As an avid, life long collector of Lego, I feel compelled to speak on the direction of the company in recent years. I think overall Lego is quite possibly the best toy ever invented. What it inspires is unparalleled and the company deserves a great deal of credit for creating generations upon generations of inventive minds. However, the one aspect I feel the manufacturer is moving in the wrong direction is the quantity, size and cost of their products.
While growing up during the 80s, I could buy sets for between $2-40 on average. Of course, inflation changed a lot of this, but a huge influencing aspect has been the size and number of sets that has increased in the past 20 years. Although you have far more choices for sets, the sheer volume produced is overwhelming. As a hardcore collector, I had to give up on getting every single set and now am forced to pick things that I can afford. What’s sad is that I can technically afford more as a worker. However, I am very prudent about my money and feel that the quality compared to the output isn’t worth it anymore.
For instance, I love Town Lego and make a concerted effort to pick up as many Town (City) elements as I can. However, some of the best sets are priced at a ridiculous $60-100+. And most end up being horribly redundant and just clones of previous models such as Fire Stations. It wouldn’t be so bad if Lego put out a single $100/year. These days though, it feels as though each theme gets it’s own $100 set. When you add up all the themes, you can easily spend $1000+ just picking up the top of the line stuff.
But then look at how vehicles are constructed. Most are now 6 studs wide as opposed to the previous 4 studs. That increase in studs has made most of the vehicles bulkier and to a huge degree, incompatible with older vehicles. And this style is inconsistent. You can find a mixture of 6 and 4 stud vehicles. Sometimes, even more as in the case of tractors or cranes. Yet what purpose outside of creating an illusion of scale does changing the width of a vehicle?
Again, the answer is quite plain: money. Sold individually, many of these new vehicles can price at $20+. A similar type of vehicle sold during the 80s would cost between $5-9. Even humble vehicles like delivery vans are fattened up and scaled to cost. It doesn’t stop there. Throw in more elements for vehicles just to pad an extra buck or two for even the smaller sets.
Yet from a product point of view, this all feels unnecessary. I don’t really need an extra bicycle for my car or a cat in a tree. It’s nice adding these environmental elements but I want something that I can pick up while getting supplies at Target. You can’t really do that these days. You can’t simply grab a few sets, pay $40 and feel like you’ve added some nice elements to your collection. Instead, you pick up one item and squeeze it into your overflowing bookshelf.
As time passes, this is becoming the norm for set design. Probably, the most disturbing aspect was when a friend of mine linked an article which talked about the real target audience for Lego. The statistics demonstrated that it’s older folk like myself who have (had in my case) jobs that end up being the main consumer for Lego. Although it’s nice that Lego acknowledges people like us, there’s some invariably wrong about aiming at us as a demographic.
I feel that the toy should cater to the 4-12 year olds in both price, size and complexity. The Town Jr series was a disaster but we’re going far off into the opposite direction. Even sets like the Super Star Destroyer, Ultimate Series Millennium Falcon or exclusive modular town sets are really not geared towards 16 year olds. They’re for adults with excessive income and a serious hobby compulsion.
But as I continue collecting, I always have to wonder if something is worth the investment. Take the Star Wars series. Look at how many iterations of the X-Wing are in existence. Why not just re-issue the original? Seeing the $100+ Helms Deep Fortress set, I asked myself earlier if I should even bother picking it up since there’s a high chance Lego will just make a better one.
The thing for me is that I simply do not want to keep re-paying $100 for the same model every other year. I don’t even want to pay $20 for things like fire trucks if they’re just the same thing redone with slightly different configurations and the occasional new part. It’s too overwhelming and costly. I would like to see something else produced that’s innovative or something that isn’t in my collection (such as the pet store) if I were to invest a significant chunk of change into a set. Also, I would like there to be less redundant sets overall or even less sets. It’s impossible to catch up anymore. As much as I support Lego, I can’t financially keep doing this. When you add space into this equation, things end up feeling wasteful.
So as a plea from a long time customer, I must ask Lego to cut back heavily, start shrinking the size and cost of your sets and add more variety to them to re-entice me into spending my money on them. Also, branch out from “safe” sets like fire stations more frequently. Give us stuff like hotels, shopping malls, etc. on the town side. And finally kill the whole Star Wars and Harry Potter series. It’s been far too long and not exciting as when it first came out.