Me.
I am John Lego and I decide not to make everyone’s dream Bionicle sets.
Because it wasn’t clear.
I’ve said before I have talked to people inside the LEGO company, including some rather high-ranking folks. The amount of tunnel vision in regards to Smart Play and the smart brick is almost baffling; any argument that the smart brick limited or stifled creativity was dismissed out of hand. LEGO fully anticipated this thing to be a smash hit.
It’s all logistics and actual sales data. Bionicle got burned badly the last time it appeared; the Bionicle Cosplayer minifig is an excellent way to test the waters in that regard, and at that point the Constraction system had a massive library of then-current molds from Hero Factory. There was nothing holding them back outside of a small handful of new pieces to make.
Now, however, Constraction is dead. The ball-and-socket system that does exist is so tied to the standard LEGO System that any Bionicle sets that could be conceived - that would actually look and feel like Bionicle - would either be filled to the brim with specialized pieces or be so large it would price out the key kid market they need to survive, like Bionicle G2’s prices nearly did.
Meanwhile, the smart brick has cross-theme compatibility, doesn’t require nearly as new machines to mold the components as Bionicle G1 did for any given year, and with an expected battery lifespan of fifty years, the cross compatibility this thing would have is immense. You could make Smart Play compatible sets for the next five decades without fear of forcing prior customers out.
Now of course that’s all on paper; reality says the smart brick kinda sucks, is painful to look at, kids don’t care about it, and the price of the sets is a huge turnoff for most people who might otherwise care. But logistically, believe it or not, the smart brick makes more sense than a classic return to Bionicle does.
As for how much money it costed for R&D, most companies see that as completely negligible. If the product pursued is hot enough, who cares what it costs to make? Not LEGO. They’ll just increase prices again because of some unrelated world event that barely impacts them.
Completely true. It’s even more evident when the LEGO Movie 2 did fairly well at the box office, but was detested by so many people it drastically impacted sales, forcing LEGO into a panic over losing the teensiest bit of a profits percentage. And unfortunately that probably won’t change anytime soon.