2023 - LEGO Year in Review

2023 has been another whirlwind year for LEGO collectors, with seemingly non-stop stream of announcements about new sets. Each year feels busier than the last, so we thought we'd crunch the numbers and compare LEGO's 2023 catalogue of sets and minfigures with that of previous years, to see if this is really the case.

Sets

LEGO released just over 450 sets that were available to buy at LEGO retail locations or other third-party retailers, or given away as GWPs. From this analysis we've excluded event exclusives sets (such as Comic-Con exclusives, LEGO Inside Tour sets, brand store grand opening sets etc), gift sets for LEGO employees and LAN members, minifigure and character packs, production collection sets, magazine gifts, books, gear, and Bricklink sets. If you were to count all those, the number would be in excess of 900.

As you can see, 2023 was the third biggest years in terms of sets, but the number of retails sets and GWPs seems to be more of less stablising in the mid-400s.

Minifigures

In terms of minifigures, 2023 gave us our biggest haul of new minifigures yet, beating the previous high set last year.

To note, we've excluded certain figures that don't meet the official minifigure definition, such as skeletons, statuettes, brick-built figures, droids, Friends figures, and Disney dolls. If all these were included, the total would be in excess of 1,000.

Rising Cost

We all know that LEGO is an expensive hobby and the rising cost of living is not helping matters. To find out how much more LEGO are charging for their products, we calculated the average RRP of all sets released this year, and compared it to last year.

As expected, all the metrics have increased. The change isn't much considering global inflation rates, but this is probably the result of the larger price increases we saw last year.

Interestingly, the average piece count fell slightly from 685 to 674. LEGO also didn't give us any truly gigantic sets this year, although the Avengers Tower and UCS Venator both entered the top 20 biggest sets ever.

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