>>58831849Lego has created a hole for themselves. They're appealing to a very specific group: AFOLs (adult fans of lego, fairly old term) that SPECIFICALLY like lego for display, AND collect them for a variety of properties they also like. It's the same type of market as something like funko pops, not model kits. It's also extremely lucrative as these whales will literally mortgage their house to get their fixes of plastic bricks. It's also very dangerous, because it's not a renewing market, so there are fewer buyers overall as time goes on and people buy into the lego brand and system less and less. This process has been happening for maybe a decade or a decade and a half. Lego initially didn't have any real competitors, then stuff like knex and market trends nearly made lego go under, a handful of IPs like star wars and bionicle saved them, and over the next decade or so (from the late 90's to the early 2010's) they were solid but being chipped away at by stuff like mega blocks and later chinese ripoffs. In particular, early-to-mid 2010's lego began losing ground even in europe and america to (primarily) chinese competition. They managed to sue some of them in china (yes really) but they still don't have a stranglehold on the market like they used to, and part of it is that they began relying on that AFOL-who-likes-specific-properties-and-displays-them market more and more and more ever since they started expanding to third party IPs, like, again, star wars. But if you notice the vast majority of lego is from another property nowadays. They also suffer/"suffer" from a giant scalping problem, with those same AFOLs buying up desirable sets before any would-be parents can get them, entrenching lego further still. They're eating themselves right now and don't know it.
