Could LEGO remake Fright Knights?

[Yperio_Bricks]

17 minutes ago, jodawill said:

When I got there, a family was standing at the BAM table pulling out every single one for resale - many hundreds of them, if not over a thousand.

This is insane! Why is this even allowed?!

[Yoggington]

1 hour ago, MAB said:

They don't know which one is selling fastest, as these are blind packs (and single SKU code per pack).

I was replying to the comment with arguments against "Why not just sell them as polybags" to remove the blind element. So in that scenario, they wouldn't be.

[Horation]

1 hour ago, MAB said:

It might have been true in the early days of CMF but now I imagine they know which ones will be in heavy demand these days. It might be difficult to decide which is more popular between two so-so figures such as the potter and the referee in the last series but compare either of those with the falconer or the brown spaceman and it should be quite clear which would be more popular. Whereas compare the falconer and the brown spaceman, that is presumably quite hard to predict. Whereas the brown spaceman vs the robot warrior, even though a similar futuristic type theme, it should be quite clear.

There seems to be this idea amongst the community that only the popular ones need to make a profit, but if TLG  makes 12 figs, ALL 12 cost approximately the same to design, require approximately the same amount of resources and use the same amount of space. They can't decide to only make one of these, and while army builders might want a lot of soldiers, they don't make up as large of a share of sales as people think they do.

2 hours ago, Yperio_Bricks said:

It's funny how the designers do not know that basically all history themed minfigs sell better. Like the Falcon archer, or the upcomming goat herder or bat lord.

EDIT: The thing is, is a CMF series made for AFOL army builders or children? They could easily sell a Black Falcon battlepack in masses. Or a bat lord and his knights battlepack. Or a goat stable battlepack

I have the real answer to this whole debate right here. 

1 hour ago, jodawill said:

Yeah, I think the comment about not knowing which ones will be popular applied to more random concepts. The costume minifigures used to be a lot more popular than they are now. I remember the hot dog one was selling for about 3x retail price as soon as it came out. Obviously, anything for army building will be in high demand. I wish they would put all of them on PAB.

I'm still frustrated with the BAM knights from a year or two ago. I was finally able to get some because I was in the right place at the right time. When I got there, a family was standing at the BAM table pulling out every single one for resale - many hundreds of them, if not over a thousand. Any time I drove to my "local" store (which was an hour away at the time), the employees would tell me that someone bought all of them as soon as they put them out.

I wouldn't be surprised if we do see more CMF parts on PAB. They've become much more generous with the parts selection recently. I can't wait to see what's listed next month.

I  do think they should sell them on PAB, but then that defeats the point of making them be sold in blind bags, maybe make them available for a short period of time after end of production? 

I'm not sure they are allowed to do this, most stores have a limit on the number of items you can purchase. 

[Lyichir]

I feel like I'm repeating myself from a previous "why are there blind bags" discussion, but another aspect of the blind-bag sales practice that I personally think benefits the CMF series is that it allows for "less popular" figs to still sell well. That might seem counterintuitive to some, but the blind bag sales method allows Lego to make weirder, more niche figs that wouldn't necessarily fit into your average set or theme and AREN'T the best for "army building". If all CMFs had to be sold individually with buyers able to pick and choose, you might indeed see more army builders and things that fit into popular themes like castle and space—but weirder, less popular choices might not sell well enough to justify producing at all. And I think those sorts of figs, far from being "filler" or wasted slots, benefit the overall variety of options for builders and collectors by existing.

[MAB]

10 minutes ago, Lyichir said:

If all CMFs had to be sold individually with buyers able to pick and choose, you might indeed see more army builders and things that fit into popular themes like castle and space—but weirder, less popular choices might not sell well enough to justify producing at all. And I think those sorts of figs, far from being "filler" or wasted slots, benefit the overall variety of options for builders and collectors by existing.

This is where there is an issue with the different types of buyers. For someone that gets just a few or a complete series, it is often nice to have the fairly unique figures as they are something a bit different. Whereas if you buy 100s to fill out a City or to army build, then the thing that makes these unique characters unique is what makes them annoying to get loads of. The aristocrat lady is really nice as a one off, but get loads and it looks weird. Same with the paper boy and potter. Whereas the orc or spaceman or falconer lend themselves to army building more.

 

I guess it is very hard to balance the different audiences - those that want a set and those that want to army build. The unique figures cause a problem for the army collectors as they are hard to get rid of if you get them and are not very useful as multiples (or even individually), but the army builder figures (or maybe it is the army collectors) create a problem for the series collectors as they remove the army builder figures from the market, pushing up the scarcity and price. By going to uniform distributions of figures, they have favoured series collectors wanting one of each, but not really done either extreme any favours compared to if they produced more of the obvious army builder figures as the army collectors still remove the army builders. Personally, I never minded the chase figures when they were 1 or 2 per box of 60. They were not that rare and if they are the less popular characters, they are still reasonably easy to get hold of if you want a complete set. If anything, making them slightly scarce seems to increase their desirability. I remember back at Series 18, the Classic Policeman. My son got one and didn't really like it as the figure was boring. And I sold it for him, and he bought a few other figures he did like. So long as not-too-hard-to-find chase ones are not going to be popular enough to army build or with kids, I don't mind it. Obviously not at Mr Gold extremes though, that does get silly.

[TeriXeri]

20 minutes ago, MAB said:

I guess it is very hard to balance the different audiences - those that want a set and those that want to army build. 

It's kind of weird , beside CMF, even LEGO seems to think regular Battle Pack sets have different purposes, on one hand , you have this awesome droid battle pack (I don't collect Star Wars, but I do like that set a lot) with 1 clone leader, 3 clones, 2 small droids, 3 super droids, generic enough to mass.

On the other hand there's this Ninjago battle pack,it's quite low priced considering 4 minifigs in 2024, but it's flawed, with 1 Jay, 1 Lloyd,  and 2 generic massable "wolf mash" characters, an army of Jay's or Lloyd's is not something I would call a battle pack but LEGO did it, even if it was just Jay vs 3 figs, it'd be a lot more massable in that case.

Edited December 11, 2023 by TeriXeri

[Horation]

7 hours ago, Lyichir said:

I feel like I'm repeating myself from a previous "why are there blind bags" discussion, but another aspect of the blind-bag sales practice that I personally think benefits the CMF series is that it allows for "less popular" figs to still sell well. That might seem counterintuitive to some, but the blind bag sales method allows Lego to make weirder, more niche figs that wouldn't necessarily fit into your average set or theme and AREN'T the best for "army building". If all CMFs had to be sold individually with buyers able to pick and choose, you might indeed see more army builders and things that fit into popular themes like castle and space—but weirder, less popular choices might not sell well enough to justify producing at all. And I think those sorts of figs, far from being "filler" or wasted slots, benefit the overall variety of options for builders and collectors by existing.

Thank you, that's what I've been trying to say for a bit : sure they can restock the ones that sell, but they still have to deal with the ones that didn't.

[MAB]

12 hours ago, TeriXeri said:

It's kind of weird , beside CMF, even LEGO seems to think regular Battle Pack sets have different purposes, on one hand , you have this awesome droid battle pack (I don't collect Star Wars, but I do like that set a lot) with 1 clone leader, 3 clones, 2 small droids, 3 super droids, generic enough to mass.

On the other hand there's this Ninjago battle pack,it's quite low priced considering 4 minifigs in 2024, but it's flawed, with 1 Jay, 1 Lloyd,  and 2 generic massable "wolf mash" characters, an army of Jay's or Lloyd's is not something I would call a battle pack but LEGO did it, even if it was just Jay vs 3 figs, it'd be a lot more massable in that case.

I imagine it is different for different themes or possibly different for licensed vs non-licensed. For SW, they like to put desireable individual characters into larger sets, whereas for in-house they like the core characters to be easily available and have huge variations of those core characters. Here, it gets complicated even further by the figures that come with comics. Ninjago ones frequently have slightly different versions of the core characters (esp Cole and Lloyd) over and over. I get the impression that the market for Ninjago is more kid aimed than AFOL, and I doubt kids army build as much as adults.