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What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

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Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#41

Post by kijin »

dxhdr wrote: post #34
kijin wrote: post #5

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…

I think it actually takes more creativity to re-purpose the 'heavily customized' sets. Here's some of those ship pieces you mentioned: http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5286/5377659338_18f315850a_z.j... As a counter point, I loved all of those specialized sets as a kid -- Blacktron and M-Tron were especially awesome. Plain rectangular bricks can be boring and need some custom pieces to spice things up.

I'd say it takes a different kind of creativity. One is not necessarily better than the other, they're just different.

If you got bored with plain blocks and had to "spice things up" with custom pieces, it means you had plenty of plain blocks at your disposal. That's how I like my Lego sets, too. A large number of plain blocks with a few custom blocks here and there. Not custom blocks galore like some of the newer sets tend to be.

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#42

Post by RobAley »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #18
kijin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the only "generic" pieces available for sale in my country seem to be baseplates and 2x4 blocks in assorted colors. I miss the svelte 1x16 pieces. They made such excellent beams for the large and airy structures that I liked to build, but they must have been part of a very unusual set because I can't find them anywhere else. :(

Bricklink.com is the place to go if you're looking for specific parts. It's sort of like eBay for Legos. At a glance, both the solid-brick ( http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=2465 ) and perforated Technic ( http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=3703 ) pieces seem to be available at reasonable prices, depending on what color you want. Unfortunately, I don't know what shipping is like to your country, or…

brickowl.com is a similar site, with what I think is a much nicer interface. Other brick sites are also available!

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#43

Post by someotheridiot »

ijk wrote: post #26
virtuallynathan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Modern Lego design has come a long way. You might be surprised by how versatile some sets are: http://rebrickable.com/

Thanks for the link, I built this site :)

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#45

Post by sebastianavina »

someotheridiot wrote: post #44

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.

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.

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#46

Post by 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...

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#47

Post by jweather »

dharma1 wrote: post #46

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 p…

I've had my eye on this LEGO robot kit for my kids, at $49: 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

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#48

Post by facepalm »

kijin wrote: post #5

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…

I'm glad that there are (semi-) complicated kits that my kid can build. For his 4th birthday there was one with a 48 step instruction manual. That's an achievement (others might already build more complicated ones, but he didn't have small Lego before that). After a while these "builds" gradually fall apart and other things are being built.

Creativity is not the only thing that can be encouraged. Building complicated things from instructions is also an important skill. And there is still plenty of creativity to be trained while playing with the finished models.

I think you can not bemoan that LEGO is so important for raising engineers and then demand that they only have "creativity bricks".

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#49

Post by MikeTV »

DanBC wrote: post #38
hangonhn wrote: post #30

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/... 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'…

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

Good point. Here's a part listing: 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.

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#50

Post by city41 »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
city41 wrote: post #29

> 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 Ne…

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.

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.
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