VIDIYO officially discontinued

Anyways, stream Shake.

What more could they really do? It felt like they were low on ideas already and if it went on longer it would just be more stages and weird vehicles. It didn't really have the ability to go into a subtheme every year like other themes

It's about time.

@drewtstew said:
" @JasoMac said:
"The app was the problem. My son thought it was really cool and we got a few figures for him but the app was so glitchy and crashed all the time that he quickly lost interest. If the app had been more consistent the whole line might have been more successful with its intended audience."

Same problem with the Hidden Side sets. The app was garbage on anything but the latest iPhone. Lego needs to either stop relying on app gimmicks or start hiring people who can actually code an app."

All of the top coders are working on blockchain. Lego need to move with the times and work on a blockchain app and play-to-earn gaming. This is where it’s all heading.

surprised Pikachu face

Personally I liked Vidiyo, but the app really needed work. It was buggy and an absolute pain to set up a dance.

You'd have to scan each and every time, physically change out your beatbit tiles, scan them (a lot of the time the scan would fail and you'd have to try again), and then find a place that was suitable for them to dance.

If they made the app less of a pain and quicker and easier to use, I think it would've been better

Collected all the season 1 minifigs except never found that orange guy with the keytar. These great minifigs could have made a fun lighthearted cast for a Fabuland 2 theme. We collected way too may ice cream cones and there's talk in the house of making a Candyland village. We have some gingerbread guys, that ice cream mermaid, a gummy bear. I just don't have the design skills like so many of you.

Sounded inevitable.

I bought a few blind boxes, got repeats. Never bought any more because I didn't feel like wasting my money when I couldn't actually guarantee the figure I wanted. (I understand how blind packaging works). I understand the idea of sustainability, but blind boxing just doesn't work for me and my purchasing will reflect that going forward if CMF decide to go that way.

The bright oddly designed figures were fun, but not something I absolutely had to have I guess. I never tried the app since I don't care for most gimmicks and I don't play with my toys (silly I know).

I would say price of beatboxes didn't help matters any. But I know they need to recover costs somewhere. It just didn't work out this time.

Like the bird said, I’m going to die of shock from not-surprise.

IDK who decided anybody buys it. In Russia we had 43115 "The Boombox" supplied as a gift to 42131 "Cat D11 Bulldozer" already going with 20% discount to russian RRP. Translating, it is just close to US/EU CAT price with that boombox set for free.

As for Vidiyo , I loved the Stage sets, some of my favorite figures from 2021, but gotta be honest, the discounts did help.

More Stage sets might have had potential like a dragon/zombie castle stage, instead of the Beat Boxes they did.

As for the App, I don't really collect themes for apps or shows as main reason, but first and foremost for the physical LEGO within.

I literally just ordered the sets last night on Amazon for 20% off because I was tired of waiting to see these hit a deep clearance. I love the figures and the printed tiles but the app was garbage. Hopefully they will reuse some of the molds for later CMFs or sets but Lego really needs to stop trying these app gimmicks. I think these would have been more successful if they weren't so overpriced and heavily reliant on the app.

Good riddance. Good minifigures but good nothing else.

To no one's surprise. I haven't had any personal experience with the sets or app, but seeing how expensive the sets were and hearing about poor performance from the app, I'm not surprised by this announcement.
Well, now that it's discontinued, maybe I should pick up some sets before they're all gone for good. The minifigs looked cool at least. Maybe some stores will put them on clearance...

The App was indeed bad but the sets were good and the minifigures great!
The problem is to release a music game. A genre which do little successes.
Just release a music video to go along as elves or ninjago. It would work good enough.

Good sets, too expensive. I picked up some of the beatboxes for £7ish on Amazon last year and I like them. The clear pod is good for sci-fi MOCs, a cryo chamber or escape pod or something. Minifigs and printed tiles are good. Some of the other sets are good too - I like the 80s boombox that opens out to a stage. I never even tried the app - certain not to work on my crappy phone. I hope they can find a way to do a music-based theme that doesn't hit the wallet so hard.

@stephengroy said:
"Gee, that's too bad.
Can we revive Hidden Side now please?"

the hidden side 2023 lie will have a 8stud long railgun to emancipate the ghosts from the realm of the dead and into nothing at all

/srs i agree

@drewtstew said:
" @JasoMac said:
"The app was the problem. My son thought it was really cool and we got a few figures for him but the app was so glitchy and crashed all the time that he quickly lost interest. If the app had been more consistent the whole line might have been more successful with its intended audience."

Same problem with the Hidden Side sets. The app was garbage on anything but the latest iPhone. Lego needs to either stop relying on app gimmicks or start hiring people who can actually code an app."

I played it on an iPhone 6S (the minimum viable phone for the game) many times and had very few issues, did I just get lucky?

@busyman said:
"They really messed up the release of Bandmates S2 by semi-cancelling it. I really wanted that blue dragon, but the sets are out of stock everywhere or never were in stock to begin with.
My local Lego store only had one carton on release which sold out before I could even get to it and never got anymore again afterwards.
There are only a few listings on BrickLink, but they are way over-priced. "

You think they're overpriced now? Every bricklink seller be uppin' their prices after this official announcement today. Get those Series 2 figures while you can at the current "reasonable" markup.

Shame, I'd hoped the series 2 figures would get a wider release, but hope Lego realise that they need to use Apps as a bonus to the sets, rather than making it the main feature

@tne328 said:
" @eggbert20 said:
"Ok, now can we get back to basics? Pirates, Castle, Space?"

I have those, but I’m greedy and want dedicated themes!! Lol

They *are* all back, come to Creator!"

NOOOOOO!!!!!! Not Vidyo!!! NOT VIDYO!!!!!!

I never complained about it, but the only things I got from it were the BeatBit tiles for record sleeves and posters and things. There were one or two other good parts that came out of it, but feel like it would have been more successful among AFOLs if it had more usable parts. The parts were very fancy and well-made, but they were too weird, colourful and niche.

@PurpleDave said:
"and the Nintendo Switch was two years away from being released."
I know that we've already had this conversation before, but I still strongly disagree with the notion that the Switch had any impact on Dimension's sales (or lack thereof). The Switch was barely a blip on the radar at the start of it's life due to the Wii U's failure, by the time the Switch picked up steam throughout 2017 Dimensions was long dead. (Not to mention that the game was also available on the much more successful Xbox One and PS4, both of which lasted well after Dimensions or the Wii U did.)

Everything else you said is 100% correct though.

No surprise here. Maybe LEGO should consult us before releasing such obvious failures.

As others have previously stated, LEGO integration into mobile apps never works well.

These often are ranges with many new moulds (mostly one-offs), new printing etc. which seem to detract from other ranges without being cohesive enough to maintain a good, what would likely be called, "repeat spending pattern" where you buy more than one of a range.

How many Dimensions sets were brought for the figs/builds rather than the actual sets? I wonder if the same applies here - how many were sold for the builds/tiles/figs rather than as a set to expand the collection?

@PurpleDave Interesting! I didn’t even know there was another TTL Disney game other than Infinity. Dimensions was even one of my favorite themes at one time, as I tried to get a lot of exclusive minifigs like E.T. and the like. My game performed well on the PS3 and I didn’t really have problems with it, I honestly wish the TTL idea could have been developed further.

Shocked Pikachu face...

@Dieselville said:
"Not terribly surprising, I guess. But my biggest takeaway here is the relatively "short" app support time frame (2 more years). This is about the biggest reason why I (and many others, it would seem) have been so hesitant to adopt the Technic Powered Up line. It's 100% app reliant and what happens to your CONTROL+ parts and sets 5-10 years from now?"

I love the look of several Technic sets but as soon as I read the words "app controlled" I just lost interest, I know people say you don't need the app to build it but you are still paying for the app development and support in the price so no thank you. Also my phone was second hand when I bought it 8 years ago so tha would be another unnecessary expense.

I'm mixed about this. While Vidiyo definitely scratched a big itch for fantasy and horror CMFs after a long time of them being absent or lackluster, I feel like Vidiyo probably funneled those characters away from the CMFs and now that this is done, maybe we'll see them in series again without the unnecessary musical theming. I only bought Bandmates Series 1, since the BeatBoxes were ridiculously expensive and the sets weren't worth it enough to me. I hated the blind boxing, but hated more that Series 2 just didn't show up anywhere. The theme was poorly conceived with the app thing, especially because it's probably the theme that had the least to stand on if the app is out of the equation. LEGO cannot possibly hope to do well with virtual play after this. The theme had good elements, but I feel like those good things were taken away from places that would better use them, and the concept and release were mismanaged.

I might have gotten a few blind bag figures for their unique molded parts or colored minifig parts but the parts not even that attractive, the price way to high and making them blind boxes made it literally impossible to buy what I wanted. If they want to discontinue plastic bags at least make people be able to choose the contents.

They weren't even good enough to look up individual parts in Bricklink and picking something up through there, it's just a hassle to understand the contents or buy this stuff and the app only served to increase the price tag which is ironic considering they are now all on steep discounts everywhere, though steep discount in germany just means "what they are actually worth". Of everything Lego did the last couple of decades this is definitely the worst thing since Galidor and Jack Stone.

I hope the unique mold and prints allotments of good selling themes will be increased again and that we can finally stop pretending that creative Lego themes are good or successful. Except Creator which has become a generic toy theme every attempt works for a year at best and then fails spectacularly.
People don't like the creative aspect, just the nostalgia of the visual style that Lego evoked in the 80s to 00s, of a toyline where everything can happen. This visual language has never been recreated by any of the new toylines, instead attempts like Vidyio and Lego Movie 2 are merely forced creativity and not natural creativity. Don't design something to be compatible with other things on purpose, then it does not have an inherent charm.
At this point with the failure of so many themes that attempted garish, colorful and confusing designs and colorschemes Lego should go back to its routes and try realistically styled classic concepts like Castle, Pirates, Western, 80s Space and the like. It is not like they are actually attempting anything new by ignoring the craving for nostalgia based sets. It is really strange to merely see continued acknowledgement of these themes popularity yet no move to capitalize on it aside from occasional sets which appear to sell very well, at least not shelfwarm as hard as many of these "creative attempts" evidently do.
And if outright 80s revivals are still not allowed, at least give Star Wars back its 2015-2019 set slots and number of new parts/prints. The tv shows are too popular for the current product palette to sustain customer and fan demands.

I think there were some great figures, and the larger stage models weren't bad, but the implementation was very much misjudged. The app wasn't fit for purpose, the larger sets were released too late, and the figures were either too expensive or packaged in a very consumer unfriendly way.

The idea of different themed bands was fine, and I think they could have done some kind of media content that wasn't reliant on an app (YouTube videos, for example) to inspire kids to play with their figures in a music themed way. Or maybe they could have made an app that allowed kids to come up with their own songs by picking from different drum tracks, lead instruments and musical styles which would have worked on more phones (and also been an opportunity for kids to learn a little as well).

Stay in your swim lane... it's simple, yet LEGO has strayed before and we know what happened (or nearly happened).

I would say I'm surprised if I hadn't said this would happen on the 23 July 2021 at 22:42 on this very same site, when the supposed "postponing to rework" was announced.

When it first came out I was 100% confident it would flunk. I never understood what it was supposed to be from looking at the sets on shelves (I still don't, even after researching it), they were incredibly expensive even by Lego standards, and apparently the app sucks. I've always disliked Lego trying to tie apps into their sets, it makes no sense.

I wish they would learn from their mistakes when it comes to apps and other digital stuff, where they consistently display terrible judgment. Kids, pre-secondary school, generally have their parents' cast-off phones. So you build something that's going to work sustainably on an old phone for a few years. And in general, I would rather see apps as an optional extra than something intrinsic to the functioning of the toy - a massive selling point of Lego is that you can inherit your big cousin's bricks from five years ago, or even your parents' bricks from thirty years ago, and they still work just the same, both in themselves and in combination with your new bricks. Make a set whose functions are controlled by an app that will be accessible by the child for a mere handful of years, and that only if their parents keep updating their phones, and you're massively diminishing the value of the toy. It's antithetical to the whole focus on sustainability.

I’m disappointed. It was a great theme with clever minifig designs & awesome new parts. Couldn’t care less about the app. I would hope, despite the continued trend of smart crap ruling lives of soceify, that they would stay away from this app support garbage.

The minifigs were absolutely brilliant, but I think that's the only positive thing we can take from Vidiyo.

The app was rubbish and the sets were all so over-priced.

But I still regret not picking up the second series of blind box collectable minifigs. I don't think they were even available in Austraila.

@Trigger_ said:
" @drewtstew said:
" @JasoMac said:
"The app was the problem. My son thought it was really cool and we got a few figures for him but the app was so glitchy and crashed all the time that he quickly lost interest. If the app had been more consistent the whole line might have been more successful with its intended audience."

Same problem with the Hidden Side sets. The app was garbage on anything but the latest iPhone. Lego needs to either stop relying on app gimmicks or start hiring people who can actually code an app."

I played it on an iPhone 6S (the minimum viable phone for the game) many times and had very few issues, did I just get lucky?"

I also had no problem using the app on ipad air3. My 8 yrs old son loves Vidiyo, although I consider all these clips rather stupid. But I am not a child and Vidiyo is just aa simple toy.

Technic PU sets are not 100% app based as you can code the hub using pybricks and use the standard PU remote. It works better then the app.

The Minifigs and accessories were cool — and I've used some of the more awesome tile 'album' covers for a music store MOC upgrade to Assembly Square. But the Beatbox starter sets — and worse the Boom Box — were priced poorly, and the app didn't deliver on dependable play experience. Found five Series 2 figs at retail in December, and now from their after-market prices I wish I had found more! LOL

@Anonym said:
"I might have gotten a few blind bag figures for their unique molded parts or colored minifig parts but the parts not even that attractive, the price way to high and making them blind boxes made it literally impossible to buy what I wanted. If they want to discontinue plastic bags at least make people be able to choose the contents.

They weren't even good enough to look up individual parts in Bricklink and picking something up through there, it's just a hassle to understand the contents or buy this stuff and the app only served to increase the price tag which is ironic considering they are now all on steep discounts everywhere, though steep discount in germany just means "what they are actually worth". Of everything Lego did the last couple of decades this is definitely the worst thing since Galidor and Jack Stone.

I hope the unique mold and prints allotments of good selling themes will be increased again and that we can finally stop pretending that creative Lego themes are good or successful. Except Creator which has become a generic toy theme every attempt works for a year at best and then fails spectacularly.
People don't like the creative aspect, just the nostalgia of the visual style that Lego evoked in the 80s to 00s, of a toyline where everything can happen. This visual language has never been recreated by any of the new toylines, instead attempts like Vidyio and Lego Movie 2 are merely forced creativity and not natural creativity. Don't design something to be compatible with other things on purpose, then it does not have an inherent charm.
At this point with the failure of so many themes that attempted garish, colorful and confusing designs and colorschemes Lego should go back to its routes and try realistically styled classic concepts like Castle, Pirates, Western, 80s Space and the like. It is not like they are actually attempting anything new by ignoring the craving for nostalgia based sets. It is really strange to merely see continued acknowledgement of these themes popularity yet no move to capitalize on it aside from occasional sets which appear to sell very well, at least not shelfwarm as hard as many of these "creative attempts" evidently do.
And if outright 80s revivals are still not allowed, at least give Star Wars back its 2015-2019 set slots and number of new parts/prints. The tv shows are too popular for the current product palette to sustain customer and fan demands."

I agree with some of the points you make about Vidiyo, specifically the price being too high and the blind boxes being a poor choice but I'm confused by a lot of what else you say.

What exactly is the difference between forced creativity and natural creativity? And how do you tell?

Also, you say you want Lego to go back to its roots and then list off a load of themes from the 80s and 90s as examples, when Lego had already been around for decades by then. Looking at the Lego sets from the early days, I would in fact say the perfect description for them is "garish and colourful". And I like that about them.

And of all the ways you could describe the 80s space Lego sets, "realistically styled" surely isn't anywhere near the top of the list. They are fantastical sci-fi nonsense, and all the better for it.

I get that you like some of the older Lego themes. I love them too! But expecting Lego to reproduce them all again today will just leave you disappointed.

The minifigs were among LEGO's best, but the series had a ton of problems. I'm sure I'm not the only one who saw it coming before it even launched.

I have noticed LEGO, lately, has been having a lot of other studios producing LEGO mobile games--why can't they farm out productions of product tie-in apps as well?

@OneIsLit:
If AFOLs can kill a theme by not buying it, it’s priced too high for kids, or it doesn’t appeal to them either. Ever hear of a theme called Bionicle? What AFOLs can kill by not buying is sets in the $200+ range, and sets in black boxes. If AFOLs don’t snap up stuff like the Botanical Collection, for sure kids aren’t going to be climbing over each other to get their hands on a copy.

@LegoSonicBoy:
I’d be shocked if Nintendo didn’t have a hand in coding the software for Mario. Matter of fact, I’d be shocked if they didn’t courteously push TLG to the side on that and hand over a finished software package. Where Mario differs from Vidiyo, though, is that Mario uses the app to connect the Mario/Luigi gizmos to software updates. Unless I completely misunderstood how this works, you don’t actually use the app when you’re playing the game. Vidiyo is entirely app-based. There’s no electronic components to operate besides your phone, and TLG has proved time and again that they are nothing if not hopelessly incompetent at programming for a range of unrelated hardware running different operating systems.

I started out playing all the LEGO TT games on PC because it was so much less expensive. Then I started running into things like one game where you could play as Santa on December 25, but because they hadn’t anticipated my hardware configuration, my Santa outfit was blue with white trim. They couldn’t figure out how to fix it, other than “use a different computer”. I replayed everything once I got a Wii, and was shocked at how much smoother the games ran when they only had to juggle 3-5 major hardware configurations at a time.

@Robot99:
I don’t remember talking about Switch vs Wii U ever (I do remember pointing out the terrible timing against the Switch release). I happen to have loved the Wii U over the Wii because for basic LEGO games I could just flip the screen to the handheld, and it was just like an adult-sized GBA.

I don’t know sales data, but I remember the Switch being almost as hard to locate as a Wii had been after launch. And what I know is that it wouldn’t have mattered how successful the Switch ended up being. They were looking at losing one of their three market segments, while planning to roll out a third year of sets that all required intensive programming. By the time they could see market data in the Switch, most of Year 3 would have been in stores.

And the data you seem to be referencing sounds like it’s about hardware sales. Did you know the GameCube was the most profitable system of its generation? Nintendo always makes sure they turn a profit on hardware sales from Day 1, while Sony and Microsoft have repeatedly taken a loss on early sales and only started to profit on hardware once they work out the kinks in the manufacturing process, and maybe tweak the design of the hardware to be more affordable. Hardware sales also don’t tell you anything about what percentage of the install base each platform captured, or how much each of those three groups were actually buying. Maybe 50% of the users were on System A, but never bought anything beyond the starter kit, while 10% of the users were on System C and got _everything_. Which platform sounds more important to their bottom line?

I didn't like the sets

I didn't like the minifigures

I didn't even take a second look at any set.

I will not miss this theme.

@PurpleDave: Yeah, that's pretty much what I was trying to say. With Mario, the app experience "ends" at the moment you finish building and from then on the app mainly exists to keep score, save and share courses, and do maintenance on Mario and Luigi. Everything else happens in the firmware built into the figure, in conjunction with the barcodes. You're probably right about Nintendo doing most of the work on the firmware — at the very least, we can assume both parties contributed to it in some way.

I stopped playing the TT games because they were just the same game over and over again with unique gimmicks. It got stale after just the first LEGO Star Wars. I don't even remember which games I tried for like an hour or two off a demo or a friend's library before putting them down and never touching them again (I know I tried the first LEGO Batman, as well as The LEGO Ninjago Movie Videogame).

After gathering all the necessary punk, rocker and metal figs, I don't care anymore :)

No schtick.

Oh no! Chimas gone? I just fabulanded.

If you're going to make a music-based theme, focus on making music, rather than making music videos

@MGDawson:
I got a complete run of Dimensions for gameplay, including Green Arrow and whichever started set included Supergirl (PS3 or PS4), but excluding any other non-Nintendo starter set. I also bought tons of extras just for the minifigs. I ended up buying 30 or 40 of the Aquaman packs when they hit the same price as the loose minifig (~$5), but I probably got extras of about 1/4-1/3 of the range of characters.

@Spidermanager:
It was exclusive to Marvel, possibly specifically the Avengers. It sold concurrently with Dimensions, but TRU was the only place I ever saw it for sale. I don’t know what the game was like, but I doubt it sold very well. Most of the attention was focused on Skylanders (the first successful TTL game that I know of), Disney Infinity (which includes Marvel characters), and Nintendo’s Amiibo. Dimensions was actually a better game than any of those. You could beat the game with just the Starter Set. Skylanders reportedly had characters with special powers that you would need to get past one puzzle, and then you’d never need them again. You could play any character, anywhere, anytime (most characters would immediately die if you tried to use them underwater, but you _could_ load them into those environments). Infinity reportedly let you Sandbox is very character, but the various entities that controlled the Disney stable of IPs reportedly were aggressively jealous of letting anyone else on their turf, so any gameplay environment was strictly limited to IP-related characters. And it was actually a game, where Amiibo was just a way to load characters into other games (which was actually a cool idea, but they screwed it up by making certain highly desired characters insanely rare). And that standalone Marvel game didn’t seem to generate any interest _at_all_, as evidenced by the fact that nobody here seems to remember it.

I think there are some lessons to be learned here:

1) Apps or other fluid play experiences should complement the sets, not the other way around. The physical toys should provide an excellent play experience on their own without any apps; otherwise, if children do not have access to the technology necessary for the apps, the full play experience would not be provided and the toys would become overpriced collectibles.

2) That said, if a play experience requires an app, that app needs to actually reach most of the target market. The play testing team should not make the assumption that every kid has access to the latest devices like the ones used in the play tests. The software development team should ensure that the app is compatible with the widest number of devices possible.

TLDR version: Sell toys, not apps, but if you try to sell an app anyway, make sure most people can actually install and use it!

@PurpleDave Thanks for sharing! This stuff has a complex history for sure.

I have yet to try out a Lego app, obviously including Vidiyo, but I bought a number of Hidden Side sets and enjoyed the theme very much. I have also bought several Vidiyo Beat Boxes (on discount), a handful of the "blind bag" figures ("blind bag" in quotes because I bought them through Bricklink, not blindly), and one full set (the Pirate Ship, to add to my Lego ship collection). I'm still debating the Boombox, which looks great but has lots of competition on my wish list.

If they had rolled out the sets along with the minifigures, I think the theme would have done much better. The sets weren't badly priced, you could see which minifigs you got with each one, and they made the same kind of sense as the Hidden Side sets, which were full of playability even if you didn't involve the app. Hearing that the Vidiyo app was glitchy (what a surprise!) when the theme launched without anything but the app and some cute but expensive minifigures sealed the theme's doom IMO. I give TLG credit for trying to mix electronics with the physical building experience, but it's clear they need to build rock-solid, simple apps to go with their bricks. Not expecting people to have the very latest in phones would also be good. Is this really so difficult?

surprised pikachu face

Nice idea figs are cool but the bigger set are a bit over priced and the app was not great

@Spidermanager:
Oh, I forgot the one other major plus! Dimensions was really the only TTL game to use _real_toys_. Everything else had statues and/or tokens. Dimensions had the only toys that you could really do anything with, and that you could change (both physically and virtually) during gameplay. Pretty much every other TTL line either ended up perma-shelved, or tossed in a box for storage. I still use Dimensions minifigs in my LUG’s displays, plus I’ve used many of the spare parts in various MOCs.

This is a real, real shame, but not unexpected.

There was a lot of innovation and creativity in the theme, and I really appreciate TLG trying to push the boundaries and go beyond what is expected of a typical LEGO set. Typical LEGO sets are still being released in abundance, so we as consumers lost nothing from TLG's experimentation.

Pros:
Imaginative characters and sets
High quality minifigures
Cool prints on Beatbits
Fun app concept (yes, my family used it a lot, probably unlike a lot of its detractors)

Cons:
Overpriced compared to other LEGO themes
No story/background or recognisable 'world' for kids to be drawn in by
App was too bloated with options, functions, menus, tasks etc. taking focus away from the amazing ability to have 50ft tall LEGO robots and dragons dancing in your street

A final wave to flesh out some of the musical genres a little would have been great, but as with everything else we bought from VIDIYO we would have waited for heavy discounts from the silly RRP.

We'll never know, but it would be interesting to understand why the RRP was set so high. I don't think app development would have been a major factor (it apparently wasn't with Hidden Side), which leaves Universal music licensing costs, multiple new molds and prints, or TLG just trying their luck...

@rople said:
"Oh no!

Anyways..."

I just stumbled upon that for the first time yesterday! I dont know where it was first used, but Jeremy Clarkson uses it in S11 of Top Gear.

Well it’ll live on in the hearts of all those folks who enjoyed it.

And in ten years there’ll be some ‘member berries when Huwbot picks one as a RSOTD.

For my 7yo, there were two main issues with the app. One was its twitchy nature when setting a stage. But the bigger one was the inability to save your videos. Lego told me this was about security, but for a kid who’s proud of their creation, locking it inside an app eventually just pushes them to apps where they can share what they’ve done. (I understand Lego’s reasoning — security. But there are ways to deal with that.)

Beyond that, I liked the theme as a whole. The minifigs were great and the sets were messy but interesting. But the stages should have come out sooner and the blind buy was frustrating. (For me, that extends to CMFs though. Let them exist and sell on their own merits.)

@Spidermanager said:
"[...] The “toys-to-life” thing dominated the market, faded into obscurity, and lives on through amiibo and other brands that have still somehow kept going. [..."]

I think a big reason Amiibos persist is simple, Nintendo fanboys and -girls are just on another level. Even by the standards of nerd and video game culture, the dedication of serious Nintendo fans to buying Nintendo stuff seems unusually strong.
Combine that with what @PurpleDave mentioned: Instead of being tied to any one game (that could eventually lose player interest), Amiibos can be attached to each new thing Nintendo releases. They don't even need to be related to the game: Breath of the Wild will give some small rewards for any ol' Amiibo you scan. And which such a dedicated fanbase, the (artificial) rarity of some products needn't even be a downside, rather it can increase interest.

I really enjoyed the colors and build of the punk pirate ship stage, but I never downloaded the app.

@Rob42 :
People do collect Amiibos or their favorite characters. I almost did the same for Infinity’s Buzz Lightyear (but for the fact that the Pizza Planet Truck was a mere token, and the Claw Alien never got a TTL release, I probably would have). I remember the Yarn Yoshis (green, blue, and finally pink) resulted in a frenzy of collecting. But I think they also shot themselves in the foot with a hyper-rare release of one version of Link, which most of the many, many, oh-so-many Legend of Zelda fans didn’t find out about until the entire release had been snapped up. That smacked of Playmate’s debacle with the 1701 action figures for their Star Trek line, which were versions of Picard, Riker, and one other character (Tasha Yar?) that were limited to 1701 copies each. Released at a time when stores didn’t have any standing policies on employees buying collectibles, you can safely assume that every single copy of those action figures never made it out of the storeroom until a particular employee punched out for the day, or a customer who was feeding such an employee regular bribes came in to collect their prize.

Yarn Yoshis ended up being easy to find after the initial furor died down, so that probably didn’t have any long term negative impact in Amiibo sales. You-Can’t-Have-Him Link, on the other hand, might have caused people to give up and walk away. TRU folding certainly can’t have helped, since I wasn’t even aware that they were still selling them. But, in the absence of proper LEGO minifigs, I guess Nintendo fans will just keep buying little statues of favorite characters, and as long as Nintendo keeps making game systems with scanning capability, and games that recognize different RFID chips, there’s no reason to stop making the things.

Also, the article I read where I found out about the Link debacle hinted at how to burn your own RFID chip so you can scan that Amiibo into your game, even if you can’t display it on your shelf. I wouldn’t be surprised if it involves the vehicle/gear pucks from Dimensions, since those were actually designed to have data recorded to them, rather than being permanently encoded.

@PurpleDave: You could probably use Dimensions bases too, but plain programmable NFC chips can be had pretty cheaply. Just looking at the top results on Amazon, they come out to 0.30-0.40€, and I'm sure there's even cheaper sources out there. The actual files to put on there seem to be a slight legal grey area and some of the places that have instructions for Amiibo cloning won't link them, but they're not difficult to find either.

All that said, yeah, I think Nintendo have built themselves a pretty sweet deal with Amiibos. With a dedicated fanbase that (in my limited experience with them) will keep buying, and straddling the line between toys-to-life and pure collectible pretty well, I don't see the line disappearing any time soon either.

@Rob42:
A lot of people have spare Dimensions pucks just sitting around because they bought packs for the minifigs. I’ve still got 20 unopened Aquaman packs, and I’m sure that’s not even half of what I bought for minifigs, entirely separate from my game collection.

The only thing is, I don’t have any interest in Amiibos. I don’t remember how long ago it was I read about the super rare Link, but I figured they’d stopped producing them by now. But the last time I remember taking notice of them was when TRU was still around, so...

The app was both cumbersome/clumsy and would take forever to load up (it almost always had to have an update completed before you could do anything else). The idea and the music play (game play?) were pretty respectable once you finally got to that point. But the journey to get there...UGH! And the idea to use boxes instead of bags for the CMFs (and the high cost) just all but guaranteed this series to become dust collectors on the shelves. A real shame...LEGO put plenty of work into this. They just cannot develop a decent app worth a dollar.

Two years in a row, fun lines with fun models canned because of ... targeting them for apps. Hidden Side had great stuff (I wish I had gotten more); who cared about the ARG parts of it? Vidiyo has some nice things and awesome minifigs. And super-inflated prices because of "apps".

EDIT: Other comments noted these had random distribution? I didn't even know that. That makes me glad I didn't actually purchase any. Shame on Lego for gambling.

I absolutely LOVE the Vidiyo world, character design, and overall art direction. I hope they use that again somehow, losing that is my greatest disappointment.

@MrMonkey said:
"Have to say that just 2 more years of app support is pretty low for a product that focuses on the app for playing music..."

Agreed...and the same with the NEXO Knights and Hidden Side apps. They just killed any support/updates to keep the apps from glitching or being slow to load. This is my 3rd go-around with LEGO and apps (not including Dimensions) and my family and I are done. They will have to REALLY get their collective act together to make me even consider messing with one of their apps again. And I don't see them doing that.

@JasoMac said:
"The app was the problem. My son thought it was really cool and we got a few figures for him but the app was so glitchy and crashed all the time that he quickly lost interest. If the app had been more consistent the whole line might have been more successful with its intended audience."

Exactly! Especially on older devices that were still listed as supported and which are often the ones which you don't use yourself anymore and let your kids use it was alsmost unusable. Long loading times, glitches, frequent crashes as mentioned.