When you mentioned decreased size of the modern castle, I thought you were going to pay more attention to this fact: the reason the price per piece ratio is so good now is because sets contain an absurd number of really small pieces.
If you were to replace the price per piece metric with price per gram or ounce (going by weight), or if that’s unavailable data, price by height or width, I bet you’d get a different result.
Great article overall—it’s got me looking forward to playing Lego with my son, but that’s a few years off still (read this article during a nighttime feeding)
Yeah, that's a good point about looking into the price per gram. A big Lego had had suggest that, but unfortunately I wasn't able to find weight data for older sets.
Clearly, some sets just have piece bloat. For instance, the 800+ piece bonsai tree which sells for $49.99 has a whole bunch of tiny pieces that serve as gravel and flowers.
Something like the Age 9+ Millenium Falcon (which I got my son a couple birthdays ago) with 1353 mostly normal size pieces is probably more equivalent to the classic sets in terms of overall scale (though even there maybe there's some piece bloat) and it sells for $169 which is (adjusted for inflation) similar to the Kings Castle of my youth as a set, though on a per piece basis it's $0.12/piece which is lower.
When you mentioned decreased size of the modern castle, I thought you were going to pay more attention to this fact: the reason the price per piece ratio is so good now is because sets contain an absurd number of really small pieces.
If you were to replace the price per piece metric with price per gram or ounce (going by weight), or if that’s unavailable data, price by height or width, I bet you’d get a different result.
Great article overall—it’s got me looking forward to playing Lego with my son, but that’s a few years off still (read this article during a nighttime feeding)
Yeah, that's a good point about looking into the price per gram. A big Lego had had suggest that, but unfortunately I wasn't able to find weight data for older sets.
Clearly, some sets just have piece bloat. For instance, the 800+ piece bonsai tree which sells for $49.99 has a whole bunch of tiny pieces that serve as gravel and flowers.
Something like the Age 9+ Millenium Falcon (which I got my son a couple birthdays ago) with 1353 mostly normal size pieces is probably more equivalent to the classic sets in terms of overall scale (though even there maybe there's some piece bloat) and it sells for $169 which is (adjusted for inflation) similar to the Kings Castle of my youth as a set, though on a per piece basis it's $0.12/piece which is lower.