Lego Goes Back to the Basics: Building Blocks

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Slashdot recently covered Lego's plan to stop producing its Mindstorms line in response to the Danish company's worst financial loss in history. While the original article linked focused primarily on Lego's plans to cease production on various toy lines, Yahoo News now has a follow-up article that looks in greater detail at Lego's plan for the future. 'We are returning to Lego's former concept,' says Lego owner and president Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. 'We're going to focus on building bricks as our main product, concentrating on little kids' eagerness to assemble.' Kristiansen goes on to blame the company's financial woes on its attempt to follow trends rather than focusing on its more traditional products. In turn, the company's plan for 2004 will include a renewed marketing push for Lego bricks as opposed to licensed products like the Harry Potter and Star Wars lines. Toy researcher Joern Martin Steenhold also notes the following in the article: 'All research, including my own, shows that computer games and other electronic games take up only 20 to 30 percent of children's play time. Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?"

Comments

First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

I always preffered unabashed Lego sets.

Having 100 of each was great. The sets with instructions were fun, but it really was more enjoyable to be creative. That's what we should getting children to do anyways.

Re:First Post

[bigman2003]

Lego could probably be a very profitable company for a long, long time. All they need to do is sell plastic blocks (which they price very high). Their move of getting rid of the electronics, tie-ins, etc is a good one. I wonder if they will dump the theme parks too.

20 years ago, someone at Lego thought that they should be a huge powerhouse company, with their hands in everything. Why not just be a medium sized company, making a few million dollars of profit every year with your core business?

Walgreens pharmacy did a similar thing. It seemed like suddenly every single corner had a Walgreens on it- everywhere you looked, another frickin Walgreens. Now, craploads of them have gone out of business, and the corner is left with a VERY cheap building. They didn't do themselves, or anyone else any good by over-expanding. (My old neighborhood had an awesome coffee shop that leased a corner building. Eventually, the landlord sold the corner lot, the coffee shop went out of business, and nice shiny new Walgreens was built. 2 years later, it is an empty building, where once my favorite coffee shop, with a fireplace even, stood.)

What does that have to do with Legos? Over expansion- the urge to be big, instead of concentrating on what works for you.

Re:First Post

[Afrosheen]

When I was really young, around 9 or 10, I actually wrote a letter to Lego, begging them for a double-sided Lego brick. Either double-male or double-female, I drew pictures and everything. Lego, in their infinite wisdom, wrote back a few months later with some legalese bullshit about how they can't accept idea submissions from outside sources, particularly not children.

This was nearly 20 years ago. I think they should've taken my advice instead of doing Star Wars co-marketing.

Re:First Post

[whittrash]

At Christmas I went through Target and checked out the Lego selection. It was pathetic. The legos I really wanted to see were Iraq legos, with Saddam in a Spider hole, Hummers, tanks, 4th Infantry Division Bradley Fighting vehicles, a prison and barracks, that would be cool. There were no space legos, no pirate legos, no medieval legos, no modern day legos (helicopter, ambulance, race car etc.). All they had were stupid NBA, Harry Potter, Star Wars and some useless NASA rockets and a bunch of crap. I didn't even see the bucket of plain legos which is my favorite. I have never, ever bought legos which were of a branded product (like Harry Potter or NBA), that isn't the point of Legos (Although the NBA arena they sell would make a very good deathmatch arena for wily humans vs. the alien robots or humans infected with dinasaur DNA). Legos are only useful when you can build an asteroid base with a small army of space pirates (who have a black flagged pirate space ship complete with sails) and they wage war with the Space Patrol and space miner Bill and his dump truck crew over a mining facility which always gets destroyed in a massive conflagration and has to be rebuilt in a new configuration. You can't do that with a Shaq lego set, all the imagination is cut off. They don't sell any of the right parts for a time machine anymore. And how am I supposed to build a fusion generator with my niece and nephew that overloads blowing up half the planet with the gimpy legos they sell now. No wonder they are losing cash.

I still play with my Lego :)

[grub]

Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?

I'm 38 and still monkey with Lego. When I was sick at home for a few days I had a little contest running with myself. I had built a small Lego "bridge" that could span a piece of legal paper lengthwise (14") then would place a glass of water on it. If the bridge didn't hold then I had water to clean up. If the bridge held for 5 minutes I'd tear it down then 're-engineer' it with less pieces than before. All the regular bricks, no cheating with the longer pieces. :)

When you're sick a bit of a mental challenge helps you forget the illness. (I was doing this with my Lego blocks from 30+ years ago but I have a lot of Mindstorms stuff too, it's leet)

what I would like to see

[mpost4]

is a return to the way legos were sold in the 80's, not in sets, yes there were those, but you could also just get a generic set. I have not see a generic set in the stores around here, they all are some set based on some movie game or some thing, but no generic set.

Re:what I would like to see

[TopShelf]

The great thing about doing this (going back to generic set sales) for Lego is that it drastically reduces their costs while also directing focus back where it belongs - on the open-ended nature of the toy. Instead of directing a kid to build Hogwarts or something, let them build whatever their imagination comes up with...

Re:what I would like to see

[broller]

They come in buckets now. They were called Freestyle sets throughout the 90's, but I'm not sure what the series name is now. Check your local Lego aisle for buckets full of windows, bricks, etc.

If it's individual kinds of parts in bulk you want, shop.lego.com still sells the service packs that they've always sold through the Shop At Home catalog, as well as the rest of their product line.

For single special parts, or any other sort of non-set purchase, BrickLink is a great resource. That's where the resellers break down the sets they buy from stores and sell the parts individually. If you want 300 wigets in blue, bricklink is the best way to find them.

Re:what I would like to see

[tuffy]

The great thing about doing this (going back to generic set sales) for Lego is that it drastically reduces their costs while also directing focus back where it belongs - on the open-ended nature of the toy. Instead of directing a kid to build Hogwarts or something, let them build whatever their imagination comes up with...

If the sets were built with generic pieces, a kid could build Hogwarts from the directions. Then, he could tear it down and build a bunch of completely different things that look nothing like the picture on the box. The first yellow castle set I got back in the late 70s was like this - packed with plenty of plain pieces and only a handful of specialized ones.

Then, as early as the mid-80s, Lego started using specialized "castle wall" pieces that weren't useful for anything other than assembling medieval-looking buildings. It was a downward trend, though I didn't realize it at the time.

Re:what I would like to see

[damian]

In Cologne Germany they have a lego shop where you can fill up cups of different sizes with lego blocks from a good selection and than pay by cup size. Similar to some sweet store.

"What about the Slashdot Crowd?"

[duffbeer703]

The problem with the Slashdot crowd is that not as many /.'ers play with legos and one might think. Most of us have jobs and lives that prevent us from playing with cool toys.

On the other hand, Lego's problems lay deeper than a bloated product line. Lego toys are way, way too expensive. Even when I was a little kid twenty years ago, my parents bought me high quality knockoffs at Sears for like 1/3 the cost of Legos. I imagine that it's worse today.

Re:"What about the Slashdot Crowd?"

[Tassach]

The great part about parenthood is that "having a life" means that you spend time with the kids. Having kids means that you can go out and blow a wad of money on toys and not feel guilty about it. My munchkin is still a little young for lego, but when he's a little older you can bet that he & I are going to be spending many hours playing legos together.

Re:"What about the Slashdot Crowd?"

[ShadyG]

Don't know how young your munchkin is, but my 2yo daughter is currently helping me build the meter-long Death Star. I pick out one example of a piece of which I need 34 and tell her to find 33 more of them. She really digs it. It helps with her fine motor skills (handling the small pieces), fine shape distinctions (1x1 plate with a loop at the end is different from a 1x1 plate without), and counting. And when we finish a page of building, she cheers.

It may take 10x as long as doing it myself, but who cares? That just means more time playing with Legos!

Stupid LEGO pieces

[nuggz]

The problem with LEGO is the stupid pieces.
Grab a random $20 kit at a store, it's full of special pieces with no real use.
What happened to actual blocks? you get only a few if any in the average kit.

I was going to buy lego for some children, until I realized I would need a moderate fortune to give them a decent assortment of basic pieces.

Back to the basics? Good...

[John_Booty]

I like the "back to the basics" idea. Today's Lego sets look way too specialized to me- too many specialized pieces, not enough basic Lego bricks- so there's a lot less creative potential. They also look way too expensive.

I think that selling basic Lego sets again is a nice potential return to the things I liked about Legos as a kid in the early 80's. It would be nice if they could sell the basic sets in addition to the fancier licsensed sets and the advanced products like Mindstorms instead of canning those products entirely, but all in all I like this move.

Finally

[Remlik]

This makes me very happy to hear. I'm 25 and my favorite lego series was the "Model Team" with the Semi trucks, jeeps, vans, helicopters and generally cool, LARGE fully functional models of real life vehicles.

I recently rebuilt my model team semi and it now rests proudly on my desk. Right now they have a very nice lego Shuttle in the stores for $50 bucks (same price as most of the model team models back in the day, and even today on ebay)that I've been trying to convince my wife we need...hehe

Its really disapointing to go to the store and see Soccer, Harry Potter, and Star Wars sets with little more than 20 pieces and some look alike action figures. Give the kids somthing that will take them a few hours to build and leave them enough blocks to construct something different if they should choose.

Just this weekend I noticed some new sets out called "design sets" that were of normal everyday objects (one was a pontoon plane) and each set is capable of being at least 3 different things. (I assume they have docs inside which show how to convert as well..at least the last technic model I bought did)

This is the lego I remember and love, and I think more parents would rather buy somthing that can be more than just a scene from SW or HP.

Reminds me of an old joke

[ThinWhiteDuke]

Do you know the difference between a clitoris and a Lego brick?

If you don't, keep playing with Lego.

Lego's importance cannot be overstated.

[smackdotcom]

Lego was by far my favourite toy growing up. Indeed, I played with the stuff so much that I am convinced that it has affected my thinking patterns, and in good ways. My visual-spatial sense is excellent, and my mind is forever trying to break down problems into modular pieces; or, seeing a collection of modular components, trying to figure out intriguing ways to assemble them into a larger system. In short, ladies and gentlemen, I think in Lego.

That said, I hope that the Lego company goes about this the right way. The things I always wanted as a youngster were more hinges and other such articulated pieces in order to build things like spacecraft and vehicles with moving parts; doors and hatches that open, sensors that swivel, and so forth. Lego's strengths were always in the design of clever models that most of us would build at least once. You could learn some neat tricks by understanding how the model designers accomplished a particular effect using a small number of bricks. I agree with posters to a previous Lego story who criticized the overabundance of specialized pieces (anathema to the creative Lego builder) and the rather exorbitant prices of Lego kits.

Perhaps Lego has decided that its future is no longer in robotics, but computers can play a role in its revival. Embrace the Internet! As so many slashdotters will attest, there are large numbers of people for whom Lego remains a unique creative outlet. Work to bring them together through the Net, and offer to sell them what they want through that same channel. More standardized, well-thought-out basic bricks, offered with the promise of volume discounts through Internet purchases. Parents who still enjoy Lego and can get access to their favourite toy in bulk and share their love of creating with a community of fellow builders will have kids who will get an early taste of the joys of building with little plastic blocks, and will thus pass on the hobby to the next generation.

Gender-neutral play

[jmb-d]

I've got 2 test subjects, er, 21-month-old boy/girl twins at home, and we allow them to play with whatever toys they want to.

Generally, they both play with (and share) the Duplo blocks (Legos are still a choking hazard), the Matchbox cars, the Mr. (and Mrs.) Potato Head, the Brio trains, my bass amp, and so on. There are also baby dolls (boy/girl twins, like them), various stuffed critters, and the Little Tykes kitchen our friends gave them. And books -- tons of 'em. Boynton, Little Golden Books, DK, Shel Silverstein poetry, Dr. Seuss, Pooh (AA Milne, not the Disney-fied crap), etc. They sometimes insist on taking a book to bed with them at nap time...

Does my son play with the trains more than the kitchen? Seems like it to me.

Does my daughter play more with the baby dolls? Again, seems like it to me.

Do we "direct" them in their play, shooing them away from any particular toy or "suggesting" to them to play with something else instead?

Absolutely not.