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Good news: their patent expired, and offbrand lego now fits on Lego, at a third of the price.
The official bricks have a better feel than any of the off-brand versions I've encountered, though. Every other brand is usually too tight, or sometimes too loose. Lego spent a lot of time perfecting the clasping power, and it shows.
When have you last tried? The competition has changed immensely during the last couple of years, and there are brands now that have it dialed in just as well as Lego. I highly recommend checking out Lumibricks or Pantasy, those are best in class at the moment, and actually better than Lego in many ways, imo. Or maybe Cada, if you're more into the Technic side of things
OK, I haven't tried those. I am currently building the Pikachu from Mega Bloks with my young children, and they are having a noticeably harder time putting the pieces together than with similar complexity Lego sets. That being said, I love the design of the set, and the assembly instructions are arguably at least as good as Lego.
I don't have any experience with Mega/Mattel stuff so far, so can't really compare those. From what I hear, the quality of pieces is okay, but not on the same level as Lego and gobricks (the manufacturer that provides the bricks for both Lumibricks and Pantasy, among others).
If you actually want to give them a shot, just make sure you get relatively recent-ish sets (released within the last 2 years or so), as especially Lumibricks has very rapidly been refining the quality of their set designs, instructions etc, and gobricks pieces from before that time also tend to have quite strong clutch power which they've softened up by now. It's really cool to see how quickly things are improving at the high end currently
Do those companies have DEI policies, or are we just indirectly dinging Lego for having had one in the first place?
Lego as a brand does imo substantially benefit from positive associations such as heritage, sentimentality, and other positive attributes. Otherwise how would they be able to demand such premium prices.
So I would see it less as them being "dinged" for this action, but more as them losing some of those privileges. Something they are not inherently entitled to.
I have a hard time reading this thread as anything other than suggestions for boycotting Lego based on them having removed their DEI policy, while suggesting alternatives which never had one.
And they still deserve credit for having invented the concept and designed the bulk of the bricks. I don't see how that changes at all based on whether they have a DEI policy. They obviously should lose any benefit from having a better DEI policy, since they no longer have one, but that doesn't change anything else.
It's like this: if someone says 'I won't ever stab you' and then later rescinds that statement, are you going to trust them more or less than someone who didn't announce their stance on potentially stabbing you?
Yeah, I'd go with the other party, too.
I get your point, although I'm not sure that's a good example. I'd be very wary of anyone promising not to stab me out of the blue :-)
That being said, I'd be very surprised if Lego isn't still doing largely the same things they did before, except they're no longer publishing what they're doing. For the Danish part of their operations I'm guessing most of it is mandated by local law anyway.
As always with debates on the internet nuances get lost and things get painted more black and white.
No idea if the other comment that they stole it is true, but looking at the wealth of the owner family I'd say they got more than enough credit. They are set for many generations to come. At some point ideas have to become common good for others to also build upon.
Someone did invent stackable blocks with four round pegs on them, but saying Lego stole the entire concept is like saying whoever invented the wheel stole the concept because they didn't invent the circle. You have to allow for iterative design to some extent.
To your second point, you are right that they have got "enough credit", considering that the patent is expired. This is how patents work: In exchange for sharing your idea with the world so it can be iterated upon, you get to keep exclusive rights to use it (which you can optionally license to others) for a limited time. So the patents expiring is literally the system saying they got their due.
That being said, they still can get brownie points in public opinion for coming up with all this, and the competition has done very little iteration on the concept as far as I can tell, beyond making cool designs with existing brick designs. But considering that the competition so far has mostly been playing catch-up, this may change. Also, considering the vastness and versatility of existing brick designs, there wasn't much to iterate upon, so maybe set design is really where we're going to see most of the movement.
It's basically down to "name brand vs generics" now with the patent expired, and some people will prefer name brand stuff.
*stole the original concept
I get mine from weird Chinese sites, soooo....
Care to share some of these offbrand 1/3 the price lego brands?
Dunno bout cheap ones but BlueBrixx is good quality
What about the other colors, though?
Well use your imagination
Bluebrixx is definitely around that 1/3 of lego prices. They are hit or miss though when it comes to quality as they use different brick suppliers for different sets, and it's not always easy to know what you're getting beforehand.
My recommendation is Lumibricks or Pantasy. They're not quite 1/3 of the price of Lego, more around 1/2 on average I think, but both offer the best brick quality that you're going to get from any company at the moment (they use the same supplier, gobricks). They're also both offering exclusively original designs, so no copied sets or anything like that, and doing a lot of stuff setting them apart from Lego. Lumibricks has light kits integrated seamlessly into every set and goes hard on printed pieces, no stickers anywhere. Pantasy likes using lots of metallic painted pieces, bigger custom molded pieces, and has a few interesting IPs.
If you're into Technic, there's also CaDa, and if you want very accurate display models you could look into Cobi. The later is a polish company that designs and produces entirely in Europe, in contrast to any other brand out there, but that also comes with a price tag that's pretty similar to Lego at this point.
Here is a list: http://brick4.com/brand/list/
And here is a textual breakdown of some of the better-known brands (warning: Reddit link).
We should push to add lego piracy to the piracy megathread.
Cheap deals and 3d print models
for technic there's CaDa
Anything "Lego" sold on aliexpress.
Bad news, their patent expired and they in turn, trademarked the bricks. They sue everyone under trademark now, instead of patent infringement.
I bought a bunch of minifigs off Amazon sold as "cake toppers" to escape notice.