I don't find Lego especially expensive. And Lego is way more difficult to manufacture, has very exacting functional requirements and extremely good QA.

Lego is pure IP (both from LEGO itself, and then e.g. Disney or whoever is behind the theme of a given set). If you get sets designed in China and made at the same factories that make Lego bricks, they're like 1/3 the cost. If you get sets designed in not-China but obviously ripped off ("Star World" sets that are 1:1 copies of Star Wars legos), also in the same factories, it's like 1/10 the cost.

The manufacturing isn't easy, sure, but it's more or less a solved problem and not at all reflected in the cost.

So when GP says priced like Lego, they just mean that - priced based on something completely different from the cost of materials, manufacturing, etc.

False. Lego is some of the most precise injection molding in the world. The tolerances are insane and they nail them every time. Compare with offbrand building blocks and you'll feel the difference.

Micromolding is very hard, and Lego is the best at it.

10-20 years ago, sure. Nowadays you can get basically the same product from LEGO compatible competitors for way cheaper. Dunno how many modern sets of the variety of competitor stuff you've assembled recently, there's huge variance. Some of it definitely has crap QC. Some of it is really, really good now. My wife put together some knockoff 8000+ piece set the other year and the pieces were basically flawless.

Where I've seen the difference is in the quality of the instructions (which matters) and the packaging (which arguably doesn't). The bricks themselves are, as you say, basically flawless.

Exactly. I bought 3 or 4 China Lego clones to try and the parts were slightly different in size and in color. Some blocks way too big, so building was not good experience. For original Lego you don’t need sanding paper on the table.

> If you get sets designed in China and made at the same factories that make Lego bricks, they're like 1/3 the cost.

Lego does not outsource brick making. They tried it out back in 2005 with Flextronics in Hungary and got a painful lesson. Lego runs all their factories themselves now.

Lego may run the factories, but the factory will run extra and sell the excess off books. Maybe less so nowadays that (1) they can charge a 20-30% premium over US Lego prices in China, and (2) competitor off-brand Lego have caught up in quality

I don't think the official Lego China factory products get sold to the US, only Asia?

they own their factories. Contrary to what you're thinking, they actually only have 3-4 factories across the world.

Right and I'm talking about the one in China (that opened like 10 years ago), selling stuff to people in China (and presumably elsewhere in Asia).

Nowadays it's kinda irrelevant to the greater point anyways, because some of the knock off factories make parts that are just as good. (Some knock off factories push out terrible QC)

I bought a Warhammer set during Covid and was amazed at the detail, compared to the 1990s stuff I had as a kid.

I can't say what's more difficult to manufacture - millions of identical bricks that snap together, or a huge range of different, detailed designs which fit snugly together but don't lock.

Just the first thing on the home page: https://www.warhammer.com/en-GB/shop/Deathlords-Mortarchs-Ma...

> millions of identical bricks

Clearly you are not aware of the extraordinary range of Lego pieces.

Proportionate to the size of each company and the amount of toys they produce, I'll bet there's significantly more variety in Warhammer.

Just from a quick search, within a year Games Workshop offer about 3000 different model kits, each of which will contain ~1-4 unique moulded sprues. There seem to be at least 50 new kits each year, possibly 100, otherwise what's available rotates around the older kits.

Lego have produced about 15,000 different sets since 1950, and a huge number of the parts are shared between sets. (That's the whole point of the toy, no?)

Yeah I tried to look up the number of different Lego partszbut it gets hard to define what a Lego part is. And are we counting different colours, different designs printed on them, etc. Somewhere between 5k and 60k.

Also you have to take in account that Lego frequently stops certain parts and also that they more and more create complex parts and comparatively less "classic" bricks.

Which is an issue because it makes the sets way more difficult to reuse than 30 years ago. Go figure what to build with a random ninjago set except the official model. But that’s another ~~rant~~story.

I don’t know a great deal about injection moulding but I’d assume GW kits are more detailed than lego, having seen some sprues.

The stuff they’re putting out these days is really quite good.

Yeah, and way much too! I wanted this so bad for my kid but it’s breathtakingly expensive (while still being quite an underwhelming set).

https://www.lego.com/nl-nl/product/lego-education-spike-prim...