Horation

I've restructured your comment so I can more easily reply : A) I'm not forgetting it, if you were to go back and fully read my comment, you would notice my example accounted for this, here the relevant text : Now it's true that they could make army-building sets, but people around these parts way overestimate the sales this would generate, I've in my whole life rarely seen a Lego army of even a hundred figs, and almost all of these were from "clone bros" buying loads of sets because of the community around Star Wars army-building. The truth is that the additional sales would be relatively small, since few people really buy more than one set, and even then, you'd need a lot of sales to make up the difference. Now do you really think a 20$ battle pack would sell 25 times more copies than the 500$ Rivendell? Don't forget that lots of people who'd buy 10 or 20 battle packs would also buy the bigger set. B) I was talking about Lego sets in general and how they have to compete with other manufacturers for the KID'S TOY market, I really don't understand how you could understand this part, which clearly talks about the buying habits of parents to be about counterfeit LOTR set, I'm saying that focusing less on themes popular to kids costs them sales against the likes of Hasbro, Mattel, etc... .As for the "claim" that 50% of fans would buy a 100$ set, that was not a claim, but a hypothetical example, the point was that a set which costs 10 times as much needs to sell a tenth of the copies to make the same profit, which in the case of a theme with fewer fans would likely be a limited degree of sales. And the example with Isildur vs Sauron is exactly what I was talking about before, they'd need to sell a lot of such sets to make up the difference vs a very big set AND the opportunity cost (the cost of renouncing to another option and choosing this one) would be huge since they could instead have sold a small set from a theme which has a lot more buyers. C)Speculation doesn't, but observations do, if making small LOTR sets was such a good idea, they'd surely be doing it, yet we see the opposite, and since we can't see their spreadsheets, why would we think that we know better than they do?

Ok, I'm going to try and explain this one (I did say explain it, not agree with it, I'd love some cheap sets). LOTR is undeniably more of an older audience thing, it's not to say kids hate it, just that fewer kids know and like it than say, Superman, or Harry Potter. So lets say there's 1000 Lego fans of LOTR globally. Lego makes a 10$ LOTR set, with say Gandalf and Bilbo, so with few reasons to buy more than one. Most of those fans will buy it, say 95%, so that's 950 people times 10$ which equals 9 500$ of revenue. Now Lego tries a 100$ LOTR set instead, again with lots of named characters, and little incentive to buy multiples. Now its obvious that the quantity sold will drop, but it will still be significant, so maybe 50% of fans will buy it, that's 500*100$ which equals 50 000$ So revenue went way, way up, and yet the number of people who bought a set went down by nearly half, and even if it went down by more, it'd still be worth it . You can repeat this with larger prices, and a similar line of thinking leads to similar results ; selling fewer very expensive sets will make more money that a larger number of smaller sets. Ok, you'll say, but then why do they make smaller sets for other themes? Because those sets target a different market which involves kids, whose parents are likely more budget-conscious than most collectors, so they need to sell toys at a lower price to better compete with other manufacturers.

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