| ▲ | Bricklink suspends Marketplace operations in 35 countries(jaysbrickblog.com) |
| 77 points by makeitdouble 4 hours ago | 30 comments |
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| ▲ | aunty_helen an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Looking at the list of countries, living in one, and knowing how much the west is cracking down on money control. This reeks of anti-money laundering controls. |
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| ▲ | dhruvrrp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Some really big/rich markets on the list (Brazil, India, ME..). I don't think LEGO is big in most of those countries (at least not in India), so they might be trying to slow down the secondary market in order to grow sales for new products. |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wonder what the story behind this action is? It's surprisingly short to the shutdown, and they seem to indicate they wanted to keep those markets open, as otherwise I feel like they wouldn't falsely give people hope they might open it up again: > We will review this decision regularly, and we hope to be able to reopen the BrickLink Marketplace to LEGO® fans in these countries in the future. Shutting it down in (almost) the entire South America doesn't feel like it makes financial sense, can't be such a small market that it wouldn't be worth keeping it open. |
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| ▲ | makeitdouble 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I get why for some of these countries, but Brazil for instance doesn't look like complicated situation or a small market in any shape of form ? Is anyone finding relevant political or regulatory patterns in the country list ? Direct link to the list: https://www.bricklink.com/help.asp?helpID=2687 |
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| ▲ | kasey_junk 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Imports into Brazil are pretty complicated, but I don’t know why you’d shut down an existing operation. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's not Lego's problem, but the individual traders on Bricklink. |
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| ▲ | OgsyedIE 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Greenland is an unusual entry on the list given the nature of Lego as a firm. |
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| ▲ | baiwl 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >To put this into perspective, the total combined population of these countries exceed 2.5 billion, or just about 30% of Earth’s population which is wild. Doesn't look like anybody can make 35% of their revenue from those countries though, does it. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You'd be surprised where Lego buyers from bricklink are from. When I was active there I got sales from just about all over the world. | |
| ▲ | hoherd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sure, but sellers in those countries found the service to be very valuable. The framing of this situation as being beneficial to the cooperation and detrimental to the consumer feeds the narrative of the Evil Corporation, which is sad. It's really unfortunate that LEGO acquired Bricklink, and then did this, but it's such a common storyline. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm an hour ago | parent [-] | | Make no mistake: Lego makes a great product but they are an evil corporation. They have been so from the day they started making bricks (they stole the design, the marketing content and even the boxes), they continued when they sued everybody and their dog for doing the same thing that they themselves did, only much worse, and finally they did it again when they acquired Bricklink and started merging accounts with the Lego website. And probably many times in between when they created incompatibilities between older and newer sets just to drive sales. | | |
| ▲ | PostOnce an hour ago | parent [-] | | Lego... incompatibilities? Isn't compatibility a huge part of the draw of Lego? I've never heard of incompatibilities, what are they? The only problem I've noticed product wise is there are now mold defects after they started adding recycled plastic, only one or two minor (visual surface) imperfections per box, but before, there were none. |
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| ▲ | BrenBarn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe not but it does include some countries with very large economies. |
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| ▲ | altairprime 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is this due to the same payment processor issue that was impacting Steam-PayPal users earlier this year? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891570 |
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| ▲ | gedy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've been a member for 25 years (yikes, since it was Brickbay) - I'm not sure why Lego company wouldn't have the resources to handle this compared to the prior smaller company. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Because it is not to their advantage. I suspect they always bought it to shut it down and this is just the opening moves. | |
| ▲ | RGamma 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Watching Held der Steine cured me of all notions that LEGO(R) still has any interest other than milking their brand/reputation. McKinsey leadership will do that to a company, I guess. Thankfully there's many good (and compatible) competitors now, that get you much more bang for the buck. I'm not that deep into LEGO(R), but it feels they have already lost a substantial portion of goodwill in the power user community, which may be contagious. I certainly wouldn't buy or recommend it to anyone anymore (except used perhaps). |
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| ▲ | chhxdjsj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A reminder that danish company LEGO took the concept from a british psychologist who later committed suicide in the 1950s due to financial issues, and they only later paid out his descendants for rights to the product in the 1980’s in order to legitimise their ability to sue other companies making lego-like products. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And paid them a pittance. | |
| ▲ | culi an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And now they're upset at lepin bricks because modern lepin bricks have superceded LEGO in quality AND price | | | |
| ▲ | yhhbbkkhh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | …what “idea”? | | |
| ▲ | chhxdjsj 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Page#Kiddicraft | | |
| ▲ | gblargg 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Specifically: > Ole Kirk Christiansen and his son Godtfred became aware of the Kiddicraft brick after examining a sample, and possibly drawings, given to them by the British supplier of the first injection moulding machine they had purchased. Realising their potential, Ole copied the Kiddicraft brick and in 1949 marketed his own version, The Automatic Binding Brick, that became the Lego brick in 1953. |
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| ▲ | colechristensen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| no explanation? |
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| ▲ | gishh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Umm. I guess not? > Six years ago, I wrote that it was a terrible idea for LEGO to acquire Bricklink and revisiting some of my thoughts I expressed then, it sure seems like there’s some dodgy stuff happening behind the scenes. > To be fair, I acknowledge that there may be compliance challenges operating in some of these countries, where things like local laws, logistics, import restrictions etc may make it difficult for LEGO/Bricklink to do their business there, but surely there could’ve been a better way to communicate this, or invite community feedback instead of turning the whole site off in 2 weeks. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Bricklink was acquired from the mother of the guy (who died) that started it by some asian 'entrepreneur' who then turned around and sold it to Lego, whose only long term interest always was shutting it down. The secondary market hurts their sales for new sets, or so they believe. | |
| ▲ | jmonty900 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Even if there were significant challenges in some countries, certainly other countries on this list didn't deserve the 2 week treatment. Lego's actions here are very sketchy. "We appreciate your understanding, - The BrickLink Team" Understanding of what? They didn't describe the situation that lead to their decision to unilaterally apply the same treatment to all of these countries. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm an hour ago | parent [-] | | Corpspeak should be illegal. It so pisses me off that companies always harm your interests while telling you it is to serve you better. Clearly it's not, stop lying. |
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