159 Comments

  1. Excellent article. You should have asked me for the data, I would have sent it to you and saved you the trouble of scraping it 🙂

    Huw
    Brickset.com

  2. kwilder

    This is remarkable. I love being part of the group of people that love Lego. What a fantastic and thoughtful argument about the prices. Thank you for your work.

  3. kwilder

    Oh, also, I should add that I would like to see if this trend is the same for specific themes, or just over all themes. Although I would guess that the individual themes would show the same general trend you discuss here, one reason individuals might believe in the “price increase fallacy” might be because of the individual themes they support. But again, I think that if you do this, you will find the themes fit the trend as well. If you are looking to go into the numbers more, this might be an interesting area to investigate.

  4. Outstanding work here. After reading a number of complaints about how the price has ‘increased’ over the years, it’s great to see this analytical approach. One additional hypothesis I have is related to the increase in the number of sets released each year, which would appear to be supported by your data. More sets to buy to be ‘complete’ makes for more money out of pocket.

  5. Excellent article. Especially for pointing out how different we remember things from ‘when we were kids.’ (I swear Optimus Prime was two feet tall!) My only criticism is linking to those two Brickset articles about supposed “quality decline”… the headlines are sensationalist and inflammatory, and a LEGO rep eventually replied to the spurious claims with information that deflates much of the (somewhat unfounded) criticism. Also the comments give me a headache. Otherwise great stuff!

  6. Andrew,
    Excellent article, love the analysis. Here is my one observation, the price per piece on some of the pirate ships are high (ex. 6280) because they are smaller ships. The ship hull count as 1 piece but it is one very large piece in the set. Also licensed product do carry a premium it is just not visible to the public.
    Jason

  7. I think there should have been an upper piece cap. A big difference since the 1980s is the ultra large sets like the Death Star. In comparison older large sets were mostly composed of rail tracks and costed more than 150 USD. I don’t know…

    What makes LEGO sets seem more expensive now is that the effective piece count seems lower. I remember that in the 80s, each set was full of bricks that were not overtly specialized only to that set. So they were useful for more things. Now the sets usually come with less bricks and plates (things that could be useful everywhere) and bring more things like minifigure accessories, flick fire missiles and other things that are not that useful. Although I think that everything was far worse in the late 1990s/Early 2000s than it is now.

    • Jessy S.

      Some of the accessories such as flick-fire missiles and minifig accessories can be useful to other sets. For example, the missiles can be used for exhaust stacks on semis or for art in a mosaic project.

  8. Nick

    I would say there’s also a subjective value/piece/cost inherent in how we shop for Lego. I am less willing to pay more for a set that I don’t think is visually worth it regardless of piece count.

  9. Nice and interesting article. I will read it some more times and see what i can say about this. But i am a young person and my feeling is that the lego price has increased as well. :/

  10. Nathan

    One reason that people perceive that the cost of Lego has gone up is that the cost of so many other toys has gone down. You can now buy so much crap for a buck or two that Lego seems like a luxury item in comparison. It’s interesting to look in toy catalogs from the early eighties and see that Lego didn’t seem as costly then because the other toys were all costly as well.

    • Jessy S.

      And a lot of toys have decreased in price because they are fully made in China. LEGO is succeeding because they produce better quality product than any of their competitors. This is even when there is a situation where people complain about the low quality of a LEGO product.

      Here is another thing, people complain about the presence of stickers in a LEGO set. I have news for them, stickers keep down the cost of a set. The latest modular building will have stickers with it, but it isn’t the last time a set geared toward adults will have stickers with it. At least LEGO listened to our wishes and got rid of STAMPS (Stickers across multiple pieces). Still that modular will be the only set that will have a red baseplate and printed golden star tiles. Translation, that set will be very hot on the secondary market when it is retired. It is going to be very hard to source out the baseplate if people try to build Palace Cinema by sourcing its parts. (Which is a project some are doing with Cafe Corner and the UCS Falcon)

  11. Very well written piece. It is very expensive, but as seems to be the trend on here, I would agree you are paying for the quality with LEGO. I like that they have provided the opportunity for adults to build sets with the LEGO Modular buildings range, those sets use real architectural techniques in their construction and are really quite impressive.

  12. I’d be interested in your take on the “adult” sets such as the architecture series. I recently was looking at these sets as a gift but was disappointed by the lack of complexity in the pieces- they were largely specially made pieces that are extremely uni-purpose.
    I wonder is there a market for Legos themed towards adults? One with more traditional building color schemes or should Lego try and share Minecraft’s success?

    • There is definitely a market for LEGO for adults. The modular buildings and other exclusives scratch that itch but there could be so much more. Currently the adult LEGO offerings falls into two categories: sets that look good but are boring to build (architecture) and sets that are fun to build (modular buildings, some Technic). The architecture line is marketed towards adult former fans of LEGO who want something to put on their desk. They can serve as a reintroduction to LEGO for adults.

      I am curious what you mean by specialty pieces in the architecture series. It seems to me they are almost all basic pieces, almost to a fault. Usually the argument is that the Star Wars sets have too many specialty pieces.

  13. Devin R.

    Wow, this was really an eye-opening article. Very well researched and thought out. What’s impressive to me is how Lego has actually used economies of scale to make sets MORE affordable over the years.

  14. I had a lot of Lego as a kid (I’m 50); and my kid has a lot of Lego (a lot!). Long term trend: there is definitely a higher number of smaller pieces now than there used to be. So while the general price has been stable, the average piece size has gone down.

    • Gerry,

      The author’s analysis of price per gram. At the end of the day, LEGOs are more affordable today than they have ever been. They are an amazing toy and I am having so much fun introducing my son and daughter to the joys of a limitless imagination.

      What I have seen, even on the smaller sets, is the increased use of advanced building techniques like SNOT (Studs Not On Top). The simplest sets have become so much fun to build.

  15. Kevin

    It should also be mentioned that a few years back, I think around 2009 roughly, TLG started using smaller boxes for the same size sets. It was part of a move to not only save money, but also become greener as a company. Because the sets now take up less physical space on the shelf, and boxes with the same number of pieces appear smaller than sets from previous years, it could also contribute to the perception that you are getting less for your money today. In reality they are one and the same product.

  16. banban

    I would be interested to see a curve of the variation of the oil price, just to see if the price of the bricks is linked in a way or another to the price of the oil (from which is made the ABS).

  17. […] You could build anything as a kid if you had LEGO bricks. LEGO is not a cheap toy. If you look at the prices now, you get a bit of sticker shock. This guy takes LEGO very seriously and did an incredibly thorough analysis of LEGO prices. […]

  18. DisgustedByUtterIncompetence

    I’d never buy any of that Harry Potter or Star Wars lego junk if I had kids.

    Lego should be about using your own imagination not borrowing from others

    • Karen

      The problem there is that Star Wars took over the Space theme and Harry Potter took over the Castle theme. Just keeping up with the kids- sign of the times. What’s a castle lover to do? Compare 6075 (Castle) with (7094 Kings Castle Siege) and 4757 (Hogwarts) and they all have their own fantastic attributes. Sell the Harry minifigs and buy some crownies- problem solved.

  19. the price status can be defined because (as I heard somewhere) in couple years LEGO will lost their license (patent) for LEGO bricks ( – so all manufacturers will be able to produce bricks that will work fine with origina, LEGO ones.

    So maybe LEGO wants to earn as much as they can until it happens?

    • People have been able to sell bricks “compatible” with Lego for many years. IIRC one of the big competitors is Megabloks, and while their toys are pretty good, they are clearly inferior to Lego. But they are the same size.

      I do recall that there were competitive products in the 70s that were not size-compatible with Lego, because we looked into this as a cheaper alternative. But since the bricks weren’t the same sizes, we didn’t buy them… however, my memory might not be correct.

      • legacy

        Even as a kid it was super obvious which ones in the bin were the knock-offs. I would even go so far as to say that Lego was one of the companies that led me to appreciate quality.

  20. Mtl

    Nice article.
    I just want to add that the size of pieces might cause some noise on the statistics. If you try to buy individual pieces from the LEGO pick-a-brick, it’s easy to note how big pieces (like a flat green 16×16 base) are way more expensive than small ones (let’s say a 1×1 flat piece), of a factor of 10-20.
    This might be reflected in the boxed set too: I noticed at the shop that (regarding LEGO City) “car” sets (cars, trucks, …) costs less than a “house” set with roughly the same amount of pieces. I think the price difference comes from the size of the blocks (bigger blocks for the base/walls of the house) even on sets with ~250 pieces.
    So the ratio of “small pieces sets” vs. “big pieces sets” will effectively alter the price-per-brick of the catalog, and should be monitored over the years too.

  21. I am afraid this is not about lego but about US dollar. Lego is manufactured in Denmark. It’s not the price of Lego going up but the price of dollar going down for 20 years. Good morning!

  22. My parents bought me my first Lego when I was about 3 and it was always one of my favorite toys and also was for my kids as well.

    I definitely recall the huge price jump in the mid-70s which I understand was caused by the oil crisis which resulted in (among many other things) the price of petroleum-based plastic increasingly hugely.

    Nonetheless, I remain a big fan of Lego and although I think they have somewhat moved away from their roots with the excess of licensed products (and the earlier licensed products were, in my opinion, not very good because they contained too many specialized non-generic pieces that weren’t useful for generic building. But that situation is improved and in particular we have found the Star Wars sets to be of most value for generic building, because they generally have very few really specialized pieces (although to be fair the sets are most useful for building other spaceships, etc).

    I’m glad the company was able to reorganize and improve its situation because if and when I have grandkids, I plan on buying them Lego!

  23. dakw

    There is one aspect not looked at in the price and that is the shift to model building vs. creation leading to a change in the utility of the pieces. I seem to need many more sets to get a useful variety of pieces these days as many of the sets contain a lot of pieces that are very specific to the needs of the set and are less useful when one wants to create their own designs. It would be a fascinating addition to rate each of the block types on its utility, perhaps by its prevalence in other sets, and then assess each set on its total utility score. So then the question is how many sets would you need to by to achieve different levels of utility and how has this changed over time.

  24. This. Is. Awesome. I remember running LEGO piece auctions ~1998/99 on RTL (rec.toys.lego) then later my own website. I’d buy sets at Walmart and other places on discount, break them out, and sell the pieces as lots. I knew I’d always make good money if I could average < $0.10/piece cost (ideally around $0.07) and sell for $0.15 – $0.20+ … fun times!

  25. Political econ

    Interesting work but I would like to know whether you would find the amount of new sets offered in toto has changed over the survey period. Is there an economy of scale at work? This seems to have two implications: first, the number of units for a particular set may have increased thereby affecting the price of all sets belonging to that class (but doubtful you could find exactly how many Death Star sets were produced in relation to, say, hogwarts castles); second, the popularity of certain set classes may affect what kinds of sets are available. Like with language, we are all confined to use the words we know. And so with Lego, set designers are confined to use what’s economical, unless, of course, the design calls for new styled pieces. These relations are difficult to grasp in statistical analyses, but would seem to play a role in price steering.

  26. Great article! Here’s a really techy question for you. I like the soft squishy jelly-ness of the lines in your graphs. i just wondered how you softened the curves? Splines?

    • Honestly, all the charts were done in Excel. I tried other methods but that was the easiest since all my data was in excel already. They are X,Y Scatter plots with sooth lines – heavily tweaked. Made the lines thicker which makes it look smoother and changed the layout a bit to make it clearer. The Excel defaults are ugly but if you spend enough time tweaking them you can get something passable.

  27. Is this method of calculating ‘average price of a brick’ fair? Some sets are vastly more popular than others. Extreme prices in extraordinary sets will skew the average. It might be revealing to plot the price of the cheapest brick (minimising price of set / number of pieces) by year, or to plot the price of a brick in the bestselling set by year.

  28. One other thought–while the price per brick has fallen slightly, I would bet that average brick size has dropped significantly as complexity has increased. This may not represent worse value, but it FEELS like worse value–a 500-brick set today is likely to look smaller and weigh less than the older 500-brick sets.

  29. Very nice article! Found it posted on LinkedIn, believe it or not.

    BTW, what language did you write your web scraping program in?

    Thanks very much

    • Weird that it was posted in LinkedIn.

      The final scraping was done in Python. A long time ago when I started it, the prototype was in a language called DM or byond. This is a language created for the purpose of writing 2d online rpgs. It was my first language and was easy to pick up but this was pushing its limits a bit. I actually ran the first scrapping on my other post (the Politics one) in this language. The results were not what I used in the article but it was a good proof of concept.

  30. Steve Bennett

    Hypothesis 3: although the inflation-adjusted price hasn’t increased, the sticker price has. Adults remember paying $10 for a set as a kid, and are naively shocked to see a similar set now costs $20 or more.

    • That’s actually a very big part, but I’d go lower than the $10 sets. The little tiny box sets with one minifig and some small vehicle or accessory that were $1-4 when I was growing up in the 80s now seem to be anywhere from $5 to $12 on the shelves. The cheapest of those are the sets that you could buy as a casual gift with pocket change in the 80s. Related to that, I’d like to see a metric that tracked the bottom price (both sticker price and adjusted price) of sets each year.

  31. I’m speechless. Well done.

    While you’re at it, may I suggest that you do an analysis of the secondary market for LEGO versus other secondary markets. Based on my periodic peeks into Craigslist, ebay and Amazon a used LEGO set holds its value rather well.

    • That is actually sort of my next project. Although, it will probably be limited to Bricklink because there the data is easier to acquire and they keep records of all transactions.

  32. Pearl Y

    The price per minifigure has definitely gone up in the past 5 years. You used to be able to get 4 minifigs (along with some other stuff) at the $9.99 price point, now these are $12.99. And there are fewer minifigs in most $19.99, $29.99, etc. sets now. Lego Minifigures Series 1 was $1.99 each, subsequent series $2.99 each – I know it’s supply and demand, but it still feels kind of exploitative. I admit the cleverness of the builds keeps improving though.

  33. Andy

    Are there any figures on production costs, i.e. how much it costs LEGO to make a brick? I’m guessing it’s less than a cent (for a basic brick), so how can they justify the prices they charge (10-20c per brick)?

  34. I suspect that part of the problem with people’s perception of price is also due to changes in tastes as they grow up. A small child will be pleased with relatively small sets, since their lego collection and experience is likely to be almost non-existent. But as they get older, they will tire of the small sets and want ever bigger sets. For adults, most of the fun is in building rather than playing, meaning that size is everything. This means that over their lifetime, the price an individual person (or their parent) pays for lego sets does go up–because the composition of their purchases changes–even though the prices of lego sets over time does not.

  35. Legos got more expensive, not because their prices went up, but because the price of everythign else has dropped. You can buy a bike for $75 now, where they used to cost 2-3 times that. Compared to the cost of other toys,

    When you walk into a store and you see “sale” on everything but legos, the legos become more expensive..

  36. zmk

    A nice article but I see a few flaws. First of all if the distribution of LEGO sizes/prices is increasingly skewed it is better to either split the sample or look at medians or rolling medians than averages. Secondly, this is a perfect case to run a regression panel regression with time dummies to see both the impact of time and the impact of size on the prices.

  37. When I was a child in the 1960s, I bought most of my own Lego, using money from paper routes I had from the ages of 7-16. But the items I bought we not ‘kits’. They were small boxes of standard bricks. Each box contained only a single shape and colour, but you could find most of the basic shapes 1×1 or 1×2 or 1×4 or 1×8, 2×2 or 2×3 or 2×4, bevels, doors or windows, if you found the right box. The boxes were only 50 cents, and had an average of 12 bricks per box. That works out out to about 4-5 cents per brick. The kits were expensive, but buying the standard boxes was a lot cheaper, and that is what most people did back then. With my paper route, at the age of 7 I could buy 100 pieces per week using my own money. Name any 7 year old that afford to do that now!

  38. E.

    Perhaps other toys are getting cheaper so Lego now seems more expensive by way of comparison.

    Awesome article — thanks! I’ve been wondering about this as my five-year-old has become hooked recently.

  39. So if price per brick declined slightly, how can LEGO’s sales have increased at 24% per year and profits at 41% per year since 2007? An excerpt from my book:

    In just seven years, from 1997 to 2004, the number of elements in the company’s inventory exploded, ascending from slightly more than 6,000 to more than 14,200. So did its range of colors, which climbed from the original six (red, yellow, blue, green, black, and white) to more than fifty. As the number of components and colors mounted, soaring supply and production costs plundered the company’s bottom line. Here’s why.

    A standard brick with two rows of four studs delivers a profit to LEGO that is orders of magnitude greater than any specialized element, all because the brick is what LEGO calls a “universal” or “evergreen” element that can be used in so many different sets. A one-of-a-kind, specialized piece, however, generally works in just one or a few sets. Moreover, the cost of molding a standard brick is orders of magnitude cheaper than producing a specialized piece.

    A mold for a standard LEGO piece costs anywhere from $50,000 to $80,000; over its lifetime, it will spit out some sixty million bricks. The cost of making the mold, spread out over all those bricks, is essentially zero. But when designers concoct a specialized piece and LEGO manufactures just fifty thousand of them, the molding cost rises to as high as $1 per piece. Including just a few of these specialized pieces, as LEGO did with unrelenting frequency during the Plougmann era, can potentially kill a LEGO set’s profit potential.

    This is not to suggest that specialized pieces are bad. Far from it. LEGO Indiana Jones would never feel real without Indy’s whip; LEGO Board Games would never spring to life without their unique dice. But there’s no denying that specialized pieces are costly to produce, and their proliferation was a prime reason why the LEGO Group’s profits plummeted through much of the 1990s, despite steady sales.

    Having launched a painstaking review of each of those 14,200 pieces in the LEGO universe, the Design Lab found that 90 percent of new elements were developed and used just once. And many components were duplicates. Among the dupes were eight minifig police officers and six minifig chefs, with barely decipherable differences between them. The Lab dealt with the redundancies by slashing the total number of components by more than 50 percent. When it reduced the product portfolio’s minifig chef population from six to one, designers protested and longtime fans howled. To calm the fans, LEGO tried humor: it held a mock online memorial service for the “dead chefs.”

  40. One more thought: LEGO is a Danish company. The fluctuations in the price of LEGO such as the big bump around 1985-7 in Figures 1 and 2 could be because of a change in exchange rates. The conversion rate between the Danish Kronor and the US$ went from over 10 in 83 and 84 to less than 7 in 86 and 87. LEGO might have been slow to respond to changes in exchange rates, leading to the temporary bump. If you’d like to share data we can redo your graphs in DKK.

  41. I wonder how much impact the change in CPI metrics had when you accounted for inflation? There was a dramatic change sometime in the nineties in how CPI was measured, essentially attenuating real inflation. If the inflationary trend of Legos was measured using 80’s methods, you might have arrived different picture.

  42. Captain TickTock

    Everytime someone says LEGOs a mini-figure dies 😉
    It’s like building a house out of ‘woods’ rather than ‘wood’.
    LEGO is the brand, the name of the product is LEGO, which consists of LEGO bricks and other pieces, but not LEGOs.

  43. Doug

    I think several things have changed today compared to the late-70s thru late 80s when I primarily collected and played with Lego as a child that add to the perception that Lego is getting more expensive over time; or at least from my point of view as a MOC (my own creation) builder rather than a collector.

    1. Color diversity: Back in the 80s, most sets were comprised of a few basic colors; red, blue, yellow, white, gray, and black. It was much easier to acquire a “critical mass” of pieces in each color to start building one’s own creations in coherent color schemes. Space, Town, Castle sets all had the same basic colors. Today Lego uses a much wider array of colors in their sets. While this adds a lot of variety and visual appeal to today’s sets, this means that one has to buy a much larger number of sets (or scour bricklink) to get achieve a workable critical mass of pieces in each color. After buying some of the modern sets, I end up with a few dark-blue or lime-green pieces that I don’t really have enough to much with other than use as accent colors. They end up in my misc color bin in the event I decide to build the set they originally came with or sell them off on bricklink.

    2. Piece diversity: Today the total range of piece types and the number of new piece types introduced every year has skyrocketed since the decade of the 80s. As a kid, the new pieces introduced every year were indeed one of the great answers to my parents’ pleas of “don’t you already have ENOUGH Legos?!?!” However, the quantity of new piece types again coupled with the broad color diversity again requires much more Lego to be purchased to attain that “critical mass”.

    3. Licensed themes: In the 80’s the Lego sets were more generic and interchangeable among themes. There were the basic Space, Town, Castle themes. The color schemes within a theme were more homogeneous (i.e. Blacktron sets or Mtron sets all had a common color scheme). Since there was no “fictional” real life object being copied, piece selection tended to emphasize versatility over “realism”. Almost every Lego set of the past had pictures of alternate models featured on the boxes and instructions that was meant to inspire a child to not just build the model featured in the instructions, but to embark on the mental challenge of making their own creations.

    Today, generally the creator sets only emphasize Lego as a building system. They come with pieces and instructions for two alternate models. Generally, Creator sets utilize a more basic color selection and look less “realistic” due to the emphasis on a versatile piece selection. Contrast that with current licensed themes and even Lego’s own proprietary themes. Themed/licensed sets are now trying to achieve more “realistic” models. As a result, piece and color selection skews toward more specialized pieces and colors again making the “critical mass” of pieces harder to achieve.

    4. Collectability/Internet/Ebay: While Lego has always been a somewhat collectible product, the age of the internet has increased the collectability of Lego. Nostalgic adults came together on the internet to trackdown and re-acquire sets from their child hood. I think Lego has embraced this as evidenced by large limited edition sets aimed at the adult market. This is also evident in the increase in tempo of development of sets and themes that drive the collector to want to buy more and more; which overall is good for Lego. In the past, an individual set and theme seemed to have more life than they do now.

    So as a MOC builder, I have found that I tend to design MOCs on LDD and acquire parts as needed for each MOC from bricklink. I now tend to pass on licensed themes. I am especially turned off by the rehashing of many of the Star Wars vehicles. Sets that I buy tend to be Creator sets for my kids or the occasional “special edition” set that appeals to me such as the Sopwith Camel set.

      • slowcat

        Just to be clear, I was referring to the brick buckets at the top of the page. I didn’t scroll down to see the Creator sets you had already mentioned.

        I bought a few of the larger buckets for my nephews a couple years back to boost their brick piles and also to give them a durable storage container. I remember keeping my bricks in an old gallon ice cream bucket for years until my collection outgrew the thing.

  44. […] What Happened with LEGO When I was working on my last presentation, I totally had the idea of buying a bunch of lego people and taking pictures to make the slides (like those awesome slide decks you see online).  However I was surprised to find that you didn’t just buy a pack of people, but you could buy different bodies, heads, beards, hair, and other accessories – oh, and they weren’t cheap! […]

  45. Phillip

    Great read. I have noticed an absolute drop in quality myself. My sets in my youth range from 83 to 90. My sons are from 2011 and there is a clear distinction. Aside from the weight of identical bricks being different, the older bricks stay together in a much more durable way than the new bricks. To test this, I created the same models using all old bricks and all new bricks and the difference was marked. I understand doing certain things to reduce costs, but not at the expense of quality…

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  49. If there’s a perception of increased cost, I don’t share it. I’ve noticed cheaper and cheaper competition in the plastic brick market, though. I wonder if that has had a bearing on consumer perception.

    For me, brand loyalty wins. I haven’t paid any mind to the competition in years.

  50. Really great, well-researched article. I think you hit the nail on the head here – the fact that there are more expensive sets than ever before affects perception. Also, I’m pretty sure the presence of a baseplate (light but large) in the old sets made them seem bigger. I don’t like the lack of baseplates in new sets – it does make them seem smaller.

    • David

      I agree with Aidan but would expand on his point. It’s not just that the sets seemed bigger; they were. As the relative complexity of sets has increased, so too has the piece count, but there has been an overall decline in the size of the models due to increased build complexity and a corresponding reduction in size of the pieces required to create such detail. The negative affect on perceived value in this is apparent, though I would argue, misguided when one considers the build quality and detail of new and recent sets.

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  52. yorkc

    This research is really great and informative to LEGO folks. I wonder if I may translate it into my language and post it on a LEGO forum?

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  55. Mio

    While I don’t think anyone should complain about the price of Lego, I have to say that I don’t think our nostalgia for the 80s/90s is at all misplaced -it really was a better time to be a yuppy/young parent. There were more and better jobs available with better pay, benefits, and less required prerequisites. Young adults today have to work a lot harder to maintain the same lifestyle our parents had..of course there are exceptions, if you are especially gifted you can still make it in today’s world.

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  59. madscijr

    Another thing different now from when I was a kid (70s/80s) is that the sets contain much fewer basic bricks. It seems the models are made out of all these exotic specialized pieces which are less useful for general building. Is this a business strategy to sell more sets by reducing the reusability, a marketing ploy to sell more pieces by making every set include unique collectable parts, or just trying to make the models look more realistic/slick? I think Lego was more fun when the majority of bricks were basic.

    • legacy

      This is where I landed as well: almost writing off the lego toys as “having switched to non-basic blocks as a way to extract money from customers”. Though I recognize that it’s a perspective that might be out of date, I don’t think I’ve recovered from it.

      I would welcome a shift to “Lego basics” where 1×1 – 2×4 bricks are sold for a 5-8c each, even if they were a single colour to reduce costs.

  60. Andre

    One remark about how Lego did not get more expensive, looking at these charts with adjusted prices. Some people complain that while newer sets do contain many pieces for the price, many of the pieces are just small insignificant pieces like connectors. You chart showing weight per adjusted price takes this into account very well. However keeping in mind that people do have a short memory, you should also have a look at this very chart starting from 2000 to now. Then you can see a price increase in the last years of about 50%. That is not little and you cannot expect people to have the 1960s prices in mind when complaining.

  61. […] So in essence, with the larger prefab elements in later castle series to replace the simple elements of the yellow castle, Lego exchanged modularity, simplicity and flexibility for more detail, more esthetics, more realism and possibly more revenue (but I’m not sure about the last one). Lego actually went through a whole period where they added more and more (small and large) custom pieces to all of their product groups, not just castles. In short: Lego was walking “the line between giving people more pieces that can be used to add detail and restricting the pieces to inspire creativity.” (Quote from somebody who has really researched and analyzed Lego) […]

  62. Regarding footnote 6, and whether newer bricks are redesigned to save money, I would tend to concur, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

    When LEGO first designed their bricks, there was no CAD (computer aided design). They couldn’t do finite-element analysis to make sure the bricks were strong and flexible enough before the molds are made. Now they can. LEGO elements are manufactured to tight tolerances only exceeded by plastic optical companies. And LEGO wants to make sure that their elements fit together just right, not too tight, not too loose.

    Okay, sure, maybe they do save money by using less plastic, but a big reason top-drawer plastics engineers carefully control the wall thickness to reduce warpage and to be able to run the injection molds faster while maintaining quality. Faster production = cost savings.

  63. […] home base in Billund, where pieces had been primarily manufactured for decades, after the company faced a financial crisis in the early 2000s. This, along with other efforts to reduce expenditures, may be responsible for the reported […]

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