BrickLink is removing military and religious builds from its platform to align with LEGO brand guidelines, courting controversy among its userbase for the second time in as many weeks.
In the second of two sweeping changes to kick off 2024, the secondary marketplace – which was acquired by the LEGO Group in 2019 – says it’s ‘identified a need to bring our terms of service closer to LEGO brand guidelines regarding restricted content’. What this means in practice is that the platform is removing military, religious and alcohol-centric builds from its public Studio Gallery.
Builds that fall under those categories will still exist, but they will only be visible to the person who originally uploaded them, and the ‘Military’ category has been removed altogether. The new terms of service came into effect on January 31, and BrickLink will begin setting current builds that do not comply with the new guidelines to ‘private’ from February 12.
“This change to the Studio Gallery guidelines is, admittedly, an impactful adjustment for some users,” the BrickLink team wrote on the site’s forum. “While many [builds] will be removed from public view, thousands more remain for you to discover and build for yourself.” The decision has apparently come as a consequence of BrickLink ‘representing the LEGO brand in a much more direct way than before’.
As you can probably imagine, this hasn’t gone down especially well with BrickLink’s users. Replies to the initial forum post have called the move ‘absurd’ and ‘stupid’, with many threatening to leave BrickLink for other platforms – or even leave LEGO for other brands.
“It's fine that the LEGO Group’s design team can't create and sell military sets or anything that breaks the company's terms of service, but to impose those same strict guidelines on a website created to share people’s custom models that aren't made for sale doesn't make any sense,” wrote one user. “Who honestly cares that builders are making military models? They're not LEGO employees and thus shouldn't be held to the company's guidelines.”
Reactions on other platforms, such as reddit, have been similarly critical of the change – and more broadly of how the LEGO Group has handled BrickLink since its acquisition. “That is extremely disappointing,” redditor Apophyx said. “It is one thing to refrain from producing such sets. It is another to buy out the largest secondary marketplace and then impose those policies on it.
“BrickLink was created by the fans for the fans, and it feels very gross for the LEGO Group to impose their policies on the platform. I understand they bought it out, and therefore are free to do with it as they please, but regardless, this to me sends the message that the LEGO Group wants to control what people do among themselves with the parts they've bought and own.”
This announcement comes hot on the heels of BrickLink’s decision to merge hundreds of listings for variant parts, which has also met with an unfavourable response from the community. It's also not the first change to the Studio Gallery since the LEGO Group's acquisition of BrickLink: in 2019, the company changed custom builds based on intellectual properties to 'display only', removing the option for other users to download parts lists and instructions.
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