MAB

LEGO produces many themes over the years, so different kids will experience different themes in their childhood. LEGO cannot continue to innovate with new products but at the same time reproduce every old theme ever made to ensure that all adults that had LEGO as a child can have the theme in the same colour schemes that they remember as a child. So there is a difference to American sports franchises where teams in leagues tend to remain constant throught years but disappear when owners decide to cut funding or other financial reasons. Also I don't really see the link between watching and playing as the same as building official sets and building MOCs. Watching sport is passive, building official sets is not. Some people enjoy building official sets (whether licensed or unlicensed) and they are no less of a fan than people that MOC (whether the MOCs are based on LEGO themes or licensed properties). Is someone that builds MOCs for licensed themes somehow better than someone that collects and builds only official classic LEGO sets and enjoys placing them and playing with them. To me, they are both LEGO fans, but just enjoy different aspects of the hobby. And people that want to build only current official sets? Just the same.

I doubt they will disappear. They were also being sold through other marketplaces and LEGO cannot control them all. While there are people willing to pay large sums then some employees will risk their job to produce them in an illegitimate way. The only way LEGO can stop it is catch the thieves making them and fire them.

I hadn't realised that they had stopped making LEGO for the "dedicated" fans. I thought I was dedicated, yet they still make sets that I am interested in. Star Wars doesn't get that many sets per year, especially if you remove all the promo polybags and other single figure type items. Plus SW caters for a huge age range, from the simple 4+ builds, through kids ship based playsets, battle pack style sets, to the large "adult" ship builds, to the more static display sets such as the helmets. Star Wars fans vary so much (just like LEGO fans), I doubt many collect and display both 4+ and UCS sets. So lumping them all together is like saying fans of Classic themes should be happy they got a Classic Pirates and Castle style set in Creator. There is also a large range of spaceships that LEGO can do and appear to have done something new, at the same time as repeating fan favourites (landspeeders, X-wings, etc). Yet with Castle, they do a grey castle and then a few years later they do another grey castle and AFOLs complain that LEGO are lazy and that one castle is too similar to the last one (just like real castles tend to look like other real castles). I really don't get this at all. How can they be passionate fans of LEGO if nothing that LEGO has done in a decade interests them? That is not exactly loyal to LEGO either. If they were that passionate about LEGO, they would be able to find something that interests them. But no, they only want a specific theme, and in that sense they are just as bad as people that want Star Wars or Queer Eye or any TV show or movie, as they are only buying LEGO when it is "their" subject and not if it is something else. The only difference is that one person wants something specific that is licensed, the other wants something that is specific but unlicensed. Sure, there is more creativity when and where LEGO is not producing sets and it appears like there is even more as there is little to no discussion about official LEGO sets. And very little discussing old sets because that is not very interesting or it has all been discussed before. As to "actually doing something" people that build licensed sets also do something with their sets. They build them, the display them, they play with them, they enjoy them. If the official LEGO model already looks good enough for them, there is no reason to pull it apart and try to MOC the same thing.

Wouldn't it bit a bit out of place there too, given the very yellow colour compared to the original native corn on the cob varieties. Obviously the size is wrong too, but then it is for most food in LEGO.

So what is the point of this thread? The opening post says: These days LEGO is catering to so many different franchises and pushing out more sets than ever, and maybe the price for this is a lower interest for personal expression and MOCs. Why is there a price connected to LEGO creating a wider range and quantity of sets than ever before, suggesting it is negative? I'd say it is a good thing that LEGO now create a wider range than ever before, as (more) people can buy sets that interest them more easily. And because they like them, they don't necessarily need to take them apart to make them into something else. There have also been claims of unsustainable business models if they make sets that appeal to people that do not normally buy LEGO, because these people buy it because of the franchise and not because it is made from LEGO and can be broken up and made into something else. With so many sets being produced, I doubt many people buy 5% or more of the sets made so most people will focus on what actually interests them rather than buying random sets just because they are made out of LEGO parts that can be made into other things. If other people want to review and talk about the LEGO sets that interest them, that has to be a good thing.

Similar enough to be recognizable. After all, if you make a 4cm tall figure that looks enough like Darth Vader and try to sell it in large numbers, then Disney will get you on infringing their IP. This set is a representation of five specific gay men, just like named SW minifigures represent specific characters. And the target audience are fans of the show. I haven't seen the show, as I have no interest in people discussing fashion and makeovers, whether than are male or female, gay or heterosexual, identify as queer or not, or trans, but presumably the characters in the show are stereotypes and act up to those stereotypes and were picked for a reason. I doubt five random gay guys discussing other people's dress sense would be very different to five straight guys discussing other people's dress sense.

I still don't understand why it is a bad thing that someone who is a fan of X can buy a LEGO set of X, and build it, display it, enjoy it as it is and talk about how much they enjoy it. X can be a single licensed set all the way through to a whole unlicensed theme. There are so many franchises that LEGO could base one-off sets, (what is it, maybe 2% of their output of sets) for years, each one with a ready made market. Why is that not viable?

Not for everybody. The entire point of LEGO (sets) is to make money for the company. They don't care if you build a set once and display it or make a new creation out of the same pike of bricks every day. They probably prefer the buyer that buys multiple sets and builds them once and keeps them displayed, rather than the person that keeps reusing the same pile without buying new sets. Not just SW. Some City collectors build City sets and display them as they were built from the instructions. And go back further. All those uncreative people that have Classic Castle, Space and Pirate sets built as in the instructions. Some even spend years finding the original versions of pieces on the secondary market so they can build them exactly as the instructions indicate. How uncreative are they and what's more, they don't even buy up to date LEGO so are bad for the company too.

They are doing Space in Creator, just not 40 year old Sci Fi designs. I think kids want more modern designs for both realistic and Sci Fi sets. 31107 is Space Sci Fi. It has a Space Rover (so not terrestrial) and an alien.

There are two Creator Space sets on the shelves now, and two others not long gone. 31115: Space Mining Mech 31117: Space Shuttle Adventure 31107: Space Rover Explorer 31091: Shuttle Transporter Maybe not the Space you want but there are clearly Space themed Creator sets.

They can, if they wanted to. Nobody is stopping them. The fact that they haven't stopped doing non-licensed sets suggests to me that they want to have a mixture of licensed and non-licensed sets in their portfolio. Remember also, their sales do not just depend on what products they have on the shelves, they also depend on what other companies do not have on the shelves. If LEGO turns its back on Star Wars, Harry Potter, DC and Marvel, etc there would still be construction sets for all those themes. But they would be made by other companies. A decade ago, you could buy blind bag Marvel characters from Mega.bloks, you could buy Doctor Who sets from Character Building, Star Trek sets from KREO, MarioKart sets fro mk'nex, and so on. What were fans of those franchises buying - non-licensed LEGO sets or licensed sets based on the thing they are a fan of made by another company? LEGO could easily dump licenses but with it they will give a large proportion of their sales to other companies that pick up the licenses.

I don't think there is any evidence that the Harry Potter theme was cancelled. It was done and it ended, that doesn't mean it was cancelled. From what I remember it sold reasonably well and if they had only an agreement for a fixed time period that ended, then it makes sense that no more sets came out. Maybe they could have extended the licence but 2011 saw the end of HP and POTC and 2012 saw the introduction of LOTR, and both DC and Marvel got a very large number of sets that year. 2012 also had a large jump in the number of other sets. So maybe they considered keeping HP on longer would be detrimental due to the amount of other products hitting the shelves. For example, Friends was introduced in 2012 and if they knew a decent proportion of the existing girl fans were into HP and they wanted to start to promote minidoll themes to girls, then having HP around too may have been an issue.

Also for some people it causes anxiety to break up sets worth $100s and mix them up. If they don't buy parts for MOCing but only sets, I can understand wanting to keep the sets complete because it is a huge amount of work to sort them out again if they want to rebuild the set or sell it on. Different people enjoy different things, and I don't think other people should be blamed or shamed because they enjoy a different aspect of the hobby to you. So what if someone builds a set once then enjoys looking at it for the rest of the year. If they enjoy it, that is great. They shouldn't feel shamed into breaking it up and mixing it in with other LEGO and then have to create MOCs just because other people enjoy doing that. Not everyone wants to MOC, which is fine.

Whether it is mindless or not really depends on what the purchaser wants from it. If someone likes building official sets and then displaying them, or photographing them, or reviewing them, or whatever, so long as they get what they want from it then it is mindful rather than mindless. It would be mindless if they felt the need to buy even if it gave them no pleasure. Just like if someone buys LEGO only for the minifigs as they enjoy collecting minifigs but not actually building (MOCs or following instructions). Some people don't have the time to MOC well or even at all or find it very frustrating if they try. If building a set by following the instructions gives them some relaxing time, then that is what they should do. I sometimes comment on MOCs but what turns me off are the requests for IDEAS votes. I tend to stop reading at the first IDEAS link. If that comes in the first line or paragraph, I won't even bother to look further. There are some people that advertise / spam multiple forums without really wanting to discuss their MOCs. They come, they post the links and they go. I think people wanting to profit from IDEAS has changed many discussion forums.

Can you use technic chain links, as they make good chains.

I'm glad they have been quiet. No point telling everyone which theme it is until they are ready to reveal. Otherwise it just leads to loads of uninformed speculation.

The last one was 2014. Recent duplo animal sets tend to be farms or based on wild animals in a more natural setting rather than a zoo.

It could return any time LEGO want to do it, if they ever want to do it. Waiting to see what the reception of anything new is like ( whether LOTR or a different subject) will probably lead to failure since by the time they develop, design and produce new sets the public has already moved on.

If WB wait to see if Anazon's series is a hit, then 2023 and even 2024 seems unlikely given both movie and LEGO set production times.

If you count all the different types of guitars, then maybe add in all the different types of skaters too (just wheels, not ice skates). There is the disco diva skater, the roller derby skater, the retro diner waitress skater.

If the reason they are rejecting Zelda IDEAS is because they are already developing their own then they must be very complex sets. They have been rejecting them for about a decade now, dating back to CUUSOO days.

Do you know where that image was from? I ask as it has the "Black Friday" tab and prices are in GBP. So presumably it was from someone with access to a test site a few months ago. They are really faouring the blues in those brick suits. We've already got Blue and Dk Turquoise. I'm hoping for a yellow one, then white and black.

Yes, stores (and online PAB) frequently have bits like wheels, steering wheels and wheel-holder plates or car-bases, white picket fences, and so on. They are popular parts (for kids).

Or read reviews.

They have, but then they have also become bigger in both volume and part counts. After accounting for inflation, most (unscientific) studies seem to show lego is slightly cheaper now than 30 or 40 years ago. But comparisons are hard due to the way the product has changed.