Blondie-Wan

The First 2021 Review Batch is now up to 41 projects (!), and still has time left before it closes.

Thanks!

Where are these Designer things?

I must say, I agree the decision to make it not just any shuttle but specifically Columbia is... surprising, to say the least. Are we absolutely sure it’s Columbia? Also, any chance it could include markings for more than one shuttle?

Lyichir has it right. So much of the larger world beyond LEGO will change over the next 40 years that there’s really no telling how it’ll affect LEGO, or countless other things. It’s simply too great a timespan, and things are changing too rapidly right now. Climate change in particular has the potential to completely upend the entirety of civilization as we know it. How well we respond to and manage it may determine whether it’s even possible for an entity like LEGO to continue to exist at all. And that’s just one consideration. Even more mundane exigencies like the ever-changing tides of the toy business world might easily have LEGO face a crisis like the one it did back in the 2000s, and there’s no guarantee they’ll survive it as they did then. I’m not trying to be unduly pessimistic; it’s just that forty years is an awfully long time, and a lot can (and will) happen in that time. And LEGO, for all the company’s size and wealth and all of their products’ everlasting appeal, is still subject to powerful forces far greater than itself.

Because building the things for real isn’t necessarily feasible? Sometimes a submitter may want to use a particular part in a color in which it has rarely or never appeared in real life yet. Some submitters may not have access to as many bricks as you do. Should Ideas be only for the wealthy?

I'd leave it in the brick, so they can know it’s not something you’re making up. Edit: I’m not sure how I missed the “If don’t want it”, but I gather you just mean removing the wire in case they don’t ask for its return. I’m sure they’ll want it, though. Also, wow! This is the first time I’ve ever heard of this sort of manufacturing defect. Oh, and keep the box if you haven’t already discarded it. It’ll have information on the tape or somewhere that should help them track down the manufacturing run.

I’d dearly love more LEGO Adventure Time myself, though I mostly want more minifigure-scale stuff.

Ghostbusters actually received four packs for LEGO Dimensions (a Level Pack and two Fun Packs for “Ghostbusters Classic”, and a Story Pack for the 2016 reboot), and Doctor Who got two (one Level Pack, one Fun Pack). Note the first Doctor Who pack for LEGO Dimensions was actually released before the Ideas set, although when the Ideas one was first announced as approved, we didn’t even know LEGO Dimensions was coming, never mind that Doctor Who would be part of it. And don’t forget Adventure Time, either (which had three LEGO Dimensions packs - one Level, one Team, and one Fun). As with Doctor Who, the Adventure Time Ideas set was announced well before it was publicly known Adventure Time would also be in LEGO Dimensions, though the Ideas set wasn’t released until after the first Dimensions pack. (In addition to Adventure Time, Back to the Future, Doctor Who, and Ghostbusters, it may be worth noting that fellow LEGO Dimensions themes The Goonies, Portal, and The Wizard of Oz all previously had CUUSOO / Ideas projects that attained 10,000 supports and made it to review, though none had an Ideas set approved.)

Obviously there won’t be any more native versions of this game coming for any more platforms beyond the five for which it was originally released (PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, WiiU), but both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X have some backwards compatibility with games for their predecessor consoles. I do t have either of the new consoles and won’t for a while, but I am curious. Does anyone here know whether either of them will run (an) earlier version(s) of them game?

Well, given my previous posts, naturally I’d say it’s worth it. I will note that the “9 hours of real story content” mentioned by Gorilla94 is technically accurate but misleading; if you just play straight through without going on asides and you succeed at everything right off and so on, it might take that long, but the core story levels can keep you engaged much longer once you add in all the extraneous stuff to do in them, as well as challenging sections that may take a while depending on your skill. The add-on levels from Level Packs can all be completed in under an hour, but will likely take much longer to fully explore and do everything. But how much fun they are can vary, and will also likely be affected by personal taste (in particular, your level of interest in particular entertainment franchises represented in the game). Right now, the biggest issue should just be finding packs. Not so long ago it was still possible to find at least some of the packs steeply clearanced, but now they’re pretty much entirely gone from stores, and I think all packs are climbing upwards in price, with many now difficult to obtain for anything less than several times their original MSRP. If you’re not averse to getting LEGO second-hand, your best bet might be to buy a collection of it from someone who got into the game early on, played it extensively until they’d gotten their fill, and is done with it.

Edit: added Animal Crossing.

I certainly would like to think so, since I’ve long been planning something conceptually similar (but different enough from your idea that we wouldn’t be competing - mine wouldn’t be road vehicles, and it’d also be from a license). I say go for it!

Good point! I suspect Lucasfilm may not have wanted to approve a set that comes across as a tacit dismissal of the fourth movie. I can’t know for sure, but I think if the project creator had included all four films rather than the so-called “trilogy”, it might have had a better chance in review. It’s not simply “nostalgia” behind those. They’re all enduringly popular, beloved stories - not on the level of Star Wars, obviously, but they’re more than just “retro” licenses. And Sesame Street is still a current show, for that matter. Home Alone seems to be regarded as something of a holiday classic by many. And putting aside the licensing entirely, the house is also one that can appeal to lots of City / Architecture fans, whether they’ve seen the film or not. Back in the earliest days, when it was still LEGO CUUSOO, they actually did give reasons why specific projects were declined. They quickly found they couldn’t continue doing that, though, for various reasons. Sometimes it might involve tipping their hand on something they were already working on internally that they weren’t ready to announce. Perhaps an outside company didn’t want to license its IP in that case, but they didn’t want to say that in case it trigger a flood of letters from fans to that other company demanding they reconsider, and wind up jeopardizing the chances of LEGO working with that company on other things in the future. Perhaps they couldn’t discuss the reason without revealing an existing licensing agreement’s terms that were meant to be confidential. Any of these scenarios would pose problems. And there are other reasons they might reject a project that might not be problems on their own to reveal, but if they did it would then mean they’d give reasons for declining some projects, but not give the reasons for others, and that too would be a problem. From the very beginnings of LEGO CUUSOO, they indicated it was sort of an experimental thing, and that various aspects of it were subject to revision as it went along and they learned what worked and what didn’t. No longer giving specific reasons why projects were declined was one of the very first changes made, and one I wouldn’t expect them to reverse.

What was that?

I did. I’m not a particularly big fan of Home Alone myself, but I’m certainly aware of its enduring popularity, and its status as a perennial favorite and arguably classic. I honestly wasn’t too surprised by its approval - certainly not as much as I was by that of Seinfeld (not because of its own popularity, which is massive, but because of brand fit and all that). That’s just not feasible. Their teams can’t just compile a list of every one of the millions of IPS that exist in the universe and spend goodness knows how much time and money investigating each and every one to know in advance which ones are acceptable and which aren’t. It makes much more sense to wait until there’s a specific reason to look into the possibility of acquiring a particular license (said reason being that someone has proposed it on LEGO Ideas). And I know you said “these IPs... that come up multiple times”, but not all of those have. I don’t think there’s ever been a previous SpongeBob Squarepants project that’s made it to review, and I know there hasn’t been one for Indiana Jones - there have been prior IJ submissions on Ideas, but none that garnered 10k before this one. And we don’t know exactly why these were declined; it’s possible that other projects for these IPs might have been approved, just not these specific ones. Note that both of those IPs have previously existed as (apparently quite successful) licensed themes already. Similarly, all the other IPs you mention might still be feasible. As noted previously, Adventure Time had one project declined, and then a different project based on the same IP was approved a few years later. It might very well be that it’s entirely possible a Ratatouille Idea or a Futurama Idea can get through, and we just need the right one to come along. Who knows? Maybe the license just wasn’t available when the Ideas project was under consideration. Maybe LEGO wasn’t ready to do a large-ish Fiat set (whether as part of Ideas or not) at the earlier time. Maybe they were already planning the set we got and had to decline the Ideas submission for that reason. It could be anything.

It really isn’t, since there are very clear differences between some of these ideas and the sets that came out. The early Adventure Time proposal you linked to and the set that was eventually released are both Adventure Time, using some of the same main characters, but are totally different - the declined idea uses minifigures for the characters and the focus of the build is Finn, Jake, and BMO’s treehouse, whereas the released set eschews the treehouse and any other structures entirely and instead focuses completely on larger-scale, brick-built versions of several AT characters. The proposed-and-declined Piano and the one that was recently released are both Pianos, but in wildly different scales, with entirely different levels of functionality; one is a wholly nonfunctional, tiny thing scaled for minifigures, while the other is a much larger, much more expensive set with movable individual keys, actual (app-based) music, motorization, etc. And in both of these cases, the sets they did release were still Ideas sets, anyway, so Ideas users still got credit and compensation for the released sets; it’s just different users from the ones who submitted these. With Doctor Who, the released set is much more like the declined proposal here - but it’s also an Ideas set, one whose submission was part of the very same batch as this one, and if they had accepted this one it would simply have meant declining the other one. They had two very similar projects that both featured a minifigure-scale TARDIS and accompanying minifigures of Doctor Who characters, at the same time, and they could only approve one of them. And all of the other examples are cases where they already had an existing license, which complicated things to the point that they eventually had to institute a new rule disallowing submissions from extant licensed themes anyway.

Isn’t someone else doing SpongeBob Squarepants sets, or has their license expired? It’s also worth noting the previous Avatar: The Last Airbender theme was a mere two sets (sort of the bare minimum number to qualify as a “theme”), whereas the SpongeBob Squarepants theme ran for six years and had over a dozen sets. I don’t know if the chances of a licensed LEGO Ideas proposal are affected by whether a previous theme LEGO produced from the property had a bunch of stuff done for it or not, but if nothing else, it’s clear that to whatever extent there “needs” to be LEGO material based on pop-culture entertainment properties, we “need” LEGO Avatar more badly than we do LEGO SpongeBob, and more of it, since the latter property already had far more stuff produced already than the former, and more recently as well.

I’m a little disappointed that only one (or possibly two) ideas were approved from such a huge field, but the Earth globe is a fine choice if there’s to be just one. It’s different from what’s been done before, and should make an attractive display item. The Music to Our Ears contest was great to see, and especially tough since no one submission could really represent the full breadth of human musical expression, but the Stratocaster comes about as close as any. I really liked a couple of the others, though, but the Strat will look great, I’m sure.

Happy fifth birthday, LEGO Dimensions. You may not be thriving, but you’re still great fun. Sorry this is so late; the way the days are now in the era of COVID-19, I lose track of dates easily.

Yeesh, that Porsche sticker is nuts. It’s insane to me that there are that many official 1x1 stickers. How many different sets do all of those come in? I knew the Voltron stickers were specifically intended to give builders a choice of whether to build the American or Japanese version by choosing whether to include the numbers for the individual lions. I would rather they’d printed those parts and included unprinted additional parts for that, but I know that’s a bit much to ask for.

So did Shinkai 6500, Hayabusa, The Big Bang Theory, the Old Fishing Store, and Voltron (possibly among others I’m forgetting). Most of those also had printed elements, though, and plenty of them. And they’re just a fraction out of the dozens of sets the Ideas line has brought. A few of the others simply lack any decorated elements at all, but AFAICT, the solid majority of Ideas sets do have some deco’d parts for which they rely exclusively on printed pieces, with no stickers. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any sets (Ideas or otherwise) that use stickers for 1x1 tiles. Are there any? Usually, if a set has decoration on elements that small, they print those elements directly even if all the larger decorated elements use stickers, but there could be lots of stuff I don’t know about... They recently released a statement indicating there is some upper limit to the number of sets they’d approve at once and queue for production, but they don’t say exactly what it is (and it could be somewhat flexible, depending upon the size and complexity of the approved ideas). FWIW, there have been times when there have been several approved, announced sets all in the pipeline at once. They’ve also released sets just a month or so apart on numerous occasions, and most notably, in summer of 2014, they released the Ghostbusters Ectomobile on June 1st, and then exactly two months later released both the Exo Suit and the Research Institute together on the same day, August 1. Granted that those two were both smaller sets, of course...

I doubt that’d be an issue. Ideas sets tend to favor printed elements over stickers to begin with, and it’s also unusual for any sets (whether in the Ideas line or not) to use stickers for 1x1 elements.

Huh, I hadn’t been aware they actually said they got a 10k initial run; I remember folks like us talking about it here, but I was under the impression that was our best conjecture. I might well have missed something, though. At any rate, I certainly don’t know all the details of the inner workings of the Ideas program, but I’ve certainly gotten the impression that it’s grown substantially in various ways over the years, including the size of the production runs of the sets. Think about how limited the early CUUSOO sets were - Shinkai 6500 was limited exclusively to Japan. And the Curiosity Rover and Research Institute both appear to have two very short runs, each of which sold out in days or perhaps a week. Now, though, we have Ideas sets that stick around for over a year, some of them up to two years, and it’s not because it’s the same unsold stock just sitting around - some of them are clearly kept in production because they continue to sell well (I can personally attest from having worked at one of TLG’s experimental pop-up stores over the 2018 holiday season that the Saturn V set, released in late summer of 2017, continued to sell strongly more than a year later). The program has grown and expanded considerably in various ways since it began as LEGO CUUSOO back in 2008, and I’m absolutely sure that includes the sizes of the production runs (at least for some sets, though not necessarily all). But I’m afraid I don’t have hard numbers to back that up (and I imagine the only folks who do can’t share them!).

But before the pandemic shook everything up, they’d still approve anywhere from zero to three projects in a single review and/or from a single batch, and it wasn’t always necessarily simply a matter of larger batches yielding more sets - they’ve approved nothing from a batch as large as 13 projects, and they’ve approved as many as three from a batch as small as six. It really just boils down to which projects they deem feasible, good brand fits, and good business-wise. They can conceivably approve a slew of projects at once and simply queue them up.