
What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick - bmease
https://therealityprose.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/what_happened_with_lego/
======
kijin
In the early 80s, my parents went to garage sales and bought me tons of used
Lego sets. None of the sets were anywhere near complete, and most of them
didn't even come with a picture of the set they belonged to.

My parents just dumped everything into a large bin and gave me no instructions
other than what the shape of the blocks themselves suggested. There were parts
of cars, parts of airplanes, parts of castles and police stations and pirate
ships.

So I made flying cars, pirate castles, police ships, and everything in
between.

Later, when my parents could afford to buy me a brand-new Lego set for a
special occasion, I wouldn't even try to build what was shown on the cover.
All the new blocks would go into the bin with the old ones, and I'd mash them
together to build crazy things.

I think those Lego blocks made me become a programmer.

These days, when I browse the Lego section at any large toy store, all I see
are heavily customized ("licensed") sets that seriously restrict what you can
build with them. The bow of a ship is no longer a jagged stack of rectangular
blocks; it's a large, smooth, custom-molded piece that can't easily fit in
anything but a ship. They look beautiful, like a nice iOS app, but they no
longer inspire creativity like they used to. Instead of Minecraft, you get
FarmVille.

I could still build a pirate-themed spaceport with that set, of course, if I
had a lot of rectangular pieces. But most sets don't contain a lot of
versatile, rectanguler pieces anymore. You need to buy a very large set for
that.

So maybe that's part of the reason why we think Lego is getting more
expensive. There have always been small, cheap sets and large, expensive sets.
But unlike in the 80's, most of the small sets are no longer worth buying.
They are so heavily themed and custom molded that the average kid can't do
anything truly creative with them. Serious players are therefore forced to buy
large, expensive sets. Because if you buy a 1000-piece pirate ship, maybe half
of those pieces will still be useful when you later decide to build a nuclear
missile silo.

Some time ago, I heard that you could just order a bag of generic blocks from
Lego. I wonder if this is true, because if and when I have kids, I'd like to
buy them that. Or maybe I'll just ask my parents if they still have my old bin
of mismatched secondhand bricks.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _These days, when I browse the Lego section at any large toy store, all I
> see are heavily customized ( "licensed") sets that seriously restrict what
> you can build with them. The bow of a ship is no longer a jagged stack of
> rectangular blocks; it's a large, smooth, custom-molded piece that can't
> easily fit in anything but a ship._

This is another example of the rose-colored nostalgia the article mentions, I
think. Lego ships have _always_ used dedicated boat parts for the hulls,
starting in 1973 with the Tugboat
([http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/310_Tugboat](http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/310_Tugboat))
that kicked off the Legoland Boats line; the Pirates line that debuted in 1989
did the same, starting with the Black Seas Barracuda set
([http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/6285_Black_Seas_Barracuda](http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/6285_Black_Seas_Barracuda)).
It makes them much more seaworthy for bathtub play. The Legoland Boat sets
used to come with a special weighted keel piece for the bottom to keep ships
upright in the water; I don't know if the pirate ships do, but of course you
can always re-use the ones from the boat sets.

> _So maybe that 's part of the reason why we think Lego is getting more
> expensive. There have always been small, cheap sets and large, expensive
> sets. But unlike in the 80's, most of the small sets are no longer worth
> buying. They are so heavily themed and custom molded that the average kid
> can't do anything truly creative with them._

This is definitely not true. I don't have the money for big shopping these
days, but every time I'm at a Target I like to pick up a little $5-$10 kit,
ideally one of the mini vehicles. I always get hours of fun building and
fiddling with the little things.

I feel like "Lego sucks now" has become a meme that people just repeat without
ever actually testing it. They look at a few kits in the store, pick out
whatever details fit their preconceptions, and sneer about it on the internet.
Try it! Go down to the store and buy a Lego kit. If you don't like the
licensed jobbies, I highly recommend the Creator line; they tend towards
straightforward vehicles and animals and robots and stuff, and most of them
actually come with complete instructions for three different things per set. I
think you will be pleasantly surprised.

~~~
kijin
My pirate ship did have some custom parts for the hull, but it most certainly
didn't look like that Tugboat. The hull came in several pieces, each of which
could be easily repurposed for other uses because they had rectangular edges
for other pieces to attach to. I don't think this is just nostalgia messing
with my memory. The damn ship didn't even float, because water leaked through
the gaps between the pieces.

I admit that I may be biased because of the particular selection of Lego sets
at the stores in my area. But if Lego itself hasn't changed, at least their
marketing focus seems to have changed.

~~~
ijk
The Pirate ships have pretty much always had hulls that were large modular
pieces, but not completely sealed.

The Tugboat was one of a long line of floating ships; they all had one-piece
hulls so that they'd be completely watertight.

Though you _could_ get the pirate ships to float if you used ballast and
sealed them off with the right bricks; I got mine to float in the backyard
pool.

------
vxNsr
This is very interesting because I as I'm sure many did agreed with the
sentiment at the time and assumed that community was trying to create some
sorta social commentary about how toys have become expensive, but now we see
that the price of legos hasn't actually changed so much, though it's had a
long term downward trend.

~~~
pyrocat
I think Community was more making a comment about how Lego has become less
generic and more based on marketing. You could say this correlates to less
creativity in favor of recreating existing properties. The bits about smaller
pieces and brand tie-ins line up with the changes mentioned in the article
(more pieces per set, more brand specific sets).

------
onion2k
Another factor that the article doesn't consider is the utility of each Lego
brick - if there are a large number of unique pieces in each set then you need
to buy more Lego sets to get the available bricks, and the bricks have less
reusable value in models built from your imagination. For example, a child
can't as easily take a set that's designed to build a car and use the bricks
to build a dinosaur instead because there are too many "car specific" pieces.

Measuring the usefulness of pieces would be _tremendously_ hard to include in
any mathematical model (pun not intended).

~~~
gambiting
You are underestimating how creative children are. I used to get a lot of Lego
sets as a kid, and they would get assembled and then disassembled within two
days max. And yes, I can confirm that a Lego Technic excavator with an
electric motor and pneumatic controls can be used to make a dinosaur(and then
to make a city block. And a spaceship. And a train.).

And in fact, it looks like Lego company is encouraging you to experiment too -
look at the Lego Movie sets. Every single one uses weird, "specific use"
pieces which are used for something completely different than what they were
originally intended for.

------
city41
> Not all old LEGO sets fetch such high prices, but of course all the popular
> ones do. These are the ones that we wanted when we were younger, and now
> that we have a bit of our own money we want to buy those dream sets from our
> childhood.

Many toys from our youth now command incredible prices because of this
phenomenon. Retro video games can command absolutely obscene prices (four and
even 5 figures sometimes). My Neo Geo collection in particular is worth
dramatically more than what I paid for it.

~~~
colechristensen
The thing is, most old video games (at least the especially popular ones) are
available as emulators and sometimes are refreshed by the publishers too.

Lego sets need not be old to be fun as I can attest from a recent impulse
purchase.

~~~
city41
Depends on the person. For a lot of people, the only way to satisfy that
childhood dream is with the real thing. As the prices can attest.

------
Intermernet
> The prices of the toys we had as kids comes as a shock. $150 for a toy? $200
> for a toy? These prices are outrageous.

I remember having an encyclopaedic knowledge of the prices of Lego sets (and
Transformers) during the 80's. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Most of
my friends in primary school knew how much the latest Technics racing car, or
indeed the original G1 Megatron (banned in the state I lived in, so notorious
and highly coveted amongst us [1]) would have cost our parents.

One of my friend's dads drove to another state and paid $90 for Megatron
before it got banned in that state as well. For that act, according to us at
the time, he won dad of the year.

[1]:
[http://www.otca.com.au/boards/showpost.php?p=354736&postcoun...](http://www.otca.com.au/boards/showpost.php?p=354736&postcount=5)

------
hangonhn
I purchased the Lego Space Shuttle in October, 2012 for my nephew for $94.99.
I had so much fun putting it together with him a couple years later that I
decided that I want one myself and it's now at $300:

[http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-4657599-Shuttle-
Expedition-10231/...](http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-4657599-Shuttle-
Expedition-10231/dp/B004ZWKWQQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1424756059&sr=8-2&keywords=lego+space+shuttle)

I know this because Amazon has a notification at the top to tell me that I
purchased it in 2012 and I can see the order. In the span of 2.5 years, it's
tripled in price.

I wish he had done a graph of the prices for the same sets over time. That way
I can compare if it is the Space Shuttle set that's skyrocketed in price or if
it is across the board.

~~~
DanBC
How many unique pieces are there in the space shuttle set?

~~~
MikeTV
Good point. Here's a part listing:
[http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemInv.asp?S=10231-1](http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemInv.asp?S=10231-1)

At first glance, looks like the only unique parts are the sticker set
(~$5-$17) and the minifigs ($3-5). How many other parts you need to buy would
depend on the size and variety of your collection.

------
dharma1
My son is of the age where his wish list for birthdays and Christmas is
usually at least half Lego, and the wallet is definitely feeling it :)

Wish there were some Lego compatible bricks with liberal licensing, so that
they can be freely designed by the community, and manufactured by several
manufacturers. Would be even cooler if there were Mindstorm style robotics
kits like that with open source licensing.

A large part of the population (especially outside 1st world countries) is
excluded from the joys of plastic bricks due to price.

Found this a while ago, not sure how legit these are -
[http://brickset.com/article/7722/reviews-of-chinese-clone-
br...](http://brickset.com/article/7722/reviews-of-chinese-clone-brands)

~~~
jweather
I've had my eye on this LEGO robot kit for my kids, at $49:
[http://meetedison.com/](http://meetedison.com/)

I'm also excited about the possibilities of expanding LEGO kits with
3D-printed parts as print resolution continues to improve. You can already
achieve some cool things by gluing LEGO pieces to 3D-printed parts, but that
seems like cheating.
[http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:403](http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:403)

------
someotheridiot
I cringe at the "I wrote a web scraping program to go through the Brickset
database". Brickset and Rebrickable both have awesome APIs that can provide
all this data in an easily digestible format.

~~~
sebastianavina
but he wrote a web scraping program for mining the data, bonded it together
using wget, launched several aws instances with hadoop, and deployed a
mapreduce job for cleaning up the data. It took three weeks and $200 usd, but
damn, modern technology is awesome, it would be impossible to do this just 10
years ago.

Thanks google, thanks amazon.

~~~
ibotty
seems overkill. still great to live now for doing that kind of analysis.

------
WalterBright
I had a Gilbert Erector Set, a competitor to Lego. I confess I always thought
the erector sets were better, and looked down on Lego. Metal held together
with nuts and bolts! vs plastic bricks. It was no contest. But who has heard
of erector sets these days? Gilbert lost the marketing war.

------
angersock
The problem that I have with Lego isn't the cost of them, the price-per-brick
or whatever. The problem is that when I go to Target or someplace to just buy
a big tub of generic bricks--like I grew up with--I instead see an aisle
packed full of special-use packages. I don't want Harry Potter or Pirates of
the Carribean or super-specialized Technics...I just want a big gallon of
assorted, simple bricks.

Seriously, it's like Lego has somehow turned into the same microframework hell
that Javascript has--hundreds of toolkits, all useless outside of their niche.

~~~
virtuallynathan
Looking at the Lego website, that does seem to be the case - but I couldn't
tell if that has always been the case. Many of the sets don't look like you'd
have much freedom other than to follow the directions due to the large number
of set-specific pieces.

~~~
ijk
Modern Lego design has come a long way. You might be surprised by how
versatile some sets are:

[http://rebrickable.com/](http://rebrickable.com/)

~~~
someotheridiot
Thanks for the link, I built this site :)

------
uptown
Yet there's still outliers that don't seem to follow the premise of this
article. How do 5 lego-sized characters command $80?

[http://www.amazon.com/2013-Lego-Ninjago-Kimono-
Ninjas/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/2013-Lego-Ninjago-Kimono-
Ninjas/dp/B00BO0OU2Y/)

Any of the LEGO Ninjago stuff is ridiculously expensive.

This one is $20 for a 2" figure:

[http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Ninjago-Minifigure-Titanium-
weapo...](http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Ninjago-Minifigure-Titanium-
weapons/dp/B00SWC94DC/)

~~~
droithomme
Those are not actual lego sets. They are pieces broken out of lego sets that
are no longer sold. It's marketed by a third party seller to the collector's
market. Each figure came from larger sets. I'm sure you are aware of this,
yes? And if so, you agree that your post is very misleading, yes?

