> you can get a lot of set instructions from Lego’s website.
This surprises me. When your product is super easy for someone else to make a compatible set of bricks for, the instructions seem like the only thing you can easily gatekeep and demand royalties for.
> When your product is super easy for someone else to make a compatible set of bricks for
As anyone who has used “compatible” bricks will tell you, it’s not easy to match the quality. Most off-brands don’t hit the right point on the spectrum of connectability-separatability and it makes them noticeably less enjoyable to use.
i did not make this experience in more than 5 years of getting alternative sets. and the sentiment among those builders i know or follow is that the quality is now mostly on par with lego. a few are still worse, and some are even better. also some claim that lego quality is degrading.
Lego is quality from top to bottom. Between the actual design of the bricks to the tolerances the bricks are built to. The moulding and printing of the bricks are top-notch and they make very few mistakes.
Anyone trying to compete with Lego is going to quickly reach Lego's price point.
The only difference is that Lego has to pay their designers and pay for licensing. If you're just going to sell bricks that you build to Lego's designs, you don't have those costs.
Those tolerances were hard to make in a toy back in 1958.
Today, in the age of cheap cnc machining, ABS injection moulds can be made very accurately and cheaply. Nearly all knockoff bricks are now a perfect fit, simply because it is pretty hard to mess up these days.
Eh, LEGO is a corporation making money, but corporations are made up of people, and while I'm sure the people working at LEGO like money, I also am pretty sure they're bigger LEGO fans than most of here.
The cost of putting up ~all old LEGO manuals online [in terms of serving them as well as potential lost revenue] is probably low enough that the rule of cool wins.
“The dog/child/vacuum cleaner ate my instruction manual” is probably a common support request at Lego, so there is no point in making the digital manuals difficult to access.
i am wondering about this too. rebrickable has parts lists which you can upload to vendors of alternative bricks. however that is actually not that much cheaper. you may get the bricks for half the price but from tests i made, about 10% of the bricks you need are not available as alternatives, so you'd have to search them on bricklink where they will be more expensive because the missing ones tend to be the more special and less common ones. so in the end it may not be worth it the effort.
you can get clones of original sets which obviously violates lego's rights, but
what i am curious about is that there are alternative instructions for existing sets. that is, you can take a set and use those instructions to build something completely different.
now, what if someone produced and sold a set with those different instructions, you buy it and then build the other set using lego's original instructions.
This surprises me. When your product is super easy for someone else to make a compatible set of bricks for, the instructions seem like the only thing you can easily gatekeep and demand royalties for.