Because they are the best quality, in every dimension, and when something is almost purely a hobby then many people are willing to pay a premium for a friction-free experience.
There are other brands that are just fine, but you will occasionally get missing pieces, poor fitment, poor/strange construction etc... With LEGO you'll not get any of those (except the occasional strange construction).
I used to buy ~50/50 LEGO/Clone, and despite improvements in clones, it's 95/5 now. The LEGO experience is simply disproportionately better relative to the cost.
It's simply worth it.
signed,
Owner of A LOT of of LEGO kits/bricks _and_ clones.
Also, the "cheap plastic" thing is clearly said by someone who don't know plastic. NASA included a bunch of pieces on one of their Mars crafts to check the cameras since they knew the parameters of the LEGO pieces losing their color better than the cameras. LEGOs are durable.
Also, even if the unit cost of injection molding plastic might not be super high, the cost of making the molds is. I've heard discarded molds are used in the concrete for new buildings as a way to know where they are and ensure they're not suddenly in the wrong hands (although that might be a rumor)
all you'd have to do to a mold is overheat and deform it or crack it. Way easier and super easy to verify it. Suggesting someone dispose of it in concrete sounds like something the mafia would do.
I for one am glad the FBI was able to get Mafia mold crackers under control. I’m afraid the Mexican cartels may have taken over that business in recent years.
I’ll also add their design chops are top of market by a mile. The kinds of things master builders are able to put together honestly boggle my mind. It’s half the reason I buy a set: just to see how they pulled off an odd angled piece or some design flourish. Truly great craftspeople doing their best work.
Re: strange construction, I would actually posit that you will not get any strange construction because _they have laws against it_[1].
That might be true, but it's still insane that a LEGO brick costs more than a small microcontroller which requires like 1000x the engineering effort if not more.
At the production scale and yields both for low end microcontrollers and LEGO bricks, the costs are largely material-bound as engineering is amortized over tens of millions units
There are other brands that are just fine, but you will occasionally get missing pieces, poor fitment, poor/strange construction etc... With LEGO you'll not get any of those (except the occasional strange construction).
I used to buy ~50/50 LEGO/Clone, and despite improvements in clones, it's 95/5 now. The LEGO experience is simply disproportionately better relative to the cost.
It's simply worth it.
signed, Owner of A LOT of of LEGO kits/bricks _and_ clones.