Last week, we first reported a rather puzzling move by the LEGO Ideas Team on two LEGO Ideas archived projects that made it through the 10K fan support milestone. Unfortunately, these product ideas – the Gravity Falls Mystery Shack by Figura and Japanese Tea Garden by Coosey Goosey – were later removed from the Achieved Support page which will make them eligible for the Second 2019 LEGO Ideas Review Stage.
It didn’t help much also that LEGO was quite mum regarding the reasons behind this issue since a lot of LEGO fan support went out to these product ideas with the hope of seeing them as actual LEGO sets in the near future. Needless to say, it left most fans of the LEGO Ideas platforms scratching their heads a bit, searching for possible answers to this unusual situation.
However, it now looks like that LEGO is now giving fans an idea of what has happened that led them to make such an unusually tough decision. LEGO opted to break their silence over the matter so that fans may have a better understanding of what really transpired with these LEGO Ideas archived projects.
Here’s what the LEGO Group has to say over at the LEGO Ambassador Network:
Although questions haven’t directly come in via LAN, I can understand there are some questions about the recent archival of the two LEGO Ideas 10K Club submissions Japanese Tea Gardens and Gravity Falls Mystery Shack.
It’s incredibly rare that we make the decision to remove submissions that have achieved the 10,000 supporter milestone and to not allow them through to the review stage. Unfortunately, after a thorough evaluation we made the tough decision (because we can clearly see that both models are incredibly well built) that in these two cases we had to do this as the submissions did not comply with our Terms of Service. We couldn’t, in respect to the LEGO Ideas community, move the submissions into the review stage as well as award prizes, whether the main prize or the consolation prize, to the members in question.
Although we know that you’re all very interested in knowing the specific underlying reasons for why we decided to archive them, this is not information that I can share with you out of respect for the privacy of the members in question. Should the members in question choose to share the reason for the archival of their submissions, then they are welcome to do so.
From what we can learn from LEGO’s statement, it looks like the Gravity Falls Mystery Shack and Japanese Tea Garden entries violated the LEGO Ideas’ Terms of Service. Obviously, it’s a broad statement, to say the least since we have no way of knowing exactly what this particular breach in TOS is LEGO is exactly referring to.
It could be anything in particular within that lengthy agreement, but according to the exchange of discussion within the LAN group, it was mentioned that one of the builders of these entries was a previous LEGO Store employee. That could point out a possible reason why these product ideas were eventually shelved. I guess these are speculations, to say the least, until such time that the owners of these product ideas will speak and share their own side of the story. LEGO made it clear that they are free to do so, and it’s now up to Coosey Goosey and Figura if they wish to shed more light on this matter.
So what do you think about this new revelation? What other possible reasons do you think that the LEGO Ideas Team could have in shelving these LEGO product ideas? Let me know in the comments below.
