Controling who? Ah well, the basic idea was good, but obviously they always had to invent ever-new ways of selling their stuff, right from the start. Forcing it into the cloud certainly was a bad move, but there've been many such moves, now and in the past. Collaboration with Star Wars. Being such a great unisex toy, they still had to introduce a completely separate line "for girls", implying that other lines are "for boys". Computer games. NinjaGo. Etc. Some might even argue that the very introduction of LEGO Technic was such a move, trying to get into a market segment dominated by FischerTechnik until then. Not me, I loved it. When I was a child I visited the one and only LEGOLand, and it was all made from square bricks, nothing else. That was LEGO back then. Enough nostalgia, I'm not complaining. But I see kids playing with it every day, and sometimes I wish they were reduced to LEGO of the seventies. Just bricks (well, mostly). Challenges the imagination much better.
To see how boys and girls play, you just have to watch them do their thing. That’s what Lego did over the course of its research in past decade. For one project, Lego gathered a group of boys and asked them to build a Lego castle together. Separately, they gave the same task to the group of girls. Both groups worked together to build the castle, but once it was assembled, there were stark differences in how the two groups proceeded. “The boys immediately grabbed the figures and the horses and the catapults and they started having a battle,” McNally said. “The facilitator said, ‘What about the castle?’ And they said, ‘Well, that’s just the backdrop for the battle.’” The girls, on the other hand, were more focused on the structure—and not too impressed with what they found. “They all looked around inside the castle and they said, ‘Well, there’s nothing inside,’” McNally said. “This idea of interior versus exterior in the orientation of how they would then play with what they built was really interesting. If you think about most of the Lego models that people consider to be meant for boys, there’s not a whole lot going on in there. But [the girls had] this idea of, ‘There’s nothing inside to do.’” “Both girls and boys were saying they liked building, but there were nuances in what they were looking for,” he added. “We heard girls overwhelming saying we would much rather build environments than single structures. They were really just looking for a lot more detail than we were offering.”