Hmm, this set is US$679.99 and 9090 pieces. The average for new sets is US$0.10/piece (ten cents per brick, expect higher rates for licensed IP), so at ~$0.074 per this set is actually beating the ratio. Yes it’s expensive but it’s probably priced fairly given the size.
And yet Chinese brick companies can do it for a fraction of the price.
Edit: Lego fanbois downvoting are hilarious, enjoy getting ripped off.
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”.
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.
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.
It sort of tracks though for price per piece (a flawed but still useful metric). It’s got 9090 pieces, which makes the price per piece about 11c.
Which is about the average.
AUD also doesn’t seem to be losing out in the currency conversion - it’s currently 680usd, which converts to more than 1000aud.
Still could never afford to drop a grand on a Lego set.
I own that set and added a light kit to it. It’s one of the few sets that aren’t a pain to build with multiple people. The main box has three smaller boxes that are essentially their own set. The ship when complete can be displayed as three individual sections or snapped together. The light kit I bought is also three separate powered systems. I just have them all plugged into a powered usb hub with a splitter. I also liked that the instructions have little facts about the titanic all throughout. Building the outer hull gets repetitive…I did the last 2-3 panels of it from memory.
Damn that looks massive, ig the 1k makes sense then. Also where are the sections separated? Is it like where the actual titanic broke or like ship sections?
It sits behind my couch because it is 53 inches (135cm) long and nearly 18 inches(44cm) to the top of the masts. It has a clever pin system that you pull up from the top deck to unlock the sections from one another. It has details in the cross section for the different floors and such. Nothing too fancy but it’s there. It also does have a rotating engine that is hooked to the rear propellers. The easiest way to show where it separates (and more of its scale) is just to post one of legos images.