When I first heard about Pley.com, a LEGO rental service, I had mixed feelings. As the “Netflix” of the LEGO world, Pley.com offers a similarly styled rental service. You select your desired LEGO sets and add them to your queue, and as the sets come available, they are sent to you. They currently have 2 different levels: one for $19.99 and one for $49.99, allowing you to rent small to medium or medium to large sets respectively. For an adult fan, the service doesn’t seem that cost effective to me, given that I typically want to keep my LEGO. I’m not really even convinced that it’s cost effective for its intended audience: parents of young children. LEGO is expensive, of course, but those monthly fees add up quickly, taking money away from LEGO that you would buy and get to keep.
Recently, however, Pley.com has started offering crowd-sourced designs through Pleyworld.com. This is a riff on LEGO Ideas, where a user can submit a design, and if the design gets enough votes, it goes through LEGO review to possible become an official set. Pley.com’s version, Pleyworld.com, operates slightly differently. At Pleyworld.com, a user submits a design and after 5,000 votes, theoretically, the set becomes available to rent. I first learned of this program when I ran across a blog post about the company’s first crowd-sourced design, the Hippie Dirgible.
The design doesn’t interest me much, but it’s apparently popular, so I assume it interests Pley.com’s intended audience. But, then I saw that LEGO artist Mike Doyle had also signed on, and already has one of his designs available to rent through Pley.com.
Mike Doyle is one of my favorite artists, and his Pley design is very distinctive. I would love to own a set designed by Mike Doyle, both because I enjoy his work and to learn more about his techniques. But, after further investigation, I learned that while you ultimately can buy a set from Pley.com, you first have to rent it. Unfortunately, because of the Netflix-like set up, you could wait weeks or months to get the set you really want. But, they offer a “free” trial. (It’s not really free; you have to pay a $2.00 shipping fee.) Two dollars isn’t a whole lot of money, so I decided to go in and see if I could get them to ship me the Mike Doyle set. Pley.com wants you to add at least 25 sets to your queue, so I knew that the odds of them sending me the set right off the bat were pretty slim, but it was worth a shot. I took everything out of my queue except the set and a mystery box option. The mystery box option cannot be removed from the queue; they need to be able to send something if they don’t have want the customer wants I guess. So, I was unsurprised when they sent me this instead:
I wasn’t terribly disappointed to get a different set. At least they sent me a set that I don’t own, am mildly interested in, but would never buy. Ultimately, I wanted to try the service out, either way. Unfortunately, after building the set they sent me, I would be unlikely to purchase a set from them. I was expecting used LEGO, of course, but I wasn’t expecting the bricks to be quite so beat up. Playing with beat up LEGO is fine, but I don’t think I could justify purchasing them at the mere 5% discount off MSRP Pley.com offers. I’m also not convinced they were very clean, despite the company’s claims of sanitizing the bricks between users.
Overall, Pley.com doesn’t seem like a sustainable business to me, but if done well, their take on crowd-sourced designs has the potential to be game-changing. I find myself unable to predict how LEGO might react to this. On one hand, LEGO might not like them infringing on the concept of LEGO Ideas. On the other hand, if Pley.com rents/sells enough of these crowd-sourced sets, LEGO is still selling bricks. I think for this type of service to work, Pley.com will have to change their method a bit. When I first logged on, I was hoping to get an indication of what sets were actually available. If the site had more crowd-sourced designs (or when they do have more), it would be nice to be able to pick from ones that you know are available, as well as pick from some of the more rare giant sets. For me, the service isn’t ready for prime time. I’m sure it works fine if you genuinely want to rent and return LEGO. (Although, I’ve read a lot of reviews complaining about missing pieces.) But, for those who want to rent a specific set to try and possibly buy, it’s just not going to work right now. But, man the potential here to access sets from designers outside of LEGO is very interesting, and I’ll be watching.
