Yes, they have kept up with inflation, and that is the problem. Manufactured goods like Lego bricks should fall in price through innovation in processes, scale, etc. What does raise higher than the average inflation should be be labor-intensive products/services. In other words, it feels much stranger today how expensive Legos are compared to 47 years ago.

I have the re-release secondhand unopened and I think I paid about that much, so even in a collector's market, not terrible at all. An expensive toy to be sure but a deeply satisfying experience if you like that kind of thing.

Wow, childhood memory unlocked. I had set 497. And, yes, it was a very expensive toy in its day.

Yes! We were never bougie enough to get Lego, I played with Sears bricks growing up.

I remember the Lego 404 set being $40 in 1980. I actually can’t believe my Mom bought it for me.

Thanks for this reminder about the cost variable.

It has almost 4 times the number of pieces, but is only about 50% longer and wider - there's just way more smaller pieces. Price per piece is very misleading when comparing older and newer sets. The newer ones have more details, look slicker, but have a lot less "meat". Which is not that great for creative play.

There are so many better alternatives these days it’s mostly fanboys and people who don’t care who are still buying original Lego.

The existence of specialty sets doesn’t subtract from creating building.

My kids get some of the specialty sets, build them, then hours later they’re either taken apart or heavily modified.

The specialty sets can provide some interesting unique pieces too. My kids have a photographic memory of each of those special pieces and which set they came from. They’ll remember them and search until they find that exact piece.

> Sets become collectible, perishable, trends can form, secondary markets exists, etc. It's simply about the baseline, not the principle. Sorry.

I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but you can completely ignore secondary markets and collector sets if you want.

There are more sets and pieces than ever. You don’t have to collect anything.

You can still buy basic brick sets. With lot of nice color nowadays. Like the CLassics or Creator lines: https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/classic

And for $100 you get a lot of bricks to play with and let your imagination go wild. Just don't buy sets aimed at adults and IP fansumers.

Lego sets aimed at children are still good! They work as standalone toys, and can also be reassembled, modified and combined. Very few toys are like this.

Adults collect them, true, but there are whole lines dedicated to them.

It was kinda funny to see the Lego Movie, which puts a bunch of emphasis on breaking the rules and mixing and matching everything, and then seeing them release the sets for the movie. I mean, it makes perfect sense. But it was still kinda lowkey humorous. But imo they're still a great toy; very fun to go to conventions and the like, where people just have giant piles of loose pieces you can buy by weight.

They still sell the sets of generic bricks. At that point it is up to the individual customer to buy them if he prefers that. I could see your point if they stopped selling the more free form product, but they haven't.

These collectible (read: branded) sets are what saved them from bankruptcy, though.

Look at it from the corporation's viewpoint:

- they have a finite production capacity

- they have a finite warehousing capacity

- there is a certain number of sets which will be bought

- crates of bricks without an established design have a limited appeal and while a consistent SKU, don't have the baked in demand a new set will have

There's nothing stopping you from buying the basic sets and only the basic sets. They didn't stop making basic sets, unless you're objecting to the new colors that go beyond blue red yellow and black?

Lego is still amazing and you don't have to buy expensive sets for your kids to enjoy them. My son loves Legos and if he gets a set for his birthday it doesn't last long before he takes it apart and starts building other stuff with it.

This is one of those instances where it feels like people are terminally online. Or like the meme of the guy standing in the corner while everyone else is having fun at the party. You can find Legos being given away in a local buy-nothing group. It's still just as magical for kids as it ever was. These complaints are only from an adult who doesn't play with Legos. Who cares if sets become collectibles? Get other sets and have fun with Legos. These are toys that are meant to be played with. Play with them.

You can still buy “generic” lego sets if you want. Look for “Lego Classic” sets.

You can also only get so creative with lego. At the end of the day roblox/minecraft and video games trains kids to build more "relevant" things. Apart from tactility, I don't see what technic/mindstorm offers over digital.

Several years ago I wrote this reddit post analyzing LEGO piece pricing: https://www.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/1328f52/detailed_lego...

It's a little out of date, but the conclusions are still relevant.

Main things of note: Brickheads are pretty economical as a "parts pack." No significant correlation between per-piece pricing and IP licensing (except for Star Wars). Star Wars and City sets are overpriced.

> Today, airplanes fuselages, wings, and car chassis are instead built up piece by piece.

Well, people did complain about the whole 'special pieces' trend that you praise.

5yo sets have smaller pieces but also use big foundational pieces. Also the builds are simpler and better explained. Sets for 8yo are more complex.

> Older sets had larger foundational and platform pieces which gave a good starting place for new creative builds.

They stopped doing the many unique parts because it was bankrupting them.

My son inherited (well, we're co-owning it I guess) my Lego, and that includes two sets of Technic aimed at educational use (1030 and 1032) which come with a stack of instructions for fairly simple mechanical models to build — each demonstrating basic mechanical principles like gear reduction and pulleys. Those sets used the 4.5V motors which have all broken down, but we also have the 1990 Technic Control Centre fully working and use those instead. That Control Centre is a simple controller used with 9V motors. It is brilliant for explaining the basic principles of computerised automation.

No app. No Bluetooth. Just wires and a simple controller built to be used and understood by children.

https://rebrickable.com/sets/8094-1/technic-control-centre

The disappearance of real metal Meccano is really crazy. I know metal is expensive, but also bulk processing of it has never been cheaper or faster.

It's also a shame because it's really good for mechanical rapid prototyping and you can bend and cut it in a pinch and it stays put. But buying vintage Meccano to abuse like that is expensive and feels like a war crime.

^ This

Hmm, the comment I was replying to was deleted.

I hate app obsolescence, and licenses that expire on your old hardware (Microsoft Word..) I exhibit 1980s video games. The hardware just continues to work. It's a disgrace what happens to mobile games, they just disappear. (Whattaya do, save all your old phones? I'm hating on you, Atari Classics app on iPad 2; revoked my paid license to use it.)

But to be fair, Lego has gone to great lengths to keep their companion software alive. Still, the nature of mobile: apps require constant updates to stay listed for new OS versions.

For one, Lego Commander existed uselessly on my phone long after it ceased to work... until one iOS it wouldn't install anymore.

Lego giving you a CD with software and instruction was a comfort (challenge: find a CD drive!) but only Mindstorms really.

For desktop apps in the 2010s, Lego relied on Silverlight to get Mac and PC compatibility. So what happens when you rely on a Microsoft framework... still as late as 2015 I was still able to download Mindstorms 2.0 (introduced 2002??) from Lego.

With instructions pdfs, Lego has been ok to let hobbyists reproduce the downloads (last I saw.)

Another thing Lego did was to provide SDKs for Mindstorms (a while after the community reverse-engineered a lot of it...). Opening it up that way was encouraging. (Lego even started distributing HiTechnic's 3rd party sensors, the folks that reverse-engineered the Mindstorms 1.0 RCX.)

I was part of the fan movement from 1998-2001 that hammered on the message for Lego to open things up. What happened is that they hired several of us :)

Lego has been testing modern sets without instructions and instead tell you to download an app for your phone.

The ones I know of are the Mario ones, but they apparently need a phone anyway to setup the little characters.

Silverlight. 3.0 was built on Silverlight. And I guess other 3rd party proprietary stuff.

I coached FLL 9+ and Junior FLL 6-8. FLL moved on to Boost and Java programming. These days I only do high-school FIRST.

You can argue this for their sets targeting children and I don't think anyone minds stickers on those.

On display sets for multiple hundred Euros however it just looks cheap due to different surfaces and colors - especially as no one is ever going to disassemble these sets.

But you can only remove them once, and then never recreate the original set. Not great.

Yeah, that's some brilliant mold engineering!

>minimal mold lines

I think this comes from higher tonnage (clamp force) molding machines. Injected plastic exerts force at the mold seam. Pressing the mold open by even a teeny tiny amount is unpalatable. Mold lines also can result where a mold has insertable parts, like sliding rods to form inner holes.

You weren’t kidding. I just took a look and the models are gorgeous!

Duplo is also compatible with regular Lego. We used Duplo for the big structure and Lego on top for details. Great way to build huge stuff quickly.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/LEGO-kom...

That's a simplification of the Kiddicraft story.

Yes, it was a shame. After Lego lost in court (to Hilary Page's heirs I think by then) I believe they finally atoned for that.

Still, Lego didn't just sell the Kiddicraft brick unmodified. Lego patented the tubes inside, which gave it superior clutch power. (I have a lot of 2x4 bricks with "Pat Pend" molded on them!)

As I've heard it, Ole Kirk Christiansen had seen Hilary Page's brick as a sample from a molding machine vendor. Lego previously made wooden toys (until his son Godtfred allegedly set the factory on fire) and was casting about for what production to invest in for the future.

The Kiddicraft brick was a little rectangular box, no tubes inside. A lot of brick toys came out in the 60s that were little shells with varying clutch power.

For a museum of the many brick toys, go to https://www.architoys.net

In particular, Betta Bilda, Block City, American Bricks.

I think it's more the consistency of product design than the manufacturing process. Everything around me, especially in the software world, seems to change for no good reason on a frequent basis. Companies change products all the time for reasons other than utility/functionality. A consistent specification over 50+ years is an outlier.

> It's not like it's hard to keep producing the pieces to the same original specifications.

It’s extremely hard to build consistent products to the spec.

There are a lot of knock-off LEGO on the market now. We get them as gifts. Some of them stack okay, some are too tight, some are too loose.

It’s hard to manufacture at scale at these tolerances and keep it that way for decades.

How many plastic things from the 70s still work perfectly with no cracking or warping?

Did you even read the article? No, even just the Title? Nothing is ever impressive I guess. Certainly not a 60 years running manufacturing process where your childhood pieces can be passed down and combined seamlessly with a set you just bought for your kid. So trivial and easy to do guys.

The fire stations et al still exist, its just that they don't sell nearly as well as the tie-ins do, at least based on shelf space allocations.

This year's isn't huge: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/fire-station-with-fire-tr...

But the police station is pretty big: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/police-station-60316

(To me this looks more fun, but I'm a pirate guy: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/police-prison-island-6041... )

> I heard your same rant in the 1980s

The two options would be that either the perception is unsubstantiated but persists, or there has been a continuous decline for the last 40 years. I'm strongly leaning towards the latter. I also having the same issues in the 00s looking at old sets from the 80s, and looking back now the 00s look much better than what we have today. Obviously not in every way, and not all recent sets were bad. But overall I have the feeling that there's been a steady trend that the bricks got better but the sets got worse

That's probably the biggest change in the last few decades, they went from never doing anything out of the ordinary to SNOT (studs not on top) for "adult model" sets only (first in the trains I believe), to now where advanced techniques are used even it children's toys that aren't models.

Classic Technic was brilliant, but when they switched to 'studless Technic' it became far more difficult to build creatively with it (even if it enabled far more intricate builds with complex mechanisms, like the gearboxes in the supercar sets) - there was no natural 'up' direction any more, and building anything became more of a 3D logic puzzle than just building with bricks.

Real shame that they discontinued Mindstorms, though.

At least LEGO is probably the toy that gets "passed down" the most, my own LEGO parts who I got from an older cousin, is now on its 4th generation (first my sisters children, then some family-friend to theirs), and I'm sure the pile(s) will get further passed down as time goes on.

True, but at least it's not single use. Is there a viable alternative? A non-petrochemical plastic that has the same qualities? It's not like they can whittle them out of wood or cast them with metal so it'll always be some form of polymer, and I'm sure they would jump at a more ecologically sound option.

I was just about to reply about their financial woes over the years too [0][1][2]

Being a collector of stuff ever since I was a kid (toys, comics, cards, physical media, printed collateral, etc), and being in my 40's (target market / demographic for expensive nostalgia) living in 2026 (the world is a casino! everything's a collector's item!), it is a little annoying to see LEGO appear to turn into something that it wasn't .. but objectively that doesn't eradicate the fundamentals of LEGO, and I'd rather see them be a healthy company with longevity (via current product strategy) than wither and die on the vine out of stubbornness.

That said, aside from leaning on the AAA IP that drives prices through the roof in some lines, I do wish they'd stop with the tech gimmicks (Hidden Side, Smart Bricks), renew one of their focuses on real tech/engineering-adjacent platforms (Mindstorms / NXT / a modern version of these), and acknowledge that wealthy adults aren't the only customers. It really prices out young, fertile minds who a lot of their product and ethos should be directed towards.

Of course, that's a huge problem right now with anything that can command aftermarket prices as collectibles! [3]

[0] - https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/innovation-almos...

[1] - https://blog.firestartoys.com/how-the-lego-company-almost-we...

[2] - https://www.toypro.com/us/news/710/learn-the-story-behind-le...

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7FZWovUTmL0

>If you're complaining about the prices, remember how capitalism works.

Why get up at all, when gravity always just pulls me back down?

The fact that "10$ a pound for used, 10¢ a piece for new" has remained true as a good rule of thumb for 20+ years tells you something.