy via local legal representatives under regional laws or international mutually agreed harmonization rules. You may factually have have broken LEGO's rules, but legally not done anything wrong. It's complicated. Correct. You are merely granting them an unlimited license/ unlimited usage rights and recognize that the 1% is sufficient compensation. No more, no less. Mylenium

I honestly don't think anyone seriously cares. LEGO is a quasi-monopolist, anyway. It's basically always the same like with the current situation of the leaked Crocodile locomotive or before that the Sián. Some of the fanboys will get their undies tied in a knot over it, the rest will just shrug it off and move on. And it's not that there are other ways that info could leak or people simply deduce a few things and speculate from other breadcrumbs of info out there... Mylenium

Did I miss anything? Sorry there's just too much tapeworming on this forum and threads simply get too long and overstuffed. TL; DR Anyway, my thoughts: You should be glad you get anything, considering that pretty much all proposals get a major internal overhaul and incur cost on LEGO's part as does of course the distribution, actual production, marketing etc.. 10% royalties is pretty insane, to be honest. A fitting analogy would be digital media like stock photo and video sites. I don't see any of those people drive around in fancy cars. It's a bread & butter business where you can be glad you make 3% sometimes. It only works on a mass basis. Of course we could discuss how you as an "artist" should be compensated, but very few photographers, painters and so on rise to a level where they can truly ask for some serious cash, so it's kind of pointless to even waste time on such a hypothetical, in the LEGO realm of all things... We can agree on that. It's very "We want our cake and eat it, too!" without any rational reasoning behind it. Ask that the guy who did the red Fiat 500 last year... I'm sure he's beyond frustrated. It's overall a good point, though. Not only should LEGO be more open about communicating this at least to the users affected (if need be in private under NDA), but also be more strict in culling certain projects early. At the very least it would spare us the umpteenth office/ living room set design from everyone's favorite comedy series... Mylenium

Well, to be honest I think LEGO are just really dumping them with no brains attached. Perhaps they are even just trying to get rid of the already produced stock to not clog up their warehouses and then after series three it's all done and we'll never get anything more of this stuff. Seems to me that this is all based on a fundamental misunderstanding, anyway.... Mylenium

Not really, considering that those cubes sit like lead bricks on shelves, at least here in Germany. Gotta give retailers a chance to at least sell some of them before flooding them with more... *lol* Mylenium

Unless they adjust the price to a more sensible range this will likely go *poof* in the long run. And since pretty much every grimace looks kind of the same, it will wear out quickly on that front, too. My 2 Cents... Mylenium

I don't care for the road tape, but I'm definitely going to get the water along with some fish stickers and decorate a wall. It's weird but in a wonderful way... :-) Mylenium

Could be something very specific with CUDA. You may need to manually install an older version and enable the compatibility settings. Fiddling with the renderers settings is unlikely to improve anything. The old "Either it works or it doesn't." adage applies. CUDA and OpenCL are built to handle this automatically and if there's an issue, something is misconfigured or the app not compiled with specific features in mind. You could try and download NVidias Profiling tools to at least see which features the renderer is actually requesting and where the probing may fail and then fiddle around with the details. Mylenium

Whoa... Don't even get me started. Just look at "Hidden Side". LEGO clearly have invested a lot into it, but from what it looks like it is only mildly successful both in terms of popularity as well as commercially. So you can invest a lot of resources in one thing and still fail, kind of making this particular point a bit moot. At the same time a theme you didn't think would work may unexpectedly explode and become your best-seller. The old analogies for movie "sleeper hits" vs. "box office bombs/ duds" obviously applies. So for what it's worth, it's really not about that. And say what you will, even done superficially a knights theme or similar could be successful enough for a little while at this point. After over 20 years without it, people are clearly starving. rinse repeat for other subjects and genres. My 2 Cents... Mylenium

Even that argument could be twisted. Aren't perhaps people just buying Ninjago stuff as foundations for MODs/ MOCs to turn them into dragon dens and knight castles? ;-) You see, this can be spun in so many ways. That aside I don't think I'm exactly lobbying for crazy, elaborate knights castles, but this stuff being successful for other toy manufacturers tells me something. Playmobil wouldn't invest so much into Novelmore if there wasn't something to it. And seeing people buying bulk lots of the new Minifigure Series 20 Knights and Vikings perhaps tells its own story, too. So to summarize: I still think LEGO are missing out on a few things here and they could easily make a buck or two in this without it being detrimental to other series. Mylenium

Geez, you sure can't keep things brief and like to hear yourself ramble, do you? It's really not fun even getting into a discussion wherever you hang around and I'm not going to even bother now... Mylenium

Well, imagine I walked into a LEGO store today totally uninitiated and the first thing I saw was this abomination that is the Black Barracuda... I'd walk out again like I did for so many years. It's 2020, not 1990. And that's the point: I like the LEGO of today, not that old stuff. So what do a lot of the Ideas sets just aimed at triggering childhood memories do for me? Zilch. And since in another thread next door we're talking about potential implications for a business model, imagine I never even heard of LEGO in my life and was just looking for a nice construction-based toy, a movie-based collectible or whatever. It's those people that you'd need to convince to go with LEGO, not something else and IMO that's where a lot of Ideas sets fail. The are very "lego-ish", for lack of a better term, meaning you often have to already be into the scene to even get your taste buds tingled... Mylenium

...but don't you think having to create dummy elements and relying on alignment functions is still kind of stupid and highly inefficient? Imagine you had to work this way constructing a machine in the real world and had to do it thousands of times... Mylenium

I don't think so. It still needs to have an appeal outside that and in particular with the Black Barracuda I just can't see that. It reminds me exactly of all the worst things why I never got into LEGO until a few years ago... Mylenium

Let me reply by firing the same question back at you: Have they, though? Given that there's a million competitors in that region, some of which are rather successful by themselves, it's a completely different discussion. And given the current political climate I'm not sure how future-proof an aggressive expansion in China, India and so on might be. The rest is of course irrelevant. We can all play the numbers game and armchair-CEO all day, but the simple truth is we all don't know. It just seems funny to me that a European company cares so little about actual European subjects. Even your claim about focus-testing with mostly European kids might not really make sense in this context then, as clearly some of these discussions would inevitably come up... Mylenium Let's put one myth to rest: When we're talking about regionally-themed stuff, we're talking about the cultural appeal and a potentially stable longtime market, not overall sales exploding. Of course there's only so many sets you can sell to people every year before they run out of money. My point is merely about continuity and I've said it a million times: If Playmobil, Schleich and a few other can sell e.g. knights-centric stuff by the bucket, then so could LEGO. This stuff just works and there appears to be no saturation point. Whether or not this would provide a viable long term strategy vs. LEGO's current approach of chasing short, but highly profitable hype cycles would be another debate entirely... Mylenium

...but LEGO are still missing out on potential other themes. Not trying to flog a dead horse here, but Knights, Roman Legions and Vikings really don't sound too far-fetched from a European perspective, given how it is ingrained in our culture and history. This stuff would sell pretty well, at least regionally. Trains may be another story, but even there I beg to differ. There are entire forums clearly dominated by the LEGO train sub-genre/ theme even today and contrary to common belief there are many "young padawans" there, so it's not going to die off nor is it perhaps as niche as people seem to think. I'm not part of that scene, but it's alive and kicking, so there must be something to it. Whether it's a realistically viable business model for LEGO to expand their product range in this segment is another story, but seeing how desperate some people are even for the tiniest bit of news and how much stuff is being sold on custom third-party markets, it makes me think that indeed LEGO are neglecting these people and by the same token are not grabbing some money they could rake in easily... Mylenium

Nope. Pretty much all current brick CAD programs are simply too dumb for even such simple stuff. Mylenium

Yeah, it might be interesting in that you finally may be able to get all the bits and pieces usually scattered across multiple sets in one box. A big deterrent for me with City sets is always that you get so much extra junk when you may just want a specific vehicle or animal mold. Mylenium

You're exactly making my point and that's why Barracuda Bay absolutely fails for me on so many levels - no advanced techniques, no good use of new parts and to boot it uses this ghastly basic color scheme from way back than. It doesn't advance the theme, it merely panders to a certain kind of fans indulging in their childhood memories. I mean the fan design was awesome, but they completely ruined it by forcing it into their corporate formula. Mylenium

Yeah, sure, but it's an unproductive waste of time and frankly why anyone would want some of those atrocities back still eludes me. I recently noticed how ugly for instance the Barracuda Bay actually is and people want more of that? SRSLY? The next thing they'll be asking is for MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice to make 1990s music again... Mylenium

I seriously hope not. Why people are waxing nostalgic over the "Golden Times" all the time is just beyond me... Mylenium

That's just one side of the equation, though. More to the point it would likely undermine their core business (selling packaged sets) to a degree where it becomes unhealthy. by that I not only mean people no longer buying the sets, but their internal production process becoming extremely inefficient e.g. due to them having to produce new lots of specific parts every other day and the machine maintenance and changeover times, parts storage and so on becoming a nightmare. Mylenium

As they say "A little bit of competition is good for the soul." I honestly don't mind LEGO getting some heat for a million reasons. And you're wrong - building your business strategy >>>against<<< your market competitors is never a good idea. You simply need to prove that your products are better than those of your competitors in a given segment. Mylenium

Not so mad, after all, just severely depressed. Anyway, nice model. I agree that the autumn colors make it stand out. I just have the nagging feeling that most of the towers and spires should be even taller. The castle really looks very spiky on photos. Mylenium

You underestimate people's laziness and that old "I'll know what I want when I see it." thing. In a perfect world we'd of course all be super smart beings with refined tastes that selectively consume only what's really to their liking, but that's just not how it works. The ongoing issues with LEGO Ideas and last year's Bricklink AFOL Designer program can be taken as a good indication of some of that. More often than not people just want to wander into a shop and make decisions on the spot. The rest - yeah, LEGO's business model has always been rather volatile with good and bad years, but ultimately completely changing it seems a far stretch. Ultimately most of their successes and failures can always be pinned down to misjudgments about market potential for some types of sets and if anything, they need better advisors on that stuff and not always burn so much money on pointless licenses or product series that nobody even remembers anymore after two years. Mylenium