In August last year a project was submitted to Lego Cuusoo, for a Lego Android statue to be released as an official product. After achieving the minimum 10,000 votes representing potential customers back in February this year, the project went up for consideration by the Lego review board to be released as an official product but this morning it was announced that the project would not be going ahead.
The announcement was made this morning through a video which announced the successful project that will next be produced would be the ExoSuit :
Project lead for the ‘Andy/Bugdroid the Android by Google’ – Marc Young said on Google+ this morning that he is ‘Feeling a bit bummed out right now’ after receiving the news. Unfortunately no reason was given in the email that Marc received for the project not going forward.
Please note for this and all reviews going forward, we’re not going to share specific reasons why a project wasn’t selected in the LEGO Review anymore. Instead, we outline our process and criteria on our Blog and Knowledge Base. Each project that enters the LEGO Review receives a thorough and fair analysis. The contributing reasons to a decision on one project do not affect future decisions for any other projects positively or negatively.
Marc did think that perhaps the project did not meet the playability and stability requirements that each project is subjected to, during the Cuusoo review process. Tim Courtney from Cuusoo outlines the process that each project goes through in the video that announced the successful product from the review process
The Lego review board checks out every project submitted to their site that gets 10,000 supporters, then they evaluate them in the lego room.
Just like the design and product development process for our own Lego sets.
Each concept has to be tested for stability, playability, safety, intellectual property market fit and so much more before we can commit to mass producing it as a Lego set.
So, where to from here? Well, if you still would like to forge ahead and build your own Lego Budroid, Marc has made the instructions for building it available as a Google Drive document. There are some parts which don’t appear to be available to order through the Lego Pick-A-Brick site so, it appears this may not be a project that actually sees the light of day.
I would love to have had the opportunity to build this set, but it’s not exactly designed as a playable set and Lego after all is derived from the Danish phrase leg godt, which translates to “play well”. It’s disappointing but understandable.
You can see the full announcement video here which includes all of the projects that were in the process of being considered for production.
Would you have purchased the Lego Bugdroid if it was successfully manufactured?
