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> I wrote a web scraping program Better to ask beforehand, many websites are quite happy to hand you data if you ask nicely and your goal is something non-competitive.
First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other pieces of that genre.
Next, there's the proliferation of zany specialized parts. I remember getting a lego cargo ship as a kid (the hull was four specialized pieces — bow, stern, and two mid sections and thinking this was awful. Lego doesn't do ship sections any more but many similar things.
It's not a get off my lawn thing. I still love lego. But it does seem to have exchanged its DIY charm in the pursuit of merchandising.
That said, you can build much better looking models now — just not out of any reasonable selection of pieces.
My point being, toy-making sounds like an awesome job. I wonder if the people who do it are mech/materials/structural engineers, or if it's still a craft? I would totally go and design toys and write Python scripts to model Nerf trajectories for the rest of my life.
1. http://www.strategy-business.com/article/07306?pg=1
2. http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/how-nerf-became-worlds-b...
I don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn't very malleable. First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other…
> I wrote a web scraping program Better to ask beforehand, many websites are quite happy to hand you data if you ask nicely and your goal is something non-competitive.
Scraping a website is absurdly easy. You can have the data before you'd have finished writing the email.
I don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn't very malleable. First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other…
What I find amazing in the linked article (from the footnotes[1]) about Lego's financial situation was that every product engineer used to have carte blanche to go out and acquire tons of resin, just to make one set. That, and the effort they went to to service small, local stores. It's both amazing and depressing; obviously it doesn't scale at all, but it really sounds like a kickass corporate culture. Wired had a s…
She is very creative and bright and is quite resourceful in putting ideas into prototype phase and has had some big wins. But there is a certain stress level associated with any creative endeavor.
The situation you are noting is within the big toy companies, and no doubt that they have an awesome job.
I say this by comparing to personal history. The author writes "The 1990s and before were a nostalgic heyday of affordable LEGO sets." but as a teenager in the 1980s, really interested in the new "Expert Builder" sets, with gears, axles, motors, I was astonished at how expensive they would be. I really wanted the Auto Chassis/956, but it took a lot of lawn mowing (and help from my parents) before I could afford it.
That's a high-end set, but even in the late 1970s, when my parents found that I liked Lego, it was expensive enough that they would go to garage sales to find old collections rather than buy new ones. Which also meant I had some of the 1960s gears and wheels which really didn't go with the rest of the collection.
So I, at least, never regarded Lego as being "affordable."
On the other hand, that same collection, augmented, was often used by my sister's kids, making it affordable on an amortized basis.