LEGO Has An Increasingly Huge Problem
And it’s starting to annoy its richest customer-base — the AFOLs…
I remember the moment as a child I hit 1000 LEGO pieces. It was a big day for me. A four-digit count of LEGO pieces! I was over the moon. I felt like I finally could build anything I could imagine, and let me tell you, I did. I built anything I could imagine. Everything that was in the catalogues I built some sort of replica of, even if I didn’t have the exact pieces. It didn’t matter if the colours were wrong, if the wheels weren’t the exact size they were meant to be. Nothing really mattered because I had 1000 pieces, and I felt LEGO rich.
Times have changed though and my measly 1000 piece collection in today’s LEGO would be laughable. That’s basically four Speed Champions sets, costing 20 bucks or so each. Heck, many medium sets these days are around the 1000-piece mark. But that’s not necessarily a problem. What is, however, that…
LEGO is chasing numbers, and it’s doing it in a bit of a questionable way.
Too many display sets
The first aspect that myself and many other LEGO fans have pointed out recently is the huge number of display sets the Danish toymaker launches. Now, don’t get me wrong, some of it is our fault — the fans’. If you look at many LEGO Ideas proposals, you’ll find that a large majority of the ones that stand any chance of winning, are display-oriented builds.
Then of course LEGO designers themselves will also come up with designs that are purely for display, and when I say “purely”, that means, you probably won’t have the heart to take the set apart because it just looks too damn good. Take for instance the Star Wars Millennium Falcon, or the latest Harry Potter Hogwarts Express. You’d have to be mad to take either of those apart.
Display sets are undoubtedly the coolest-looking ones, but for brick’s sake, 10–15 of them a year is more than enough!
And of course, there are plenty more. From small sets like Speed Champions, to mid-size sets like Creator Expert licensed supercars and the large Technic supercars, they’re all sets you genuinely either want to collect or display. Either way, chances are you won’t take them apart.
What does this lead to? Well, definitely more revenue for LEGO, but also a lot less space in the house to display them. September’s Lighthouse set, while gorgeous and super tempting, I am wondering where it would fit, as I already have too many sets displayed. The Hogwarts Express or the Titanic is out of the question, and the Millennium Falcon even more so, which brings me to my next point — size.
Too many overgrown sets
A 1000-piece set is undoubtedly cheaper than it used to be in the past. That’s a good thing. I know, folks like to bash LEGO for its prices, and to some extent LEGO deserves the criticism, but objectively prices have come down, even when they went up. You do get more pieces for your buck in 2022 than you did in 1992. That being said, in 2022 we also have a lot more large, very large and downright obscenely large sets.
The Titanic has 9090 pieces, The Harry Potter Hogwarts Express has 5129, while the Millennium Falcon has 7541 pieces. Take a look at any of the 200+ euro sets — which there are 56 of — and you’ll find that even the smallest of them comes with nearly 2500 pieces. That is a lot of pieces and while the price-piece ratio is generally not bad at all, the problem is the size. Even the smallest 200+ euro sets are uncomfortably large. The 1989 Batwing certainly looks great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s big. It’s overgrown. It takes up too much space additionally to costing just too damn much. At 200+ euros, good cost-piece ratios are not as big of a selling-point as in a smaller set. Not for the average customer, anyway, and only hardcore fans will appreciate the large quantities of the same part in a set.
While price actually may be a secondary concern for some, size does matter, and in LEGO’s case, there is such a thing as too big. Looking at the dimensions of each set, most of them instantly become a no-go. People don’t have that much space to spare, no matter how much LEGO wants to up the number of pieces in a set like megapixels in a camera.
It feels like LEGO sets are ballooning out of control both in size and price, and it might backfire.
Fans across the web are pointing this issue out. Reviewers with massive following who can afford huge sets no problem are avoiding them, simply because there is nowhere to store them, even if they end up taking the sets apart. To quote Andrew Gribben, “Attila, you’re running out of house…”, and he’s right. Many of the truly cool sets are anywhere between large and huge, and there’s only so much plastic a one-bed apartment can fit. I have about 12 sets to build in the upcoming months, and I am already scratching my head wondering where the hell they’re all going to go. For a passionate LEGO fan, one of the most heartbreaking decisions is which set to take apart.
LEGO needs to dial back the massive set fetish, and focus more on the mid-size range again, like they used to back in the 90s.
Hi there! 👋
Recently, I started a new publication — Bricks n’ Brackets — dedicated to LEGO, tech and coding. It would mean a huge deal to me if you’d follow it, though only do so, if any of those topics pique your interest. You can also read more about why I started it and what my overall goal with it is. You can also join as a writer if you’d like, as long as you submit articles around those three topics. The publication also has a YouTube, Instagram and TikTok channel. Thank you, and may the gods of creativity and success guide your day!
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility!
