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What happened with LEGO

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Re: What happened with LEGO

#111

Post by EdwardMSmith »

danielweber wrote: post #62
Tloewald wrote: post #13

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…

Steve Yegge has a rant somewhere about how Lego used to make kits that could build special things, using entirely off-the-shelf parts, with maybe one or two exceptions for things that just couldn't work otherwise. And now (for older values of "now") it sells kits loaded up with special parts so that you can't really build as good a Batmobile without getting the Batmobile set. He was comparing it to programming langua…

My take on it is this:

In the 70s and 80s, Lego was low resolution. Block, 4 bit color.

Now its just higher resolution (smaller pieces with more non-right angles), and higher bit-depth.

Lego has just paralleled video game evolution.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#112

Post by jmount »

Nursie wrote: post #67
shocks wrote: post #18

I've always called them Lego. Not Legos. Is that an American thing? (UK citizen here). Just curious.

Lego is definitely, definitely a collective noun like 'sand'. You have a grain of sand or if you have a lot you just have sand. You have a Lego brick or if you have a lot of them you have Lego. I am also British

But wouldn't different types of sand taken as a collection be "sands?" Just as many types of fish are fishes?

Re: What happened with LEGO

#113

Post by anonymfus »

tcbawo wrote: post #32

Lego is now competing for attention with applications such as Minecraft. It will be interesting to see if pricing trends hold, or whether they attempt to preserve market share by cutting costs. Maybe Minecraft will start to move into the themed application market (Lego Star Wars, etc.).

There is a Minecraft themed Lego set.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#114

Post by DannoHung »

The one thing I'm thinking is this: Didn't the pieces used to be a bit bigger? Like, not the studs, just the number of studs on each piece?

Seems like a lot of pieces now are 1 and 2 stud-ers.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#115

Post by waqf »

ianb wrote: post #81

Where I think this analysis is wrong is using the general inflation number. If your inflation basket of goods was full of products similar to Lego – plastic toys – the real price of Lego would not appear to be going down. Well, "wrong" isn't perhaps the right word, but it doesn't address the perceived price of Legos in a world where plastic goods are constantly going down in price relative to other goods.

Exactly. Pace the article, the reason that Lego seems expensive to us is that other toys are now much cheaper (in real terms) than they were in the '70s. If you corrected for "toy inflation" instead of "general inflation" this would be apparent.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#116

Post by shocks »

jmount wrote: post #112
Nursie wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lego is definitely, definitely a collective noun like 'sand'. You have a grain of sand or if you have a lot you just have sand. You have a Lego brick or if you have a lot of them you have Lego. I am also British

But wouldn't different types of sand taken as a collection be "sands?" Just as many types of fish are fishes?

Er, I'm pretty sure fishes is wrong...

edit: I stand corrected! Thanks Google. :)

Re: What happened with LEGO

#117

Post by sliverstorm »

acabal wrote: post #38
Tloewald wrote: post #13

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…

My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded. I would rather my kid play with generic space and castle and pirate blocks, than with Star Wars and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Carribbean blocks. As a product of the 80's I can say I spent a lot of time playing with highly branded and marketed toys, so it's not necessarily a bad thing; but there's something special about Lego that makes me feel like they should…

When I was a kid they had sort of started the branding effort. At that time LEGO was primarily doing creative in-house theme lines, but some branding as well.

Kid-me deduced that the more generic sets had more pieces, so in an early attempt at cost optimization I leaned generic the few times I had money. Though, it was also cool to get some sets with interesting pieces that let me branch out. Vanilla bricks can be limiting at times.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#118

Post by sliverstorm »

algorias wrote: post #28

> There is no way LEGO sets have always been this expensive; it is just molded plastic. This is the worst kind of fallacy. First of all, plastic is more expensive than you think when many different pieces in many different colors need to be produced, stored and packaged in a precise manner. Secondly, the cost of development obviously gives huge added value to those pieces of 'just' plastic. What happened to lego pric…

Don't forget tolerances. LEGO pieces have pretty sharp tolerances for a toy.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#119

Post by sliverstorm »

tlrobinson wrote: post #100
emddudley wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not holding my breath. There is no way that home 3D printers will be able to maintain the same manufacturing tolerances as the LEGO factories, definitely not within the next 5 years.

I agree. On the other hand, 3D printing itself could displace LEGO as a creativity outlet for kids. But there's something about physically snapping blocks together and experimenting that couldn't be replaced by CAD software.

3D design and assembling LEGOs are different levels of learning/play. Perhaps we could compare it to oil paints vs. watercolors. A very young child is perfectly capable of smearing oil paint on a canvas, but watercolors are a better starting point.

Not to mention I found the inherently limited nature of LEGOs was a great exercise in working within a set of constraints & thinking "outside the box" to beat them.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#120

Post by Nursie »

jmount wrote: post #112
Nursie wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lego is definitely, definitely a collective noun like 'sand'. You have a grain of sand or if you have a lot you just have sand. You have a Lego brick or if you have a lot of them you have Lego. I am also British

But wouldn't different types of sand taken as a collection be "sands?" Just as many types of fish are fishes?

I'm not sure 'fishes' is valid (British) English either TBH, maybe it's a pointer to a more general rift between UK and US language use. The OED does list 'fishes', but I've never heard it used except in jest or by people trying to be cute. Lolcat speak :)

We would say 'The sands of the sahara' and 'different types of sand' or 'different sands' sound equally valid.

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