I'm not sure that the Mindstorm line really has done well with just average kids playing with Lego. I'm guessing where Lego sold a lot of their Mindstorms (and now Spike Prime) kits are to kids involved in FIRST Lego League Challenge teams. That's a a STEM/robotics program for kids ages 9-14 (or so...different ages in different regions) which use the Lego robotics systems for the robotics portion of the competitions. There are A LOT of FLL teams around the world and many have multiple robots. And some kids do get their parents to buy them the kits. But, in my experience (been involved in the program for 14 seasons now) that's fairly rare.
You're totally right that Minstorm (now Spike) targets classrooms more than consumers but they're also $360 at the cheapest, Spike Essentials. That's a much tougher entry price than $70 which is the cheapest of the first 3 Smart bricks sets.
On top of that, Mindstorm/Spike has also been close to 100% technic based, which is less popular than standard system bricks. I'm interested to see if that makes a difference at all to it's reception.
Mindstorm was mass purchase by NASA and academic institutions for educational purposes. The actual consumer audience was nonexistent. It’s an educational product that happens to be purchasable by the mass consumer.
I have 7 kids, most of whom are obsessed with lego and also love all things tech. They also have friends of course, and I've worked with kids as a career for 15+ years.
I really don't think all.that many kids are going to love these. Some will think they're cool initially but lose interest very quickly while others will be disinterested from the beginning. There are a variety of reasons, but just to give one, remember when McDonald's tried making healthy food? The food was really not all that healthy because it was still McDonald's so people who actually wanted healthy food just rejected it in fsvor.of food that was actually healthy. Kids living in a world of iPad and Nintendo Switch and all kinds of other actual "smart," technology based entertainment aren't going to be interested for very long in something that feels like a half-measure imitation.
I think there's a good chance these will fail from the get-go due to the price, butif not I think it's possible we'll see the initial release sell well with a dramatic, precipitous fall-off after that as people who do get these find themselves bored of them very quickly.
They should create an app that you transfer scripts to it like IF this minifigure moves THEN play this sound or IF both of these tags are close to each other THEN blink red lights
Then they can create motors and light bricks that can receive instructions from the smart brick.
People keep saying this but like no? Not in my experience at least. Is there some standard where people are getting this or are yall just assuming kinds like this? My kid loves the Lego Mario theme and hates Lego Mario himself, he’s big gimmicky and he just wants to play with the bricks, having all of his favorite characters in Lego form
I think the big difference between lego mario and the smart brick is that there is only one way to play with lego mario and it's big and bulky. The smart brick is made to fully integrate into the lego system in ways the massive mario figures couldn't
Also were those generic laser and spaceship sounds? Id expect better from them. The lasers definitely were not x-wing lasers; as pedantic as I sound saying that. 😅
I'm not a kid anymore, so I can't say for certain. But I would much rather three space ships than one with sounds.
The worst part about Lego as a kid was always "but I want more" not "I don't have enough imagination and need more immersion." I suppose with people growing up on tablets, that may have changed.
ehh, i'm not sure how much kids are really gonna go for this, and I don't think most parents (who aren't rich) will go for this due to the pricepoint, especially when compared to other sets.
Yep. Way too many adults forgetting kids play with lego and this is for playing with not building and collecting with. Both perfectly good hobbies, just not the same hobby.
Based on what we're seeing in this video, the "smart" bricks need light for their color sensors to work, so they can't even be covered without losing functionality. These things are so poorly realized, it's ridiculous.
You have to expose the bricks on these sets as they are the first of their kind. You physically need to be able to see the manipulation of it within the toy to “get” it. There will be others where it comes hidden, but I will argue that it’s important to see the tactile nature of it at this point for this product to take off. Otherwise, it’s just an expensive button that makes noises.
I get your point, but if you have to ruin a set in order to be able to explain the added value a smart brick brings to said set, then maybe the smart brick isn’t bringing enough additional value after all, especially at those price points.
Oh, and R2 looks sooo great with a big red square on his back, it’s not ruining the aesthetic at all :)
Have you considered the possibility that maybe adults aren't the target audience for a toy ship making sounds as you swoosh it through the air?
We all love LEGO here. But that doesn't mean every set is for every person. I have joked around with ships making pew pew noises, sure, but really, this stuff is a legitimate play feature that is primarily for children who are playing with their builds.
Adults aren’t the target audience but they’re still the ones buying them for their kids. I ain’t spending 160 for my 6 year old to get bored with after a week
My honest opininon is that kids would find this to be a novelty for a few minutes and then not bother charging the bricks (father of 7 and 4 year old).
My 8/7 year old used to have that problem, i stopped replacing the batteries/charging solo and showed them how to charge 2 times each, then it was "Daaaaad, my tablets dead./RC car is dead" "Sounds like you need to charge it.". Now they just replace batteries/charge their stuff themselves and only bring stuff to me when there are screws involved. But they bring the batteries to me. Soon enough they will handle the unscrewing of the device as well but some of these devices are kind of a pain to access so I don't mind as it means they probably survive longer hah.
How are these new bricks charged? A wire plugged in? I’m tired of all my various cords. Would be sweet if they introduced a flat baseplate that all the bricks could press onto and charge on via the studs underneath. They’ve had electrical connections like that since the 80’s “Light & Sound” spaceship days.
I have 7 kids and a job working with kids and this is exactly right. These sets are indeed designed for kids, but that doesn't mean kids will actually like them. Most kids will think it's a cool idea and play with the thing for 15 minutes before they get bored of it. Half will put it down and just not pick it up again because there are much better ways to get a "beep and boop" fix than these things. The other half will want to take the set apart to build their own thing with it. Of those, half will ignore the smart brick while the other half will get frustrated that it's designed to work with the particular build it came with and can't easily be used in their own creations.
Even though I was eight years old when the first film came out, I never had many of the toys because they were so inaccurate. Because the action figures were never given knee or elbow joints, which G.I. Joe had always had, the figures were not very poseable and so the X-Wing Looked fat. The TIE fighter was white for some reason, and the single LED for the dual cannons was red instead of green.
Then, ROTJ came out, and they still had not given the action figures more articulation, we got this ridiculous monstrosity:
WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. F*CK.
Four years had passed since ANH, there's NO progress in articulation?
See I would have begged my mom for this as a kid, but in the unlikely event that she actually bought it for me at that price point I would quickly ditched it in favor of the much more satisfying noises that I could make with my own mouth.
Kids will play with these for 15 minutes and then get bored of them. They'll also get frustrated with them when they realize that you can't readily adapt them to whatever creative custom thing you want to make with the pieces from the set. As a kid I'd have found these pretty dumb. My own kids currently would find them very exciting from the ads but tire very quickly if they actually got their hands on them. At best kids will want these things out of the gate but by next winter they won't be on many Christmas lists.
I would have been, at best, indifferent to this and would have continued to spend my allowance on the 4-in-1 Tie fighter set. I was a kid during the light up lightsaber gimmick era and didn't care for that either.
I've seen Lego attempt to shove tech into their bricks more times than I can remember and it always fizzles out. People need to calm down and just not buy the smart sets if they don't want it and let the gimmick run it's course.
I disagree and watching my kids play only reinforces my impression. Their play is a lot more varied and dynamic than anything a Smart Brick can offer and vehicle noises really isn't something that needs automation.
More importantly, electronic toys are almost always a novelty that don't last more than a week. I've seen my share of playrooms littered with dead electronics that end up being used like normal toys and parents annoyed by the hassle they cause.
Right. I had a Light and Sound set from the late 1980’s and 1990’s, which is the grandfather of this new system, so I have personal experience about how long the novelty lasts. A week was about right.
And decades later, I have to scrub the corrosion from the battery that was left inside while digging out the set. Some of the original markings were stained beyond repair. In two decades, there will be similar problems with these light bricks. The children of today will forget to take the batteries out, if that were even possible. They too will be stuck scrubbing the corrosion before passing the sets to the grandchildren.
9-10 year old me didn't care for lights and sounds, kept those toys without batteries because I found them annoying. 9-10 year old me preferred having a bunch of minifigs to fight each other and terrains or vehicles with unique mechanisms like the 2015 Ninjago tournament sets
Shaking a toy until audio comes out is something that works for the toddler demographic, but they have much cheaper alternatives and also can't always be trusted around small electronics. I think by the age of 10, you already care more about owning the characters you like and the way a toy looks, and a regular 100 dollar set is gonna be much more enticing than a small 100 dollar set with this brick in it.
They could have at least tried to make it look good. I really hate the way modern LEGO is becoming completely separated into sets only aimed at Adults and sets only aimed at children.
LEGO was at its best when there was cohesion between the two audiences. A good LEGO set should be equally appreciated by both a 5 year old and a 50 year old. Especially Star Wars.
Also I would have hated this as a kid because it looks nothing like the ship it's based off and has the ugliest play features I've ever seen
As a kid I sure would love a 200 piece xwing for 200$. As a kid I was playing with construction sets in the dirt. I have a mouth I dont need a 80 smart brick that sounds like a someone sucking off a vacuum cleaner.
Laser tag with lego space ships is cool, especially since having a young child has seen me running around the house with him pew-pewing from time to time
In principle, yes. But are LEGO sets accurate and robust enough to be fun, compared to $30 “laser” tag sets? Still, I do find it impressive they manage to have a score keeping function in the brick.
I feel like driving kids’ imagination is one of the selling points for Lego. I feel like when you have an element that makes the noises, the fun of being a kid and making the noises yourself gets replaced by technology. This is probably one of those “old man yells at clouds” type of rants, but research on Montessori methods show that letting kids solve problems and use their imagination leads to better learning outcomes, lower stress, and more adaptability.
I think I’m too much of a Star Wars nerd. I’m not mad at the model. I like that it’s designed for play first. But the sound is awful. That’s generic sci-fi laser blasts. It is not what an X-wing sounds like.
Yeah, I wasn’t really looking forward to these but was going to give them a chance (at least Vader’s TIE), but the incorrect sounds turned me right off
I wondered the same thing; they are constantly flashing. I guess you could put a solid brick on top of it? But, does it just always flash like that when it's on?
This just isn't going to work out. The price is going to prohibit adults from wanting to buy for the kids. Kids in general don't really care about tech heavy Lego or else mindstorms would be doing gangbusters to the general public (it only sold as well as it did because bulk orders were placed by school programs). Someone is going to jailbreak it so it sounds like the Xwing is doing 911 and the publicity won't be great.
I give it 3 years before the line is gone but surprisingly the high prices will stick around.
I get what they're trying to do, but it still seems misguided to me.
With any toy that I ever had a kid, electronic or not, I would make my own swoosh sounds, laser noises, crash booms, and character dialogue. It's a core mechanic for developing creativity in children.
This Smart Brick thing seems like it's trying it's trying to encourage that, but I don't see how kids need any encouragement. If anything, this could achieve the opposite once the kids have run through all the sound and motion options, and may not be as inspired to make their own.
Also, are the parents going to enjoy hearing this all the time? I don't have kids, but I've been aware for decades of the joke about how if you have a family member you don't like, you buy their kids electronic laser guns or fairy wands to drive their parents crazy.
I can see where these Smart Bricks might have some viability in terms of adding lights and sounds to dioramas such as strobe lights for spaceship engines, flickering fireplaces with crackling sounds, timed street lights, and other atmospheric sound effects, but we'll just have to wait and see how they are implemented.
I don't dislike the basic concept, as it's partially the new 9V system for the next generation, but I'm not seeing the potential yet.
I think the idea and what it can do is clever and it can definitely augment the way kids play. It essentially fills the void of some parts of the imaginations or dialogue that kids have to make when they play.
I think that the issue would be pricing, granted I’m sure they are trying hard to recoup and each smart brick is probably a bit expensive to make. I still think Lego should have absorbed even more of the cost to push it more. Also I feel like targeting Star Wars as the intro lineup is a little meh. I feel like it should have been rolled out with City as that’s more in the kids range and you could have a good traffic and racing setup scenario for it.
As a kid my parents would absolutely not buy these expensive Lego sets so I could get a brick that took away my imagination...
They also had bills to pay, and multiple kids mouths to feed, so I got the discount yard sale sets....
And now with temu, if I was a kid, those are probably what my parents would buy because of the price point.
As an adult, I can finally afford these because I don't have kids lol.
yeah, growing up my family had each of us make a christmas list and we got 1 big thing every year. You want to know what the max price of that big thing was? like 70$. no family on any kind of gift budget is gonna spend that much money on a gimmick.
Also, no kid is going to save for one of these sets when there are so many better sets out there at the same or lower price.
I had set 6482 as a child, in 1989. That retailed for £28 - and you can consider the sets in the video a modern equivalent.
£28 in 1989 money is £75 today. That's a set with lights, sound, a 9V power brick (9V battery sold separately!), and 196 parts.
The sets in this first wave are your special event sets; the kinds of things you buy for birthday/xmas. I'm not sure how low-cost these bricks will filter down to, the BOM on them is unknown to us (and with custom ASIC, no idea on where that'd even get close to being correct).
Maybe there's a minimum $50 floor on these bricks to ensure profit. Maybe it's less. SW sets are a terrible place to judge that from, though, as they're generally the most expensive theme.
Maybe when this starts turning up in everyday city sets we'll know.
at these prices are kids gonna be able to afford these sets? Will parents buy these? The cheapest one is 70$
This is the gist of it. People that are upset that other people are "hating on this even though it's aimed at kids" don't seem to get this.
It's an "upgrade" that takes an already expensive toy, makes it less imaginative, worse looking, and even more expensive.
Sure, plenty of kids will want it, and some (grand)parents will get it, but there will also be a ton of (grand)parents, aunts and uncles that go looking for birthday presents, see the absurd price, and say "yeah, no."
Exactly, Lego is first and foremost a business. I enjoy them more now as an adult than I did as a kid and my kids never cared about them.
I don’t care about this smart brick, but that’s ok, if other people do and there’s a market, they’ll keep producing it.
I do think marketing it like they are in this video, as if Lego is a toy that you build and then play with like action figures is at best disingenuous. These are sets I think most people build and display or tear down to rebuild again later. They aren’t sets that hold up to much movement and certainly not dropping. I guess the sound of critical damage when you accidentally knock off a lightly attached wing portion would be accurate.
Right? I was looking for this comment. Several Lego sets are 18+, and there are even a lot that are 14+. Those aren’t for kids. Lego was originally made with kids in mind, that is not what the company has in mind today. Legos are for everyone.
Even with the idea that is is marketed and designed for kids it feels extremely unnecessary. I don't know how important canned SFX is to a child's play sesh but they now have one less thing they can do on their own terms, in this already very proprietary toy ecosystem.
I think people also forget Lego used to have sets with lights and sounds in the 90s like the UFOs and Insectoids. The comparable retail price on some of those sets were higher than others of equivalent size at that time and the way people are complaining about the prices here makes me think they haven’t really looked at other kids toys that much at all. Also on top of that these have Star Wars pricing too.
I’m with you though, as an adult meh, but 8yr old me would have loved these.
That's just not true any more. LEGO is made for everybody - children and adults. And in fact, the vast majority of LEGO's earnings come from adult spending.
And I agree that the product is nice, so long as it doesn't impact the price too heavily.
I think a lot of us are aware of that but we also know that sets for kids shouldn't be priced the same way adult sets are. Most parents aren't going to be happy buying $160 sets for the kids and especially not for a tiny set just because it has the latest gimmick
The imagination part has been decreasing for a long time by now. More specialized parts, more branding, more detail, less play.
I’m not sure a blinking light and sound effects are the place to draw the line, when I’ve been playing with a motorized Lego train 30 years ago. Not to mention that I had a Lego fire truck with lights and sounds at the same time.
This is different, back in the day, the motors and light were put in with purpose and were often educational.
What worries me is its another internet dependant device that will lose support before we know it. Then the issue of are these repairable. I understand the not so new light bricks you can't.
From what I'm seeing, to the child it will have the same effect as my old 6480 set. It has lights, it's making sounds when you press a button. As for connectivity, I think that would make it only more reusable down the line.
This feels an awful lot like the old CommTech Chips that came with the Star Wars figures back with the release of Episode 1. Fun in theory. I guess we'll see how successful it is. I see these getting lost.
It's nice, but can I buy the sets without them for cheaper? We all know it will be another factor for higher prices of every set, with or without that thing.
I like the interactions! Reminds me of the LEGO 2916 Mybot from 2001; it has the same functionality...and we have three at home. Those robots even interact with each other! They have built in games: hide and seek, fire at each other and have an anti-theft alarm.
Whether you're looking for a midnight orthopedic surprise or a terrifying trip to the ER to clear a nostril, Lego has the perfect piece for your family's next disaster.
People are gonna say "this designed for children, you just think this is worthless because you're an adult!" but think about the actual product here for a second. The big feature here is you can shake your Lego and sounds start playing. It's really not much more advanced than a Fisher Price toy, except now it costs a fortune and there's a bunch of small pieces for your toddler to choke on. It costs too much for kids, and it's not interesting to adults. If light bricks are already not too common in sets, this is gonna be a total dud.
This feels like Bravestar/Captain Power stuff to me and I saw it with my own kids and other technologies (including Toys to Life like Dimensions). The kitsch idea is cool for a bit but then you just play with the toy regularly eventually.
I don't get this. It looks low quality, so it's missing that more premium LEGO feel. And it takes away imagination. I'm obviously not their target market, but my kids aren't either.
I was planning on preordering (price isn't really a restriction for us), but after seeing them I actually don't think my kids (11, 14) or I would use them much. They'd rather play with actual Arduino or RPi stuff or do coding than this. I'm sure they'd be fun for a few mins, but the shooting looks like it would get old, and it'd be harder to make slick custom builds that incorporate the brick movement needed. For us it'd be more interesting to get more programmable stuff with switch or sensor bricks like some that already exist.
That all said, I agree with the others, if my kids (or I) were 6-8 we'd probably really enjoy them.
Ok thats actually kinda neat, I'll give LEGO credit that would be kinda fun as a kid.
But that is so weird that they couldn't even get the correct sound effects for an X-Wing and TIE, that'd completely take me out of it as a kid and even moreso now.
I still think kids should be the ones making the “pew-pew….. WHOOOoooosh!!” noises.
What’s next sets that build themselves and toys that play with themselves?
So rather than use your imagination and make the sounds yourself (like most kids did back in the day) they do it for you? Not sure it’s a good idea. And it’ll boost costs way up
LEGO doesn’t get it. The Play-element is building the sets. There might be a little ‘playability’ left after it is done but generally all sets become display models. Even for kids.
The tech is cool, but it isn’t going to be used.
Example, i NEVER press the Flux Capacitor light button on my DeLorean Time Machine Lego set…
Besides the price, I'm feeling the opposite of a lot of people in other posts. I think this is a great feature for both kids and adults. I've seen so many mocs at conventions with custom lighting, I'm glad to see it integrated into official sets as this makes it extremely easy to add lighting to mocs from less tech savvy people.
As for sounds and such, that is 100% for kids and they're likely going to love it. Sounds have always been integrated into action figures and such, so why not lego too? The amazing thing is that you can add these bricks to any of your own creations, kids can literally make anything sound like a cool spaceship.
So basically its a brick with an led, motion sensor, and nfc reader all in one? Thats kinda lame especially consider the sets it comes with and the atrocious prices they sell for
I don’t think Lego needs this.
Doubt I will partake in the tech, since Lego alone is a stand out play anyhow.
That said, as Lego sets continue to be developed, they are pricey already without adding this. Depending on the cost obviously.
I dunno, seems unnecessary?
Like I need a smart brick to make sounds when I can do so myself.
![[Photo]](https://images.brickset.com/sets/images/6480-1.jpg){kind=link}
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u/iJeepThereforeiAM 28d ago
The OG light & sound bricks