We're taking a short break in our regular Demo Time articles today just because, to throw a little salt and Mentolatum in the mix.
There was a
recent interview with Hasbro (the parent company that owns Wizards of the Coast and thereby, the
Dungeons & Dragons and
Magic the Gathering IPs) CEO Chris Cocks lamenting that they
can't get any more money out of their customers after they've purchased either a physical book or a pack of cards. I say this because I don't know how much of a royalty cut Hasbro gets from the sale each time they lease one of their IPs to anything from a cereal, video game, or a new
3,745-piece LEGO set retailing for $359.99.
First off, I am not saying that the number of pieces, the amount of time it took to create and finalize the design, or the amount of time it took for writers to write a "short" standalone adventure, Red Dragon's Tale, are not all worth $359.99. The set does look pretty incredible both in its detail and the execution. There are also a lot of unique minifigures, which I know is a huge draw for collectors and a reason behind higher prices. The set is also marketed for ages 18+, so it's not likely that your everyday eight-year-old is going to be buying this set.
This isn't the 664-piece King's Castle that a certain six-year-old received for Christmas in the mid-1980s (which the Internet tells me retailed for $52.75 when it was released in 1984). Or even the Forestmen's River Fortress from 1989 that sold for a whopping $37.50 with 357 pieces. Some of where I'm coming at with this article is from a point of jealousy, I recognize that, if that wasn't already obvious, for several reasons. First, is that I don't have $360 lying around to drop on one LEGO set. Second, there isn't a place in our house where this set would fit. And lastly, we have an almost-four-year-old who loves LEGOs and there is a zero percent chance that unless I built that set in my office at work, there will be dozens of missing pieces either during the construction or within five minutes of its completion.
Which then opens up another can of worms. With these licensed LEGO sets from STAR WARS, Super Mario Bros., Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and Harry Potter (Media Bias Check), has the target audience for these particular LEGO sets now become the villainous Dad from The LEGO Movie in wanting sets to be permanent or semi-permanent (e.g. without using the Kragle)? Does the Super Mario LEGO set still hold the same level of interest when it's in a hundred pieces that no longer resemble Level 1-1? Are we become Will Ferrell?
But the main reason that I am writing the poor diatribe of brain vomit nonsense is that I am annoyed that this is the first official
Dungeons & Dragons LEGO set released. I get it though. It's all about spectacle and this is certainly that. LEGO has teased images with other, smaller builds such as the
Mimic Chest*, but to release an entire line at such a high price point I find it off-putting.
D&D and LEGO have always felt they would be perfect. I know, anecdotally, that people have been using LEGO figures instead of
Warhammer/Reaper miniatures for decades now. Still, I feel that releasing a handful of smaller sets between a $5.99 -$39.99 price point before releasing something on this scale would be more digestible. LEGO could even take the pre-painted figure randomized route and release blind box/polybag sets for $6 that include a small setting and a random
D&D figure and a small/medium-sized monster; which it looks like they'll be doing something along these lines in September.
Similar to what this creator did, minus the Red Dragon, because that's way too large to include in a $7-$10 box. And then there's the modular
Dwarven Forge approach, although I feel
that the rooms here are too cluttered to be functional outside of a diorama. Maybe I'm just missing the point altogether?
*[After this article was finished, I found out that the Mimic Chest, at least for now, will only be included as a "thank you" gift of sorts to people who buy the "Red Dragon's Tale" and even then, only a limited number are being produced, likely to create that FOMO effect that companies love to bank on. And that shit works.]
I think I also get annoyed with some of these LEGO Ideas voting poll creations where someone creates a 2,498-piece set that, while looking gorgeous and wonderfully detailed, would likely cost upwards of $300+. Sure, there's a market for massively detailed sets, otherwise LEGO wouldn't have a cap of 3,000 pieces for their LEGO Idea creation submissions and they wouldn't've put out so many of them. But I think that separate from the individual creator's description, there should be a tab that shows how much the set would cost, as generated by LEGO that could not be altered by the creator unless they alter/change the specific pieces used. Or maybe have a price cap, where your submissions can only contain X number of pieces up to an estimated MSRP of $49.99 and use that as a ceiling. Or I guess I could also just unsubscribe from the LEGO Idea Creator emails letting me know that this cool project just got over 10,000 votes and moves on to the next step to possibly become an official LEGO set.
That's it for me now as I think I heard some whippersnappers rustlin' out on muh lawn.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S. Or jeebzus, there's the Rivendell set, with 6,167 pieces for $499.99 which pales in comparison to the Venator Class Republic Attack Cruiser which has 793 fewer pieces at 5,374 for $649.99, which pales in comparison to the Millennium Falcon which has 7,541 pieces, for $849.99. The moral of the story here is that STAR WARS LEGOS can be fucktastically expensive.
P.P.S. AI image generative technology was used to create the cloud that Grandpa Simpson is yelling at because my big box of LEGOS has been sitting in my parent's garage for the past 24 years and I wasn't able to create a cloud with the LEGOs that are currently at my disposal. The Grandpa Simpson image was taken from S13 E13 of The Simpsons, "The Old Man and the Key." All other edits were made manually using MS Paint.
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