I would agree here except that’s not really how the LEGO power structure works. Niels B. Christiansen is an experienced businessman with no history of toymaking, to be sure, but despite being CEO he really doesn’t do that much with the company. Most of the actual running of LEGO A/S, and its parent company, KIRKBI A/S, is done by the LEGO heir, Thomas Kirk Christiansen, who has no such background.
I think the main issue here is businessmen all over the world are more concerned with the theoretical idea of making money than the process of getting there and the long-term ramifications therein. You can replace Niels or Thomas with anyone else and you will get the same result. I have my issues with Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, former CEO of the LEGO group, but it is abundantly clear he knew how to make a tremendous amount of money and deliver quality products that strengthened the brand’s identity and its public reputation.
All the goodwill LEGO is currently burning through at a rapid pace with their underhanded tactics and placing all chips on Ninjexo-fonicle was built almost entirely by Jørgen. It is a shame the people now involved don’t pay closer attention to what he did.
Such an unfortunate trend. I think companies with hundreds of billions of dollars on the line would do well to hire a court jester of sorts; someone with no significant executive power but with full jurisdiction as quality control, to decry awful ideas with impunity. Tunnel vision is a nasty thing to suffer from, and apparently it’s spreading in the business world.
Does Thomas Christiansen have a background in LEGO/the toy industry, or is he himself also another opportunistic businessmen that doesn’t have that much of an interest in LEGO itself as a hobby?
And if word on the street is true, original themes will have licensed properties mixed in with them to keep up sales. There won’t be pure original lines in the future. Everything must be supplemented with licensed material.
Judging from that short teaser @Ghid posted for the upcoming Dreamz x HTYD x F&F crossover theme and what info @ajtazt got from his circles, Lego may be finally done making OG lines.
Which, is to say, is a very alarming sign of things to come.
The only hope I have ATM, like the “Smart Brick”-using sets, is that this will hit them back a little bit.
Maybe what many have been saying is true, and the only way for Lego to change for the better is to undergo both a smaller recession & another leadership change.
This seems to be a pretty dire statement without a lot to back it up at the moment. We don’t know that we won’t be getting a new theme next year; even if we just haven’t gotten rumors of it yet, it could start in the summer like DREAMZzz did.
So DREAMZzz is having a crossover. In 2015, many LEGO themes got a crossover–it was called LEGO Dimensions, and Ninjago, Chima, and City were all included alongside 3rd-party IP. DREAMZzz also had a crossover with Ninjago in its first few months, so it’s not as if crossovers are out of the question for it. DREAMZzz even has the easiest handwave available: “It was all a dream…”
I’m not a fan of this crossover, but I do think that it’s too early to see this as a herald of the death of original themes. After all, Ninjago’s still out there (though those untrustworthy rumors about Ninjago Smart Brick sets next year had better be as untrustworthy as they seem).
We know there’s a new theme or themes coming. They’ve been up on the LEGO World Builder site forever - the same site that DREAMZzz came from - Detective Bones and Holiday Heroes. Neither of these sound like smash hits, but neither did DREAMZzz’s original pitch, either.
As for LEGO Dimensions, it was a commercial failure.
I highly doubt LEGO won’t make any original themes after this point. Yes, they’ll either get absorbed by the Ninjago hydra or be used as a springboard for licensed properties like DREAMZzz’s corpse has become, but they’ll still happen. They just won’t be isolated anymore.
I also wouldn’t call this a crossover in the traditional sense as LEGO really only ever does crossovers with its own properties. I fear what DREAMZzz is doing is a license deal, making themed sets around an existing external property inside LEGO’s original theme for the purpose of pumping life into what would otherwise be a financial investment into a television show going down the drain.
Now hopefully that’s not the case and it takes the form of an animated short instead. But it’s also really odd that LEGO chose the Fast and Furious franchise to make a collaboration with, as there’s few properties LEGO produces merchandise for that would be as incompatible in concept as that is for DREAMZzz. However if we get animated LEGO Vin Diesel saying Family for 20 minutes it’ll be worth it
Just make a character’s dream (haha so funny xd whaddaya mean this is the cringiest aside ever) be “appear as a main character in F&F 15”. It’s no less cringe and lame than the Ninjago: Rebooted season’s plot of “The Overlord is hiding inside a game that’s just Ninjago’s version of Fortnite, which he then uses to get a tech company to build military robots.” Just because it’s a mid reference doesn’t mean it won’t sell like crazy. After all, Fortnite’s done the same for almost a decade, and it hasn’t had any significant sales decreases.
Not to be nit-picky, but, technically, Rebooted was released years before that game, and the Digiverse shares far more similarities with Ready Player One given its immersive virtual world (incomplete as it was).
Wait, was Dreamzzz originally a pitch on LEGO World Builder? I had no idea about that. Originally when that platform first came out I was very excited, but I haven’t seen anything from that platform actually come to anything… To me it seems almost like LEGO themselves have forgotten that they even created that platform, as the site is awfully inactive, barely got advertised, and the Instagram account for it hasn’t posted anything in almost two years.
Perhaps I’m a bit overly pessimistic, but considering Lego’s current history with in-house themes from 2013 to now, I’d not be surprised if that would end up being the case. (I do hope that I’ll be wrong, though.)
We’ll see, but I’m kind of getting bored with Ninjago & City being the only original themes in Lego’s lineup, TBH.
Not because, I hate them or anything; I, like many other, just want more variety, really.
IDK really, but again, looking at how Lego has been leaning more towards third-party licensed brands over their in-house ones, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if what I envisioned would end up being true.
Frankly, this isn’t that much better than the alternative I’m afraid of.
To me, at least, the core essence and fun factor of original Lego themes are that they can be enjoyed on their own merits, without having third-party characters and elements forcefully shuffled into them.
IMO, if this becomes the only way for Lego to continue making their own themes by watering them down with licensed brands, then I’d rather stop giving them my money onward.
I know that I may sound like a narrow-minded old man yelling at the clouds, but I am simply unable to fathom how this wouldn’t be bad for original themes in general.
Agreed. It’s one thing if it’s a product like Fortnite where the story isn’t the selling point (rather, the existing engine and mod tools are), it’s another when the original product itself (Lego’s building systems) are. They really won’t make more money doing crossovers, anyone who wants the licensed stuff is just going to buy the licensed themes’ sets.
LEGO probably greatly regrets having the site exist at all and would rather it just get memory hole’d out of existence.
I never said it was better; either circumstance is sadly horrible
Agreed. If the future of LEGO is the Ninjexo-fonicle hydra consuming all original ideas and the dregs of what remains being used to sell merchandise for other properties, then my LEGO money is better spent on resale parts than acquiring any new sets.
Perhaps the future of original themes, much like the future of Bionicle, is up to us now.
