Originally published at: Lego set for The Office available for pre-order | Boing Boing
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I definitely miss the days when Lego was a creator tool.
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Has Lego crafted a Climate Breakdown set yet or a they just waiting till after the fall of civilization?
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Between the Ideas submission and the commercial set we’ve lost minifigs of Andy and Erin, meaning no opportunity for Parkour, and no joyful innocent bafflement.
Hugely disappointing.
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Who among us, I ask, who work in an office is not sufficiently satiated by the artifices of our environment without a desire to reproduce it in the form of minifig Office characters?
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…I mean, what happened here is that someone created this from Lego, and then a ton of other people said they liked their work and would buy a copy. 
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So how does this work? Does Lego now need to acquire the license? Or do they wash their hands of it and say “not our problem, it’s the original creator who associated this particular constellation of bricks with the media property. We just sell the bricks and minifigs”?
Well, considering it’s going to be released in October of 2022, I assume they just licensed it. Likely why there are characters missing, because they couldn’t secure the image rights to those characters/from those actors.
Would have been nice for BB to link to the actual store page for exact details rather than the Ideas page.
What makes you imply it ever stopped being that?
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I mean, LEGO Ideas is not legally binding for anyone. 
In this case they did go ahead and get the license because they agreed it’d be a great product. However the service is just a fun way to engage with fans, nobody is bound to anything. There have been plenty of projects that hit the 10,000 votes to which LEGO says, “Sorry we can’t do that one”. Mostly on the really big sets, because fans always love models with tens of thousands of pieces in them, which LEGO knows wouldn’t sell enough to justify the production.
LEGO also redesigns the models based on what the fan submitted. Fans don’t understand all the constraints LEGO works under to get sets just right for all ages and to be composed of parts that can easily be produced in the right schedule. Fans also tend to violate building rules here and there, creating connections that stress parts and so on, which of course LEGO won’t do. LEGO also designs sets based on how easy it will be to make instructions easy to follow, so they’ll redesign fan ideas to be more modular, or have fewer very small parts. What gets shipped is always something designed by LEGO designers, based on something that “won” the Ideas process.
Fans have gotten smarter at this over the years. People used to submit only huge spaceships and other impractical dream sets, but nowadays we see a lot more stuff like this which is very practical and has good commercial potential.
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