Why Not Have More Ideas Sets?

In case you missed it, LEGO and Target partnered up to produce a set that achieved 10K votes on the Ideas platform, but didn’t get produced as a set. There were three options and they were put to a fan vote. The choices were a Viking Village, Marine Life, or working mini-golf.

The voting wrapped up and the results were posted. The Viking Village won the vote per the post on the LEGO Ideas site. The set will be sold at Target, LEGO Brand Stores, and LEGO Shop @ Home in the US. I’m not sure of the retailers who will get it outside of the US, but don’t panic if you don’t live in the US and have Target. I haven’t seen anything about when the set will be released. Maybe a year from now?

This brings up an interesting point. Don’t we already have a program to bring rejected LEGO Ideas projects to life?

Isn’t the BrickLink Designer Program the place to bring back rejected Ideas sets? I guess this program limits sets to a 10K production run and has limited availability, but still. Why is there one more program to produce these projects?

My proposal would be to just select more Ideas sets through the Ideas line versus bringing them back through various ways again and again. The issue I’ve heard is LEGO doesn’t have the capacity to produce more at a time then they already are, but then again, aren’t they involved in these programs? I guess the BrickLink program puts more on the fan designer, but couldn’t LEGO do the same for Ideas? Maybe they could publish their guidelines and make fan designers meet them. That’s just my opinion anyways.

I’m glad to see another set coming via fan vote, I just think we could streamline the process versus having various programs to bring Ideas projects to life.

What are your thoughts?

Happy building!