welcome to publishing 4. last week i roasted the living jabronies out of epic and ubisoft because i had nothing else to talk about. but this week i'll talk about one of the most beloved plastic toy brands and how they've been getting a little worse for wear. everyone knows the lego system, a toy line of interlocking bricks made of durable ABS plastic refined to a premium and error tolerance so insanely thin that out of each million bricks made about a dozen fail the test. but the largest global manufacturer of tires doesn't just make plastic bricks. the minifigure is one of the most beloved kinds of action figure and certain examples run for insane amounts of money.
but there's a tad of a problem. sets are generally getting a little more expensive and a little less price-effective. in the mid 2010s which is generally considered one of lego's more prosperous ages, the average price-per-gram of a set (we'll take 31026 Bike Shop & Cafe as an example) was about 6 cents per gram. but a recent unlicensed set (our example for this is 31381 Fierce Shark with a Treasure Chest) will most likely be closer to around 8 cents per gram. and for licensed sets it gets so much worse, with the price per gram of a lot of recent star wars sets being around 18 cents.
but it would be okay if not for lego downscaling some models violently. i don't really care about downscaling as much as others do, my main gripe is with 18+ sets taking up too many slots nowadays, but downscaling is still a problem that exists. take 75432 V-19 Torrent Starfighter and compare it to 7674 V-19 Torrent, and you may notice that while the newer one has more pieces and just barely a better price per piece, the older one is a lot larger. both are amazing sets but i needed one for sake of example.
join me next week as i take a swing at comedy and fail miserably.