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Not to be reductive and at the risk of pissing off Lego fans, how much could those $1000 sets cost Lego to make? We're talking about plastic bricks that must cost a fraction of a cent per brick.
Legos are very cool but they seem ridiculously overpriced to me. Especially now that they're getting fans to design things, so they can't even claim any sort of R&D going into it.
I'm not going to disagree they're overpriced, especially the bigger collector sets, but they are built to insanely perfect tolerances and that's never cheap. Use any generic blocks and it's easy to see Lego manufacturing is on another level. In addition I've built countless sets and despite thousands of tiny pieces I've only had one piece missing, once. And customer support sent out that piece immediately, no questions asked.
I believe much of the cost comes from the standards they hold themselves to.
Bootleg Lego are the saddest thing. They have cool designs but the pieces not being built with the same precision makes them a shore to build. Assembled pieces just don't hold together and it becomes an unfun disaster.
Some things just need that level of insane precision and consistency to work well and comes at a cost.
Aka Bootlegos
I tried to give other brands a chance, primarily because Lego doesn't dabble in war builds, but yeah I built a kit, picked it up to move it and half fell out because the bricks were not able to tightly clasp. I suppose it's less of a problem if you glue, but notably different experiences indeed.
My kid one a small set one. It was a cool Japanese anime robot but it was impossible to finish. The look of frustration and my own when I tried myself. I had to tell him to give up.
That’s starting to not be true. Several of the brands out of China have better manufacturing quality than LEGO these days.
I know we're way off original topic, but do you have personal experience with the chinese brands? Any specifically you'd recommend checking out?
In addition to this - brand value and licensing costs or however they structure their deals with other companies.
Yeah I jumped on the $500 Rivendell set and was more than happy to pay that. Before that one came out my brother and I always talked about how sad we were that we didn’t get the older LoTR sets
And the new Barad-Dur set looks amazing as well.
Hah I’m definitely getting my brother that one for Christmas!
But don't they hold themselves to the same standards for smaller sets and use the same machines to make them?
Yeah of course, but I think a lot more design goes into something like Millennium Falcon 75192 ($850) than Millennium Falcon 75375 ($85), it's 6600 more bricks to build. The collectors builds also tend to have more specialized one off parts.
Exactly this.
Though I am not sure how much more the designing actually costs in labor, compared to how much more they charge. (Marketing and licensing are other things that would be customized for these specialty/collector sets)
They're not all that one-off if they're making thousands of them. And does that really justify an $850 price tag? We're not talking bespoke here.
Maybe I'm not the best person to ask because I don't buy the big sets, I settled for a millennium falcon 75257 ($170). The $1000 kits aren't worth it to me personally, I'd rather piece together MOC but I guess for someone that wants to flex or is a huge fan of a specific property, it's available 🤷
By one off I mean they introduce specific pieces for that set, which introduces more cost with a custom mold and run to create the brick. Parts you won't find in any other set.
It doesn't have to be justified to you, but it's clearly worth it to some people. My most expensive sets are <$300, but having built a fan design, I can tell you the official ones are so much better that there's not even a comparison. The construction is miles better and I've never had a missing brick in the dozens I've built. People are allowed to spend their money the way they want.
Sure. All kinds of expensive things that don't have to be expensive are worth it to some people. That doesn't really justify it.
I'm sure you buy/collect something people have told you is unjustifiable, or at least implied that whatever you're spending your money on isn't worth it.
But it's worth it to you, and that's what matters. Literally the exact same principle is at work here.
You can be sure of that, but since I'm poor, that isn't true.
Estimates vary but seem to be between 5 and 10 cents per brick.
Lego definitely makes a profit, but they also haven't done the usual thing for a business to do, make the product cheaper to squeeze more out of it. In fact, one of the reasons to choose lego over another is the tight tolerances they have for their Legos, they fit better and hold better than a knockoff.
So like, yeah, business, they're trying to make money, but its not the clear-cut fake inflation thing going on, or even necessarily price gouging, as far as I could determine. Its more, this is what a quality product costs, they haven't cheaped out, but it just feels so prohibitively expensive because people aren't paid enough in general.
That’s not exactly true, the manufacturing quality of LEGO has gone down in recent years after moving much of the manufacturing to China. For example, you’ll find more parts with ejection marks in them today than you used to.
Ironically there are a few good Chinese knockoff brands with superior quality now.
I remember seeing something that said that while the price of a Lego set has gone up. The actual price per brick hasn't.
There's also licensing that needs to be considered.
You do pay more because of the LEGO brand, and they rely a lot on nostalgia & fandom to charge that much.