this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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And yet Chinese brick companies can do it for a fraction of the price.
Edit: Lego fanbois downvoting are hilarious, enjoy getting ripped off.
Oceangate made one I believe as well, fairly realistic too, only off by about 500 meters
I mean... yes, sort of? I actually have a couple of those, I just put together a bonsai tree set from "JIANPINWORLD" a few days ago. It's a nice set design, but the quality is... not good. The fit of the pieces reminds me of Megablocks sets from the 90s, which is to say that the brick tightness is very hit-or-miss. The set involved putting little flower pieces onto sticks, but the holes in the flower pieces varied considerably, sometimes too tight to fit on the stick and sometimes too loose to stay attached. There were small hook parts, two of which cracked in half while tying to connect them, and there were no spare parts included. The coloration of the pieces is inconsistent. The instructions are also poorly laid out and badly printed.
The sets you're talking about are very much an example of "you get what you pay for".
Never heard of JIANPINWORLD sounds like a rebrand set. There's various tiers of quality, anything that uses bricks made from GoBricks bricks like Mould King, Cada, Pantasy are top tier, tbh Jie Star are excellent too and Reobrix which use Jie Star bricks. Consistency and clutch are all fine. Stickers and minifigs can sometimes be a bit lacking, but if you value those at £-5-600 more power to you.
While I do think Lego is too expensive you have to remember that these Chinese knock offs don't have any design cost (model wise and packaging/manuals) or licencing cost they have to earn back. Just copy the design and produce some cheap, knock off (sometimes lower quality) bricks.
For clone kits, no doubt Lego have some licensing costs, but £3-400 per set on bigger sets? Titanic has zero licensing costs. Same goes for design costs, Cada, Pantasy, Mould King, Reobrix etc are paying designers for original IP and are still a lot cheaper than Lego original IP.
I've got 2x Reobrix 8 stud wide cars and 2 x Mould King 8 stud wide cars in the backlog, all 4 are boxed (in higher quality boxes than Lego provided) with manuals, all 4 shipped from China for ~£30 all are original IP. The Mould King cars even come with display cases!
I've also got a Reobrix T6 shuttle waiting to go, around £120 shipped (shipping price varies through the year, it's high ATM), it's been highly reviewed, it's by a known MOC designer who got paid, 5k+ pieces.
I'm eyeing up a Baka Rocinante at the minute 6k+ pieces, shipping is high so it'd be £150 or so shipped, but that'll likely come down. I've not built Baka before but some of their other sets look phenomenal. Their Rivendell is stunning looking (and not a clone set).
I'm not saying Lego don't make a good product, but they are taking the micky with pricing - just look at the price of the X-Jet, £80 retail and under 500 pieces.
Edit: as for the bricks being knock-off I'm not sure Lego a a leg to stand on in that regard, they're clearly a knock-off of Kiddicraft bricks.
Turns out production costs are lower if you use slaves
Got any evidence for that or do you mean the robots at the highly automated factory?
Gobricks
You realise Lego make bricks in China too, right?
Oh Im sorry, it is obviously unheard of for Chinese companies to use slaves, especially if we look at their supply chains.
It's not unheard of for anyone using Chinese manufacturing, like Lego, to have slaves in the supply chain.
I have both bought and been given some of these "knockoff" sets, and while the resulting build. The resulting build is pretty, but fragile. The tolerances on the bricks are bad, to the point that some required a lot of force to join, and others are so loose that they can barely carry the weight of the bricks on top. I have also consistently found at least 1 brick that wasn't molded fully, and was therefore useless, with no spares. The colors are also usually quite uneven. The instructions are usually fairly easy to follow. But the build methods are bad. I often see bricks stacked directly on top of other bricks, with no interlocking, resulting in whole walls being able to easily fall over.
The knockoff are fine if you don't have the money to spend on Lego, but you really also get what you pay for.
I strongly disagree in general, some manufacturers are terrible - but this is only characteristic of the cheapest sets. Good quality sets are fantastic, I've built multiple 1-5k+ sets from china and none of what you're describing is true of them. I've seen poorer quality, but it's always on the cheapest of the cheap, 1k+ sets for £15.
Minifigs and stickers are often lacking, I'll grant you that.
Lego is also not the be all and end all of quality - broken brown bricks, mould marks and colour mismatches I've all seen on genuine Lego sets.
To say you get what you pay for is patently wrong, 98%+ of the quality for 20% of the price.