To Everyone Who Says they Don't want a G3

Jawblades home planet is Scylla, and almost every villian and breakout had a backstory

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Having a name does not translate to a backstory.

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thank you, sir.

for better articulating what i was tryin to say a while ago.

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I do want it back, I just dont want it back if its gonna suck again and if its going to be cancelled too earily cause of some convoluded or dumb reasons, by that point why should I even support such scumy LEGO business practices. Ether they do the line justice, or dont do it at all.

Which means, LEGO do your research, ged gud, and good will come back at you. Its not freaking hard, you have been doing that sorta thing for decades, even G1 followed that formula.

@asernic was saying jawblades home planet didn’t have name.
jawblades back story is hes a member of the legion of darkness that broke out of hero factory its not much buts its more info than the Skull villains.

I don’t want a g3, I want a beast wars ESC. revival

I’d have to agree. But I will state that personally Ninjago does not give me the same feeling as Bionicle did. Ninjago has some really good sets, and I thought the story was fine at first but it felt a little too cheesy as it went on. Not saying Bionicle’s story was perfect or anything, I just loved the depth of it as a kid. It might just be the fact that I’m older now, but It doesn’t quite hit home like Bionicle did.

As for G3, I agree with people saying that if Lego is just going to bring Bionicle to play around with the fans again, than it probably should stay cancelled. But if yes, if Lego ever does realize the mistakes they made, or maybe someone who knows what they’re doing buys the franchise, I would love a G3.

Yeah I feel that Ninjago is probably the only real successor to BIONICLE. Like, HF had some of it, but Ninjago really carried the torch.

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Before Bionicle Lego put out some trials to make sure it would succeed. They created Robo Riders and Slizers as test themes. I think that Lego should try this if they do want to make a G3 because with G2 they just tossed it right in due to fan demand. They could create a modified system and test it out with new small time themes and give them small stories that could help produce new ideas and show what works for the audience. There needs to be a little more thought put into it, for G2 it was more rushed unlike G1. Lego was under fire due to debt so they thought hard into making a franchise that would save them, and it worked. So I think the solution is to MAKE LEGO GO INTO DEBT AGAIN!!!

Just kidding, I’m not stupid. As I said G2 was rushed because they felt the demand for Bionicle, one thing that did contribute to this was the fact that it’s return was leaked and everyone went crazy. Now I’m not saying it was the fans that made it rushed, Lego kind of threw it on themselves. They only took a glance at the new demographic and tossed together something that was slightly lower than before. Lego Friends was sort of a trial and error thing when it first started out but then it ended up doing really well so they used it. It seemed like Lego tried putting more thought into G2 while it was running but ended up leaving a bunch of loose ends (EX: upper Vahi half) and then failing after it’s end trying to make things better (EX: Ekimu, teh contrevurshal toer o lightweyht). So I know I just wrote two paragraphs but it literally didn’t take me that long since I do this a lot. So any counterarguments or expansions?

history has a habit of repeating itself my dude
if lego made a g3 it would just be repeating a past mistake (g2)
if constraction wishes to survive, we need a new theme, one with a way bigger target audience than g2 had

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:angry:

Well, i didn’t know that i guess. Oh well.

HF had much more worldbuilding and depth in the books, not to mention the website and (kinda) comics. The show slowly devolved into a toy commercial in IFB, but it did its job well enough. I just find that HF and G2 had very different ways of going about the story.

G2 was trying to mimic the epic scale of G1, all while falling flat on its face as soon as possible.

HF was less of a grand story and more of a jumping off point for wild imaginations, leaving cliffhangers for kids to make their own continuation, and giving you the info and freedom you need to expand the world however you want. Something that I believe, makes it the most LEGO-y LEGO story theme of them all.
.

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In my opinion although lego had done a good job with g1 but

I also think that because story comes second with bionicle because they have to sell the toys and not the story bionicle’s story will never be able to compare with something where story and the media that portrays the story comes first for example star wars (Despite the money they make from toy sales.) or tranformers.

I think you folks are overlooking a very significant detail here; Bionicle is not being properly replaced with another original constraction line as they have after previous discontinuations.

I doubt that the line being Bionicle rather than Hero Factory(or whatever else) is the reason it ended. It’s much more likely that the lego company would rather relocate their assets into licensed lines like build-able Star Wars figures that are selling crazy well, rather than a Bionicle that was selling moderately well and experiencing little growth. Hence, “Bionicle sold well”, although not well enough.

Look at what they were doing with HF towards its end- introducing minifigures to a line that never had them to start with and abruptly ending the story with a half-baked special that didn’t correlate with the previously established plot whatsoever. There was clearly something wrong there… There’s no way that was the ending they had planned for HF(also note Faber’s recent angry rant about HF’s squandered potential). It looks a lot like a last-ditch effort to see if they couldn’t keep it from going under by inserting attributes of lines that perform better.

I get the feeling that Bionicle G2 was them continuing to try and pull original constraction IPs out of the mud. They wanted to see if bringing back the brand that made the toys famous would perform as well as it used to, but with a slashed budget this time(for fear of it not improving anything). Unfortunately, they ended up with similar sales to what Hero Factory made towards its cancellation- which simply wasn’t enough for a growing company.

That isn’t to say it couldn’t have sold better had they actually invested in the marketing team and coordinated their media outlets, but they were looking for some kind of performance out of what they did put into it- realistic or not.

So, do I want a g3? In short- Of course I do! I want to see the legend of my childhood succeed again and inspire many more young minds like it did my own.

But

I wouldn’t want it to come back in the same market climate that we’re in now. The evidence points to constraction doing poorly for original IPs, so they’d be forced to make a compromise of either stunting its budget and praying for it to still work(as they did with G2) or trying to recreate it as a system line(which would be rather bittersweet for many old fans- me included).

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If LEGO were to bring Bionicle back for a G3, they would need to make it a big bang theme, with lots of advertising, and things to get people invested. Things such as electronic compatibilty, maybe with an app that’s like MNOG. Gear functions for sure. And a collectable, like the Kanohi of yesteryear.

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Here is a interesting thought, what if HF’s budget issues that Faber described was because LEGO was slowly siphoning away the money to put into other themes. (Ninjago, Chima, Friends, LEGO Movie) And they just figured “Eh, BIONICLE is coming back soon enough, and that will sell great, we can let this die”

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I want G3, there was some dumb rumor that Disney was buying Bionicle, tho it ain’t true if it was I think it be a good thing. Imagine a Bionicle theatrical movie.

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I do not want a G3. At least, in the current climate. Here’s why:

Lego has given me zero confidence that they would be able to handle a BIONICLE G3 in a way that would be satisfactory. As the years have gone on, and more info has come out regarding G1 and how it was handled, it’s become increasingly clear to me that G1’s widespread success was likely luck. All the right circumstances and all the right things happened at just the right time. Trying to recreate that perfectly would most likely be like catching lightning in a bottle.

The mistakes, the mismanagement, the ever-present feeling that constraction will always receive less attention and marketing than the system themes… Lego seems to have extreme difficulty, in today’s climate, adapting BIONICLE for modern kids. Lego has given me no reassurance that any possible G3 wouldn’t suffer from those same issues. They COULD realize that they need to go back to their old way of handling BIONICLE’s plot and marketing, OR they could look back to G1 and how its sales declined due to the complex story preventing new fans from jumping in… and keep things the same, or try to alter the formula in some such way once again.

Plus, so long as BIONICLE remains a constraction theme, in today’s Lego world, where System themes with TV shows are the main focus and Lego spends all their marketing budget on them, it will never receive the amount of promotion and marketing it needs to grow a large fanbase. If BIONICLE came back as a System theme… I’d be singing a different tune, but that’s another matter.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that Lego isn’t stupid, they do take notice of the theme’s problems and attempt to fix them. I firmly believe that everything done in G2 was done in response to what they “learned” from Hero Factory, seeing as how it’s become increasingly clear that they used it as a test-bed for ideas for BIONICLE’s reboot basically from the moment it was launched. Lego saw G1’s stagnation as a problem that they needed to fix with future themes, which is good… but there’s many different solutions to those problems and I have no way of knowing how Lego would go about “fixing” BIONICLE in G3, G4, or any future reboot of the franchise.

It’s that ever-present uncertainty and the lack of faith that G2 has left me with that make me think it would be far better for everybody if BIONICLE either returned as a System theme so it could receive the necessary focus and marketing it needs, or just stays in the hands of the fans forever. Trial by Tahu, Reviving BIONICLE, Okoto Origins… these are just a few examples of the exemplary fan projects out there that are infinitely more satisfying than anything official that we got from G2. If we want BIONICLE to be successful, we don’t need to crawl on our hands and knees, begging Lego to bring back G3 and “do it right this time.” How about we just do it right ourselves? We have all the capabilities in today’s modern world. Technology has advanced at an extremely rapid rate. Elaborate stopmotions are being done by MNL, SuddenlyOranges makes me care more about characters than Lego’s BIONICLE, quite frankly, ever has, Failsafe42 is making a CGI fan-film, Pereki manages to perfectly represent that classic BIONICLE feeling with infinitely fewer resources and manpower than Lego had, and fans like Cyber-hand have even taken to making their own pieces on Shapeways! As far as I’m concerned, leaving BIONICLE’s fate in the hands of Lego rather than the fandom, at this point, is too much of a gamble to truly put my heart and soul into hoping for it. The fans are increasing my enjoyment of BIONICLE as a franchise, whereas Lego was detracting from it.

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They have lost customer trust/consumer support from the Bionicle and constraction community through their half a decade and more long questionable business and marketing practicises for this section of LEGO toys.

Consumers should never be the first to blame for the blunders of the company which JOB was to provide the necessary athmosphere for consumer spending. If they do not provide that through promoting the line (marketing through visual media, promotions, events, transparency) which comes with research of the market and consumer demand, they will fail.

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I’m just gonna throw this quick picture in here.

This is a picture of a ToysRUs I took just a few minutes ago. This is was one of the aisles. Full of Bionicle sets, several of which are fairly old by this point, and should be long gone like most other Lego themes in this store (Chima is the only other one that seemed to seriously linger).

Also, this isn’t just one of those stores that stock late. While looking around, I managed to find many of the newer Lego Batman Movie sets, Nexo Knights sets, and the brand new wave of Ninjago. Only Bionicle and Chima are lingering this long, every other theme appeared to sell at a decent rate.

This is why it couldn’t realistically come back. The name has been taken off the shelves twice already, both time ending with some serious shelfwarmers. This is more stock of discontinued sets than most Bionicle sets I’ve seen in once place in a long time. These stores need to sell their stock, or they make no profit, and if these sets take so long to sell the store is either losing money or making none. Lego has their own retailer, but these individuals still distribute a massive amount of the stock.

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