Today the Bones Blog brings you a list of aspects of sets and story that have been demonstrated to be "what most fans want." Of course, this isn't an all-inclusive list (lemme know if I forgot something you know of), and it should be cautioned that this could change in the future, and how much of a majority wants each thing is very difficult to pin down. Some of these haven't hurt sales horribly when not done in the past, but many have, and the idea in general is to improve sales as much as possible, to please more kids and keep Bionicle healthy in a challenging toy market.

Basic profile: 9-11 year old boys who enjoy action figure roleplaying melded with an easy snap-together construction. Enjoy adventure stories about heroes fighting villains. (With a note that there are exceptions, but these are in the minority.)

Setwise:

--Quick, easy builds.
--Roleplaying focus (rather than MOCing, for example).
--Variety between team members (nonclonism).
--More "Bionicle" style; less "Technic" style.
--Balljoints, as opposed to gears.
--Projectiles
--Heroes to be "noble humanoids"
--Villains allow more non-human styles
--Mild level of "Biomechanical" style
--Eye-catching colors

Storywise:

--Action Adventure
--Good guys vs. Bad guys
--Suspense
--Good guys win (overall)
--Cool powers
--New locations

Marketing:

--Distinctive packaging
--Awareness


Now the first thing to understand about this list is different personal tastes. I say this so often, but so many people still don't seem to know it. So once again, personal taste means that different people are wired to like different things, and that's okay, and even good, because it gives us variety. People are like snowflakes as I also often say -- no two are the same.

However, certain tastes tend to be shared by a majority of Bionicle fans, and for Bionicle to remain financially healthy, it should appeal to the majority tastes as much as possible. That doesn't make the minority "wrong" -- they are allowed to like what they want, but unfortunately it does mean Bionicle can only rarely give them treats. I.e. Bionicle can't please everybody.

Secondly, we must remember that in 2001, LEGO didn't know all this, and actually targeted many of the original sets towards different tastes, incorrectly thinking different tastes would be the majority. Essentially, this is summed up here: History of Technicism Vs. Bioniclism. Some people often mistake that history as evidence against this list; rather, this list is basically why LEGO changed many of the original things (and sales have gone up as a result). It's trial and error, basically. LEGO has learned from its mistakes -- this is a very good thing.

The quick, easy builds part is one that trips up a lot of people who don't share that preference in debates. They confuse this for something beyond just taste, thinking it means the majority fans are less intelligent or the like. No, it's just that most Bionicle fans have tastes not geared so much towards machinery or other physical complexity, but towards storylines and roleplaying.

Meaning, they channel their intelligence into the roleplaying and imagining their own stories. That's simply how they play, and IMO it's not really surprising that these would be the ones most attracted to a set line based on a storyline more so than any previous LEGO line.

Basically it's "allocation".

I have a theory that most people's intelligences are roughly equal, as I've mentioned before, it's just that we allocate our intelligence to different areas from other people. IQ tests for example are biased towards the kinds of allocations of people more like me. But that doesn't mean that people with low IQ test results are "dumb" -- if we designed a test that was biased towards how they allocate their intelligence, someone like me would probably look dumb.

Let's bury the myth right now that the simple build is anti-LEGO or means LEGO is slowly getting rid of the brick. They actually tried that with Galidor and it failed miserably. Kids do want the simple build -- it's not that they just want to get that annoying build step out of the way.

It's more that they want to quickly be able to play with a character that they built -- a sense of pride that "I made this guy!" even if it was from instructions. MOCers don't get much satisfaction from that, but that's because of personal taste.

(Also, titans usually do have fairly complex builds even now.)

Nonclonism is wanted by most mainly because of the roleplaying preference. A roleplayer wants to "collect the team", but not if the team members basically all look the same. Fans of clonism usually don't understand that; they tend to be MOCers or the like. But roleplayers don't usually care about getting the same pieces in different colors. They just want variety in their quick-build action figures.

Another myth to dispel here, a newer one -- "Clonism" refers to members of a single team being clones. It doesn't refer to the whole "Inika clone torso" thing that many have raised. Seemingly, most fans don't really care if 2008's torsos are the same pieces as 2007's. Most likely this is because the 9-year old age range, the main driving force of sales, is a new group of kids every year. Kids grow up, and most lose interest in toys as they get older.

Also, reusing torsos has been done every single year (other than 2001 ). Even in 2005, when the Hordika were an exception, the Toa Hagah had this. So far reusing torsos has never lasted longer than three years. 2008 is the end of a three-year arc. So it's likely that we will see new torso designs in 2009 (maybe even more so since it is a new chapter of the story).

However, I want to caution that there are two reasons why that might not happen:

1) Toa designs have been gradually improving towards most fans' tastes over the years, and the Inika/Mahri/Nuva shape, since it finally ditched the gears and has a sort of biomechanical feel and is "noble heroic", seems to be near ideal. It may be difficult to improve further on it. So there may not be as much of a need to make new torsos in 2009.

2) Nonclonism has meant that, if you look closely, this torso re-use is still a lot more varied than 2002-2003. Some are backwards Inika torsos. The Piraka torsos could be used too, and the Hordika torsos are still reused in 2007 Matoran. Budget-wise, if you want a whole team to have different torsos, you can't make six new torsos. You have to re-use pieces a lot. Ignoring this fact has helped create the Inika-clonism myth -- nonclonism is actually part of why Inika clones get reused a lot.

Personally I do think we will get new torsos though. We'll see. I just hope we won't go overboard and attack LEGO if they do decide not to -- so I'm warning you guys now that there are good reasons not to.

BTW, reason #2 there has also created the myth that there's less new pieces now. Wrong -- there's simply more reused pieces because each set has its own piece for most places. There are actually about the same amount of new pieces, and my counts so far have actually shown slightly more new pieces, at least in most categories. For example, there's almost always at least two new foot pieces each year now, compared to 2002-2003, when there was only one per year (Bohrok, then Rahkshi).

Gears were the number 1 fan complaint consistently since 2001. Not much more to say there; that horse has been beaten to death a fair few too many times. However, I have supported a proposal to return gears to one or two members of a team of six canister sets each year, possibly boosting sales for those since there does seem to be a bigger minority that likes gears than many things. I stand by that proposal so far. And of course Icarax has a gear this year, though he's technically a titan.

Projectiles -- I'll just link to the History of Set Gimmicks in Bionicle entry for them. Basically they're more fun for roleplayers than most past gimmicks, hence they remain.

The Noble Heroism is a subject for a future blog entry, as you guys may know if you saw the (now dead, I'm sure) topic I started asking for opinions on that. One of my theories is that this may be part of why the Mistika are designed the way they were to a degree, although that's a can of worms I won't bother jumping into unless anybody wants to ask about it in comments. Another important factoid here is that this is part of why the Hordika sales were mediocre (though not horrible); they were seen as villains by most fans. (Hero sales are usually a lot higher than villains).

Villain style is pretty self-explanatory. Fans accept a wider variety here, which is why a lot of minority fans tend to like some villains better than any of the new heroes. Still, villains sell less than heroes.

Biomechanical style essentially means rubber, but also anything like for example Carapar's shell style. Older sets had a major flaw in that they looked just like robotic "stand-ins" for the actual storyline characters. Hence the typical myth "they're robots". Newer sets do a much better job of representing the characters' biomechanicalness, although IMO it's gone down a bit since the Piraka/Inika, and I'm not totally sure why. It may be that it wasn't a big factor according to focus group testing, or maybe it actually was seen as going overboard with it. I'm not sure. In any case, newer sets, especially villains, still tend to seem more biomechanical than robotic, and their sales are through the roof.

Eye catching colors -- translation, brown sold poorly. Kids want red, blue, green, orange, yellow, etc. Now, I've supported boosting ice and earth sales still more by using something like iceblue and purple. Greg has said that white and black do sell pretty well, though, so it's not a big problem. Personally I think it would be more consistent, though, even if the boost in sales was minimal. Every little bit helps, doesn't it?

Oh, and the roleplaying preference is the reason for the whole 3 heroes 3 villains per yearhalf thing in 2008, which I think is a very wise idea.


Now, storywise I don't really have much to say. We typically talk about story more in terms of what makes sense than in terms of what most fans want. Story is freer to have a lot more imagination unleashed without worrying so much about it -- basically, the story team and Greg specifically are free to put in anything they like, and let us like it or not as we may. The rules mainly are in terms of how violent it's allowed to be. IMO as an aspiring writer (and in the opinion of most published writers I've heard from / read talking about this), that's the best approach.

Still, Bionicle does have to keep the audience in mind when it comes to story. Writing a temporal mechanics geek's dream come true of a storyline would be a very bad idea, for example. I would love it. But most fans would just be confused by it. So bad idea. As another example, romance is best kept out of it, because it's not what action figure roleplaying boys aged 9-11 want.

In the other direction, keeping things mysterious and epic in feel (if the results of Greg's poll here on that are indicitive of most fans, which is somewhat debatable), and keeping the characters realistic, and in general making sure it's a fun action story, are things the storyline should try to keep up in various ways. The story shouldn't be oversimplified, or most fans get bored with it, as was demonstrated by 2002-2003.

And on that note, Greg has commented that input from BZPower and other online fans is actually more helpful for storyline. Actual fans of the storyline are less in number than the total fans of the sets; many kids just go to the toy store, buy off the shelf, and go home and play and don't know about the storyline. The story helps sell the sets, and I'm not going to venture a guess into how many percentagewise are in either group.

But story fans do tend to be online a lot more than set fans, which makes sense. So online fans tend to be a bigger chunk of a tiny percentage of story fans than set fans. Also, since story can have more freedom of variety, Greg's more free to do things we like, and other story fans probably won't know the difference in a lot of cases.



Marketing is actually the biggest issue Bionicle faces today, according to Greg's response to my draft for this article:

The biggest issue really facing BIONICLE is not that the sets are off or even the story (although the story is hard to access if you are new to it) -- it's really a question of awareness. When you have massive Transformers movie/buzz and Spider-Man movie/buzz, awareness of other franchises -- I don't care what they are -- suffers. That is why the '09 movie is so important, it has the potential to get in front of the faces of younger kids as the original films did and spike awareness.

In a sense this is a good thing. The 2009 movie is happening, and 2009 sets are happening as well. Also, it means that most other problems have been solved. One thing that worries me is the bad sales of the second and third movies, though -- if there's a 2010 and 2011 movie too and we see the same thing, it might mean no more movies will ever happen, which could seriously hurt Bionicle in the future if the toy market changes radically. I hope the movies are spaced farther apart this time.

Also, maybe different marketing and advertising tactics can be used in the future to help solve this issue.


Main other thing here is the whole canister thing. The need for packaging that stands out is why canisters are used. These also need to be different from last year's sets. So far this seems to have been consistently a strong point of Bionicle since 2001.




Well, that's all I've got. Please post any comments/questions/disagreements/cookies/nukes/etc.