MAB

Based on the last round, anyone wanting to buy a set should be able to get one just fine if they remember the date they go live and are not unavailable on that date.

Or they are a fan and want to offset some of the cost of the large sets by selling the GWP to someone willing to pay that much but didn't buy the big set to get it.

That also sounds a lot like Alien Conquest, Galaxy Squad and Castle of 2010-14. A lot of people seemed to put those themes down as they weren't as good as the space and Castle themes they had in the past. But kids of that time got on and happily played with them. And later, when there was nothing space and castle available, people revised their thoughts and they weren't so bad after all.

Yes, the two are quite different. Although Barad-Dur is microscale it still looks fine with minifigures posed in front of it as well as inside it as there is nothing really showing the scale compared to a figure. In fact, there is one window that is minifig scale. So it looks like a tower that figures can interact with at the same scale even though in reality it is much much larger. Whereas if they did a microscale city with identifiable small buildings, then minifigures would look like giants next to it. Same here, the size is OK. The price is not. Plus that awful tree.

Plus media companies want to be associated with LEGO. It is the number one toy company in the world. To be associated with LEGO promotes their IP. It wouldn't surprise me if licensing costs per unit sold are lower for LEGO than other companies as media wants that reach. Monster Fighters would have got boring very quickly once they had done the full classic roster of monsters. It was a perfect one year theme. It might have stretched to two. But longer? No thanks. Because the health of the company is important to a fan that wants to continue to see new products. Look at the huge range of sets available now compared to 10, 20 then 30 years ago. The popularity of TLM and the growth after that, the initial forays into 18+ sets, trying out botanicals, buying bricklink to get the BDP running at a much larger scale. If they suddenly start making financial losses and lose market share, I wouldn't expect anywhere near as much choice any more.

Nothing is stopping you building like that. You can use regular torsos like that if you want to. You can also buy plain heads for little money or wipe the prints from printed heads.

Those that used to use the brickset forum may remember the theft from Fairy Bricks. They had £400000 worth of LEGO stolen. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-53408525

Those other companies are able to give some people what they want. LEGO's financial report suggests they are still giving many people what they want.

In official sets LEGO has inspired creative play for kids by recently doing the mashups of lightside/darkside. If it is creative to put a bit of helicopter on a fire truck, then it is just as creative to mashup an X-wing and a Tie fighter.

Again it depends what you want to show. If you want to show the building, you don't need all that many soldiers to attack it. If you want to show off the size of the army you almost lose the build. At a show over 10 years ago there was a guy displaying a Helms Deep MOC and he had bought about 400 orcs to attack it. I had a chat with him near the end of they day and he was disappointed that nearly all of the comments and questions he got from the public were about the size, the cost and the time taken to pose all the figures and very little about the build.

Although that leaves out the more interesting scenes that happened outside. To me, the most realistic option is minifig scale buildings / scenery representing the location rather than the whole thing, like they did with Rivendell and The Shire.

Why is it a bad example? It is a perfect example. It is a CITY set. The clue is on the box. And we've just been told that CITY is 100% creative. And just like license haters seem to cite the repetition of the X-wing or Millenium Falcon from Star Wars, what is creative about yet another fire truck? LEGO keep making them as kids want them and they sell, not because they are creative or imaginative.

It depends what you want to do. If you want a detailed vignette of a battle in action, then 12 soldiers vs 12 soldiers on a 32x32 stud area is often plenty. Whereas if you like to line up formations row after row on multiple 48x48 baseplates then you'll need a lot more.

I'm glad for some uncreative licensed themes then if this is what you call 100% creative... Firetrucks are so creative and LEGO has never done anything like that before, and cars that look just like formula one cars and even have real world advertising on them. So creative.

Everybody won't try to make the same stuff though, as there is typically lots of material to choose from. And in unlicensed themes there is not full creative freedom. In castle, aside from the original yellow castle, the output tended to be grey and occasionally black bits of building, horses and carts, the occasional dragon. There is very little creative freedom to design something genuinely different as if it doesn't fit the theme, it won't be accepted and also probably wouldn't sell if customers didn't understand what it was meant to be. One of the downsides of BDP is the similarity of so many castle offerings, series after series. Similarly with classic pirates, it was really quite a narrow theme conforming to "Boys Own" style or Hollywood style swashbuckler pirates. Kids having those sets would know the traditional storyline and how to play , just like with a licensed set. Classic themes were much narrower than Ninjago, Nexo Knights or Chima but even they draw on traditional storyline although the themes often appeared rather disjointed where maybe there is too much freedom.

There are not too many licensed themes though. If anything, there are not enough as LEGO is missing out on sales to fans of other licenses. The number of licensed themes is irrelevant to the number of unlicensed themes. The number of retail sets of each is about 50:50 and has been for a while. The reason there are few unlicensed themes (not sets) is that the popular licensed themes have swallowed up the smaller themes. City covers so much more than it used to including realistic space. Ninjago covers a lot of light fantasy, some historical architecture, historical-like wooden ships and space-like futuristic technology. The shorter lived themes of Dreamzzz, Hidden Side, Vidiyo, and even NK and Chima have mopped up the rest of the ideas although often overlapped in some places. Creativity in those themes is responsible for killing off the classic themes. Remember also people's views of Castle in the final years. LEGO gave fans a big castle and small medieval sets yet those fans dissed it as boring and repetitive, it sold poorly and was heavily discounted. Something similar happened to Galaxy Squad with complaints about it being too aggressive and not Classic Space. So LEGO used creativity in story telling to weave some aspects of classic themes into the themes that kids actually like today, and no longer do the classic themes but instead make big, expensive classic style sets for nostalgic adults that only want things like they had in the past.

The various hoods and keffiyeh are all quite thick, presumably a hijab would also need to be a similar thickness. It probably wouldn't look any different to the old style hood.

To me, that is the worst of both worlds. Microscale gives the overall shape of the city but not really any detail, and the minifigure scale interiors would be rather irrelevant as most scenes occur outside. Rooms inside Barad-Dur work as it is a tower and you expect rooms in a tower (even if the scale is off). Whereas having rooms inside a City (rather than a building) would be weird.

Whose creativity? Is there any difference in creativity between a consumer buying a City set or a Modular and following the instructions and a consumer buying a licensed set and following the instructions. I see many second hand sets for sale and many consumers build sets once and keep them together. And for those that take sets apart and rebuild into something else, there is just as much building creativity in licensed MOCs as for unlicensed. From the LEGO designer point of view, they can use creativity in build styles just as much for licensed sets as for unlicensed. And the same for unlicensed? So no more Classic Space grey and blue, as the endless repetition of those got boring, no more repetition of fire or police in City, no more repetition of castles and wagons in Castle, no more repetition of ships in Pirates, ... Star wars is about 5% of LEGO's output in terms of available sets. If someone doesn't like it, there are plenty of other themes. Many unlicensed themes have the same now, with named characters and storylines.

So buy Dreamzzz or vintage stuff on the secondary market. And let others that want to buy Star Wars, HP and Ninjago buy what they want. If LEGO only made themes like Dreamzzz, they'd soon be bankrupt and you'd only be able to enjoy old themes from the secondary market.

And what about City, Ninjago, Friends, Technic, Creator,... should they be time limited too? LEGO will produce what people buy and for new themes what they think people will buy. They keep producing Star Wars and City because they sell very well. Killing a top selling theme would be bad for all themes, as LEGO would lose market share and revenue.

Sideshow Bob looks a bit strange. Maybe it is the angle of the photo.

So which licenses and the associated fans would you want to get rid of? If LEGO cut out a small licensed theme, chances are there would be zero extra unlicensed sets made as if there was a market for those unlicensed themes, they'd be filling it. For a few years now, it has been about 50/50 licensed to unlicensed in terms of sets. More licensed themes, but much smaller number of sets per theme than in unlicensed themes.

Even if it did, there are 1000s on BL at little more (and with LEGO's recent price increase often less) than the PAB price. I imagine the early days were dominated by resellers buying out the stock, as large numbers were appearing on BL and some customers were paying silly prices. While those that waited were soon able to buy from PAB.

Especially when the "other stuff" includes the license that you have just dropped to concentrate on your own designs, but they are being done by another manufacturer whose sales are rapidly increasing as they managed to get hold of the license to produce brick building toys for the largest entertainment company in the world. Not only would the rival's sales of Disney licensed sets be huge, but as people get used to buying their products when shopping for brick sets then sales of the rest of their in-house products would also take off. It would be a huge marketing fail if customers saw that LEGO lost the rights to Star Wars and other Disney brands, Warner Bros, etc and other companies started to produce them.