Maybe it's LEGO attempt to clutch at any straw and they finally trying to be better, but I really doubt it. LEGO has moved themself into a position where they are really cornered. No innovation, fat price tags on everything... – There is a German guy who had a LEGO store in Frankfurt, called "Held der Steine" (hero of the bricks). His YouTube account is quite popular and became a meme in Germany. LEGO sued him for having something which somehow resembled a LEGO brick in his logo. On his channel he reviewes all the "new" stuff LEGO is putting on the market; and he's showing how desastrous the Danish company became. They simply don't care anymore at all as it seems.
Now he's also presenting all the Chinese stuff as well – they are actually ahead in the game already.
NBA is doing this to themselves too. They keep banning these amazing youtube channels that put up 10min highlight reels within minutes of the game ending. These videos are getting millions of views and instead of hiring them the NBA has been legally harassing them for years and the biggest one announced this week he's finally shutting down for good.
There's plenty of other examples of this in the NBA itself (with their half-baked streaming options) which I'm sure exists in most other sports.
One big one is they should have a library of every game ever for a subscription fee or individual access fee - it's pretty much impossible besides bittorrent or DailyMotion to find old classic games online (even from 2012 playoff finals).
They are all just throwing money into a dumpster fire by trying to live in the past generation of media.
This is just like how we all had to wait for a decade to get decent websites from every major retail-facing corporation, instead of a non-interactive static glorified contact form website. I expect it will take another decade for the big media companies to get proper leadership.
I suspect it's ESPN and their ilk that pay a very hefty premium for the rights to distribute similar highlight reals. Why watch highly-opinionated fluff content when you can get the goods straight from youtube?
On the other hand, the NFL does a good job of making highlights available on their own site very fast, and there are a lot of youtubers using NFL film access to do in-depth breakdowns of players and games.
> LEGO sued him for having something which somehow resembled a LEGO brick in his logo.
Not true. They did not sue him, they just informed him nicely. Also, he in fact had a logo newly registrated for his businss which was resembling an old trademark of lego. This was not about his youtube-channel but his attempt to make a serious business of it. So this was just problem between two companies making money, totally normal and AFAIK demanded by law.
That guy was just spinniung tales and profiting on this to push his own business by playing the poor victim of a hobby-channel.
> Also, he in fact had a logo newly registrated for his businss which was resembling an old trademark of lego.
So they decide to piss him off over such a triviality? That's a terrible decision; if the guy's an enthusiast with an audience, you try to put him on a payroll and go full market fanfare for you; making him change his logo and pissing him off in the process has zero opportunities to increase profit for LEGO in any way and lots of ways to backfire.
Mixed blessing. There was - and is - plenty wrong with Bricklink. The guy who bought it wasn't nearly as nice as the guy that started it (who died in a car crash, his mom then sold it).
Could you explain, for someone outside the AFoL community, what the downside to this acquisition is? What do people fear will change? What kind of innovation are fans looking for that Lego isn’t providing?
I’m also particularly curious what you mean about Chinese products – what have they been innovating in where Billund has been stagnant? I confess my only familiarity there has been in trying to separate knock-offs from genuine out-of-production sets on eBay.
I love Lego's products, and have decades of fond memories with them, but every interaction I've ever had with the company itself has been kind of disappointing in terms of quality of service. I hope that's not a bad sign for BrickLink.
Why is this bad news? The article has pretty positive spin.
LEGO's finally been realizing that they should target adults over the last several years, and have been seemingly successful. I know more adults with recent LEGO sets now than ever.
I was cautiously optimistic until they said unequivocally that they'll be stopping all sales of BrickArms and other fan-made/third-party accessories. (And moralizing about not supporting "warfare and violence" while continuing to sell Lego Indiana Jones sets with rifle-toting Nazis.)
This is probably going to kill BrickArms. Most of their sales are through BrickLink.
Not sure they will be interested in keeping that alive. Additionally I am guessing they will remove BrickArms content from Bricklink at some point.
---------
Will this have any impact on BrickLink's independence?
> Yes, and no. BrickLink will no longer be an "unofficial" marketplace and will need to be conscious of the fact that it is representing the LEGO brand in a much more direct way than before. However, BrickLink's target audience (AFOLs) will remain unchanged, and the BrickLink brand itself will remain intact.
Statements of CEOs and acquiring companies around the time of acquisition should be valued at exactly nothing. They'll do what ever they want to do in time no matter what they say today.
No one has mentioned GBC yet (Great Ball Contraption). GBC is a great hobby for adults, especially if you have kids. Bricklink is indispensable to find parts for GBC.
When my son was younger - about 7 years ago - I got really into making GBC contraptions with him. The hardest bits to find were the damn Lego balls! I paid someone on eBay $1 per ball for only 20 of them, not including shipping. I have no idea if it's better now, but I'm always amazed at the numbers of Lego balls the GBC events have. Where did they get them all??
That’s about right for the price. They’re not cheap. There’s copies that do the same job, but like in any hobby, people look down on the “fakes” despite them being functionally the same thing.
Like most niche secondary markets, Lego resale has a lot of interesting dynamics from a variety of participants. For example, some unopened sets have historically done well as investment vehicles once out of production [1].
I hold the Lego Group in high esteem as a company (no affiliation, just a lifelong fan) and I hope that they will do well by this acquisition. However, it also raises questions about the economic and social effects on niche resale communities when the original producer also owns the aftermarket. What would it be like if Nike or Adidas purchased reselling platforms like StockX? What if, back in the bubble, the company behind Beanie Babies had owned the aftermarket platform? IDK how it changes incentives for the company or the market participants, but it's interesting to think about. I would appreciate any insights on the question.
Look no further than StubHub / ticket scalper sales. There was a great article a while back talking about tacit agreements between originators and scalpers (scalpers provide a baseline load, and detailed / last minute customer care without involving the originator).
> I hold the Lego Group in high esteem as a company
Lego started off on the theft of IP, as a company they've been absolutely ruthless in enforcing their fraudulently obtained patents. They then attempted to whitewash this.
They're a great toy, and there is a lot of good about them but their origin story and quite a lot of their behavior is not nearly as nice as they'd like you to believe.
Wish Lego "reissue" old sets more, kinda feel like they are the same as Wizards of the Coast with Magic cards. I'll always regret not getting the Technic Mercedes truck (42043) when it was generally available. Argubly that's one of the biggest and most complicated set. Price is now ~400€ but it was 150€ before. Oh well
This is a great idea. Supposedly the LEGO factory is set up to produce anything - let me order some nostalgia set from 1983! Like how the Magic: The Gathering people have undermined "rare" cards by just printing so many they can never be valuable.
As a kid, I always wanted the Galactic Mediator [0] set. It was $60 at the time, which my parents could never afford. It'd be cool to see a reissue of that.
You remember the Millennium Falcon at scale for the mini figs a couple of years ago? I was that close buying on, but I said to myself 500 buck is tad expensive. They now sell them for more than 3k last time I checked... Maybe next te around...
One of the most dangerous ideas to get in your head is that you can invest your money in such a way as to get a more than 10x return in less than 30 years; it leaves you vulnerable to a great number of scams and bubbles.
10x would be ridiculous, but so far LEGO's limited run models means that if you buy a popular model at the end of its run for its normal store price, you can effectively double that money by just having it in a closet for 1~2 years. Are you going to get rich off of a LEGO buy-now-sell-later scheme? Heck no. But is it a perfectly sensible way to double a small amount of money over a 1~2 year period? Absolutely.
Yes, it's a sad story. I worked at BrickLink shortly after he died and the company was acquired, and helped port some of his code to Java. It was all very dense ASP (classic, not ASP.net!) and SQL Server stored procedures. It was written perfectly for what it was: the product of one person's passion, one person's mind.
He did lots of little simple things, like just delete all data after 30-days. This decision alone saved an incredible amount of complexity (and was charmingly naive).
I've always been a minimalist myself, but I'd never seen minimalism taken so far. This was a very active, very data-intensive webapp that served the whole world basically running on two machines. It was a the webapp version of that 'aha' moment you get when you see what someone can do with 1k or 10k of code in code golf or the demoscene. We all pay a very heavy price for collaborating on software!
Bad news for Lego resellers, the original manufacturer taking full control of the bulk of the secondary market for their product can't end well for the people active in that marketplace. Fortunately I never really bet on Bricklink (didn't want to set up shop in someone else's ecosystem), but there are plenty of people augmenting their living there.
yeah, when I read this headline, my first reaction was "uh-oh" -- for years, Bricklink has been the only reasonable way to get specific [i.e., not subject to pick-a-brick selection]
bulk parts / bricks -- the stuff my kid and I build wouldn't be possible without Bricklink -- I sure hope they don't functionally torpedo it, or just kill it outright
I don't think so, in the end BrickLink is more like ebay then amazone, i.e. a platform which helps you by from other shops. And it also has the custom builds program.
If they crack down on reselling parts someone will just create a new platform doing that. What might be lost is some of the custom builds stuff and "automatically find parts" functionality. At last for some time.
Through they might put up a bit more quality assurance, i.e. follow complains about non-official LEGO parts being sold and similar. It also prevents the platforms from starting to sell non-Lego blocks and figures.
Through we probably can be sure that militaria LEGO builds are not unlikely to disappear.
If I had to guess, this is related to Brickset working with LEGO to sell those custom sets recently. They're probably going to sell extra stuff occasionally through it and maybe some exclusive parts etc. Leaving the reselling alone. Just a thought.
I'd be a bit concerned too. I have got the distinct feeling that over the last ten years or so Lego has been working harder to control both it's image and how the fan community uses its products. Stuff like suing YouTubers for a variety of reasons and being ever stricter about how and when you can use the Lego name.
My concern would be that Lego will make BrickLink the "approved" community and resale site and make it harder for alternatives to exist.
I hope I'm wrong, but I cant help but think that because the resale/collector value of Lego increases it would make sense for Lego to try and control that market.
I was wondering what would be the general opinion of the effect this will have on BrickLink going forward. I, too, am concerned about how this will affect BrickLink's autonomy to operate as it has for years.
Bricklink will be hard to beat for an alternative marketplace, it's been tried a couple of times by people not happy with the way Bricklink was run but just like Ebay it's a two sided marketplace and those have very strong network effects that once a party is established make it very hard to enter that market.
As an AFOL: I'm actually cautionally optimistic about this.
I actually trust the TLG to do good here. They have had a bunch of exposure to the "internet people", over the years. I think they'll handle this well.
> The original Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System was born out of a collaboration between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Lego group. In 1985, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, then Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of The Lego Group, heard of the work of MIT's Seymour Papert and was struck by how similar his goals of learning through building were to those of The Lego Group’s newly formed educational division. The Lego Group began a partnership with Papert’s Media Lab, funding their research and sharing ideas.
Also, if TLG fucks this up: It's not like it's that hard for someone to create a new bricklink-like brick trading site.
Readit News
I'm sorry for Bricklink, may you rest in peace!
Maybe it's LEGO attempt to clutch at any straw and they finally trying to be better, but I really doubt it. LEGO has moved themself into a position where they are really cornered. No innovation, fat price tags on everything... – There is a German guy who had a LEGO store in Frankfurt, called "Held der Steine" (hero of the bricks). His YouTube account is quite popular and became a meme in Germany. LEGO sued him for having something which somehow resembled a LEGO brick in his logo. On his channel he reviewes all the "new" stuff LEGO is putting on the market; and he's showing how desastrous the Danish company became. They simply don't care anymore at all as it seems.
Now he's also presenting all the Chinese stuff as well – they are actually ahead in the game already.
There's plenty of other examples of this in the NBA itself (with their half-baked streaming options) which I'm sure exists in most other sports.
One big one is they should have a library of every game ever for a subscription fee or individual access fee - it's pretty much impossible besides bittorrent or DailyMotion to find old classic games online (even from 2012 playoff finals).
They are all just throwing money into a dumpster fire by trying to live in the past generation of media.
This is just like how we all had to wait for a decade to get decent websites from every major retail-facing corporation, instead of a non-interactive static glorified contact form website. I expect it will take another decade for the big media companies to get proper leadership.
On the other hand, the NFL does a good job of making highlights available on their own site very fast, and there are a lot of youtubers using NFL film access to do in-depth breakdowns of players and games.
Not true. They did not sue him, they just informed him nicely. Also, he in fact had a logo newly registrated for his businss which was resembling an old trademark of lego. This was not about his youtube-channel but his attempt to make a serious business of it. So this was just problem between two companies making money, totally normal and AFAIK demanded by law.
That guy was just spinniung tales and profiting on this to push his own business by playing the poor victim of a hobby-channel.
So they decide to piss him off over such a triviality? That's a terrible decision; if the guy's an enthusiast with an audience, you try to put him on a payroll and go full market fanfare for you; making him change his logo and pissing him off in the process has zero opportunities to increase profit for LEGO in any way and lots of ways to backfire.
I’m also particularly curious what you mean about Chinese products – what have they been innovating in where Billund has been stagnant? I confess my only familiarity there has been in trying to separate knock-offs from genuine out-of-production sets on eBay.
The quality / price ratio. Chinese knockoffs are 90% of the quality for 25% of the price.
Prices have been about the same at 10c/brick or lower for pretty much forever. It's more that kits are getting more detailed than ever.
LEGO's finally been realizing that they should target adults over the last several years, and have been seemingly successful. I know more adults with recent LEGO sets now than ever.
This is probably going to kill BrickArms. Most of their sales are through BrickLink.
https://www.brothers-brick.com/2019/11/26/news-the-lego-grou...
Not sure they will be interested in keeping that alive. Additionally I am guessing they will remove BrickArms content from Bricklink at some point.
---------
Will this have any impact on BrickLink's independence?
> Yes, and no. BrickLink will no longer be an "unofficial" marketplace and will need to be conscious of the fact that it is representing the LEGO brand in a much more direct way than before. However, BrickLink's target audience (AFOLs) will remain unchanged, and the BrickLink brand itself will remain intact.
Source: https://www.bricklink.com/r3/announcement/lego_bl_faq.page
Here are some GBC examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWd3vgLaA_M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9_b6PzrqyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpBa59oOjVc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XqnTFSPG1I
See also: http://www.greatballcontraption.com/wiki/Main_Page
I hold the Lego Group in high esteem as a company (no affiliation, just a lifelong fan) and I hope that they will do well by this acquisition. However, it also raises questions about the economic and social effects on niche resale communities when the original producer also owns the aftermarket. What would it be like if Nike or Adidas purchased reselling platforms like StockX? What if, back in the bubble, the company behind Beanie Babies had owned the aftermarket platform? IDK how it changes incentives for the company or the market participants, but it's interesting to think about. I would appreciate any insights on the question.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/lego-coll...
Lego started off on the theft of IP, as a company they've been absolutely ruthless in enforcing their fraudulently obtained patents. They then attempted to whitewash this.
They're a great toy, and there is a lot of good about them but their origin story and quite a lot of their behavior is not nearly as nice as they'd like you to believe.
[0] https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/6984_Galactic_Mediator
He did lots of little simple things, like just delete all data after 30-days. This decision alone saved an incredible amount of complexity (and was charmingly naive).
I've always been a minimalist myself, but I'd never seen minimalism taken so far. This was a very active, very data-intensive webapp that served the whole world basically running on two machines. It was a the webapp version of that 'aha' moment you get when you see what someone can do with 1k or 10k of code in code golf or the demoscene. We all pay a very heavy price for collaborating on software!
If they crack down on reselling parts someone will just create a new platform doing that. What might be lost is some of the custom builds stuff and "automatically find parts" functionality. At last for some time.
Through they might put up a bit more quality assurance, i.e. follow complains about non-official LEGO parts being sold and similar. It also prevents the platforms from starting to sell non-Lego blocks and figures.
Through we probably can be sure that militaria LEGO builds are not unlikely to disappear.
My concern would be that Lego will make BrickLink the "approved" community and resale site and make it harder for alternatives to exist.
I hope I'm wrong, but I cant help but think that because the resale/collector value of Lego increases it would make sense for Lego to try and control that market.
There already is https://brickowl.com
Gonna miss you Bricklink, its was good while it lasted.
I actually trust the TLG to do good here. They have had a bunch of exposure to the "internet people", over the years. I think they'll handle this well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms#History
> The original Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System was born out of a collaboration between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Lego group. In 1985, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, then Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of The Lego Group, heard of the work of MIT's Seymour Papert and was struck by how similar his goals of learning through building were to those of The Lego Group’s newly formed educational division. The Lego Group began a partnership with Papert’s Media Lab, funding their research and sharing ideas.
Also, if TLG fucks this up: It's not like it's that hard for someone to create a new bricklink-like brick trading site.
That was my first thought.