Lego says it wants to start to bring video game development in-house

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/lego-is-starting-to-bring-its-game-development-in-house-key-exec-says/

by namanyayg • 1 year ago

169 100 1 year ago

The risk antenna extend to maximum…..

Danieru3• 1 year ago

Warner Bros has been trying to sell off their studios. So I can see Lego succeeding if they buy TT. Otherwise I think Lego will realize what many others have: starting up a new studio is hard, and having money makes it harder.

You cannot will a studio into existence with money. Google tried this. Amazon tried this. Microsoft has tried it a bunch of times.

Games can be a good business, I know my studio is, but it is hard in was that traditional business methods cannot cope with.

So Lego, make sure you acquire TT. That is your only clear opportunity to use money to solve this problem. Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade. Don't listen to that VP who is promising you can push XXXmillion into an org chart and get an effective studio as the result.

fumufumu• 1 year ago

I know Amazon tried. I haven't heard of Google trying. Sure they started Stadia but they had no internal game dev teams that I know of.

I have hard of MS's issues. The biggest issue is a game dev team is generally lead by a game-director. It's not a "design by committee, come to consensus" type of thing like software dev is at Amazon, Google, Microsoft. The way work happens is not the same. They might look superficially similar but as a simple example, at typical game dev team is 70% artists, 20% game designers, 10% software engineers (+/-) where as a typical team at Amazon, Google, MS is 95% software engineers.

muststopmyths• 1 year ago

Jade Raymond was famously (gamedev famously that is) hired to lead a studio to create first party content for stadia

ekianjo• 1 year ago

Sure they started Stadia but they had no internal game dev teams that I know of.

They had. They just did not end up releasing anything.

pjmlp4• 1 year ago

Google had internal teams, and were naive to think studios would rewrite their tooling into Linux and Vulkan, given their fame.

On the last year before shutting down Stadia, they were finally addressing this.

"How to write a Windows emulator from scratch"

https://youtu.be/8-N7wDCRohg?si=lOU6iTtwi6MS_Bhw

owenpalmer3• 1 year ago

find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games

I love this idea, imagine if Lego had an open game creation platform. So much potential for idea generation.

andrewxdiamond• 1 year ago

You’re basically describing Roblox.

knowknow• 1 year ago

Isn’t this what Lego is basically doing with Fortnite?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Fortnite

shakna• 1 year ago

I think that was one of the ideas behind Lego Worlds, originally. It did end just as a sandbox, but I believe originally it was going to support scripting and sharing of games - with the idea being that Lego might pick up the most popular of them for standalone release.

Somewhere around the 2015, the beta releases dropped the capability. (Along with infinite landscape.)

There was some rumours about Blockland maybe threatening legal action if they kept it, but nothing concrete, so take it with a grain of salt.

pdpi• 1 year ago

Completely off-topic, but your comment cued me to look at your profile. I don't quite know what it is, but the screenshots on Steam for both Whiskerwood and Railgrade tickle my brain in a very peculiar way. Will surely be picking them up at some point in the near future.

golergka• 1 year ago

Whiskerwood looks an improved version of Timberwood, one of the best colony sims I've played. Thanks for the link, I've enjoyed it!

stryan• 1 year ago

Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade. Don't listen to that VP who is promising you can push XXXmillion into an org chart and get an effective studio as the result.

I think they did hire the guy behind Manic Miners[0], a very faithful and well-done remake of the Lego Rock Raiders game, so perhaps that is their plan.

[0]https://manicminers.baraklava.com/

ehnto• 1 year ago

I had not heard about this remake, what throwback. I'm going to have to play it again to see if my memory aligns with reality.

breckenedge• 1 year ago

TT?

Uvix• 1 year ago

Traveler's Tales, the developer of most of the LEGO video games over the last 20 years starting with the original LEGO Star Wars.

dangus2• 1 year ago

As a tangent, I never understood why WB wanted to spin those off so badly. Isn't being a content company supposed to be entire purpose of their existence? If you sell off your content creation businesses what even are you as a company besides a shell corporation?

If they aren't succeeding with WB games they should restructure those studios and try to manage them better, not spin them off.

I see the same thing happening with 3D animated movies where companies like Dreamworks and Illumination are diving heavily into outsourcing. It is technically working for them from a financial standpoint so far but I am not totally convinced it's a true long-term solution.

It just seems like a way to become a valueless middleman in a world where distribution gets increasingly easier by the day. It seems like all their contract studios would be empowered to become competitors in the future.

mrpippy• 1 year ago

WBD has had a crushing amount of debt since it was formed a few years ago, and they’re in “sell everything that’s not nailed down” mode.

YesBox• 1 year ago

Hi fellow indie dev!

Games can be a good business, I know my studio is

If you dont mind sharing, how many people do you employ/long term contract with? "Games can be a good business" is entirely subjective to the studio's goals. So I guess I'm wondering: is your goal to stay solo+/micro/indie, or are you planning to grow with each successive game? And how big?

Sustainability is something I've been thinking about a lot recently[0]. I'm relatively close to launching Metropolis 1998, which falls squarely in a long tail genre (if done right)[1]. I'd love to build up a studio, in office, and along the way figure out what's the right headcount for my goals.

Whiskerwood looks neat btw. Good luck on the game. I'd love to hear why you chose to go with a publisher this time around? Was it an affordable luxury :P ? Marketing, community management, localization can be a PITA, but it's entirely possible to do even at solo scale.

[0] It is not cheap to operate a game studio that employs local people in the USA. It's frustrating because the COL in the mid west is <= 70% cheaper than the coastal cities (where the vast majority of studios are). There's a lot of cheap land where the industry could be to make art/games a lot more comfortably (ignoring the fact that N% people dont want to live there, which is valid if that's not what they want)

[1] Many people play Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999), SimCity 4 (2003), and the original City Skylines (2015) today. steamdb.info, OpenRCT, subreddit activity, etc.

Shoot me an email if you dont want to respond here?

Danieru3• 1 year ago

Hey YesBox! I've been watching your game for ages. I think since you first showed it on the indie subreddit. I'm excited to play it. Sim City 2000 was a big influence for me.

Overall though I'd say: coastal US is a market no one can afford to do gamedev with employees in unless you are a child company of a platform holder. We're based in Japan where cost of living is vastly more reasonable.

Personally I'd suggest you highly question yourself about what sort of studio you want to work in. The environment you want to work in, should be the one you try to make. For me that meant full remote with no offices. I'd honestly be surprised to meet ang gamedev who likes offices and commutes, much less one who list the extra cost.

InsideOutSanta• 1 year ago

Damn, those little cars are so fricken adorable. Wishlisted.

phire• 1 year ago

I'm not sure buying Traveller's Tales is a good idea.

TT had a really good engine that allowed them to pump out Lego games at an impressive rate of 1-3 per year. They maintained that cadence from 2005 through to 2019, then they stopped.

In the following 6 years, they have only released a single game: Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, in early 2022. It's been a full 3 years since they released a game.

They built a whole new engine for Skywalker Saga, so the development time is understandable. But apparently that engine was too hard to work with, so they dumped it and switched to Unreal, which has probably set their development efforts back again.

Now, I'm not saying that studios need to continually release games. Many good studios have long development cycles. But it's a bad sign when a studio suddenly switches cadence, how much of the original TT team is left?

kristofferg• 1 year ago

Sounds like every other successful studio. On the contrary (to making this a bad thing) - they managed to pivot engine twice and ship without tanking.

travisgriggs• 1 year ago

I wonder if you’re both half correct.

There’s an assumption that TT is what the success is about, and then a counter claim about recent observed changes.

A very plausible anecdotal hypothesis would be that it was never “TT” per se, but a group of talented people that managed, for a period to find a chemistry that brought them and success together. And that as is so often the case, eventually this group of people lost that chemistry for any number of regularly observed reasons: poached talent, talent attrition, Puournelles Law, change in employer relations, you name it, we’ve seen them all.

So if I were Lego, I’d go find the people that used to be behind the regular success TT had, and investigate whether THAT arrangement could be resurrected in a worthwhile way.

Dwedit2• 1 year ago

"Funko Fusion" was developed 10:10 Games, a company founded by Jon Burton from Traveller's Tales. Unfortunately, the game got really bad reviews.

KolibriFly3• 1 year ago

Yeah, history isn't exactly on Lego's side when it comes to spinning up a new game studio from scratch

watwut• 1 year ago

Lego do know how to make toys tho. Google or Amazon never did. The existing lego games were good, so lego at least got the governance right. Again, Google and Amazon had no experience in that area.

isk517• 1 year ago

You do make a good point. One of the largest gaming company started as a toy company, and their star developer started as a toy designer.

pjmlp4• 1 year ago

Yeah, this is getting especially hard as VCs learn not every title can be a AAA, nor there are enough people in the world to play all the games they pump out.

Which is something that the MBA driven approach of exponential growth will never grasp.

Art and entertainment don't have a mathematical formula for guaranteed growth.

slightwinder• 1 year ago

starting up a new studio is hard, and having money makes it harder.

But Lego is not just big business throwing money at a goal. They have a long history of games, and were probably more involved than just selling out a license.

Google tried this. Amazon tried this. Microsoft has tried it a bunch of times.

They all tried with new unknown franchises. Lego is a well known name, and the games for them are more advertisement than a money-grab. As long as it's good enough and makes a break even in costs, they will be fine, I guess.

Lego is one of the few companies, probably even the only one in the world at the moment, who should have the best preconditions to not catastrophically fail with this.

Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade.

That smells like the road to fail. They should start simple and conservative, build the studio, teams and collect expertise, just make new classical Lego-games. After some years and 2-3 games, when they established themselves, they can start experimenting.

Also, there are already experimental Lego Games. Most of them were not that well received, because experimenting is hard, especially if you compete with Minecraft and Roblox.

rvba• 1 year ago

Amazon also has a TV / film studio where they take known franchises and kill them.

Their costs a lot of money, has bad scripts, old scipts are thrown away. And everything I saw (usually gave up fast) seems to have this "cheap CGI" feel. Yet supposedly it costed a lot of money to make.

debugnik2• 1 year ago

They all tried with new unknown franchises.

Does Lego still have any strong original franchises, though? It seems most of their set themes are third-party licenses now, and their original themes can't hold a candle to e.g. Bionicle back when I was a kid.

Then again their most popular games were all Lego Star Wars.

bluescrn• 1 year ago

Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade.

Find some Lego-loving indie devs and let them go wild. Fund the development of some prototypes, and let them build something that actually encapsulates the creative aspects of Lego, not just a generic action game in a Lego skin.

boppo1• 1 year ago

How does having money make it harder? Are we saying a small group of passionate, under-capitalized people is the best way to start a studio?

transcriptase• 1 year ago

The evidence points that way.

Amazon built the most incredible open world pvp MMO, entirely player driven, dynamic, sandbox game someone could hope for. Entire player built cities, territories that could be held by virtue of players actually guarding it, massive guilds, server politics, or you could just ignore it all and do your own thing and explore a huge beautiful realm.

It was called New World (alpha test). Then because it was too novel and perhaps not fun for people who can’t handle that type of game, they destroyed what would have been an incredible hit and rebuilt it from scratch to be a mediocre half-baked clone of every other PVE mmo without realizing you can never make a PVE mmo player happy without endgame loops and a constant stream of new dopamine drips.

And when it failed because they were unwilling to go ahead with something a suit thought was too risky, they gave up.

fatant• 1 year ago

I think various other things that come with the territory of being a larger company make it difficult to replicate the success of game studios that produce great video games? I'm not entirely sure but maybe there's typically bureaucracies that hinder making successful video games.

mcphage3• 1 year ago

Part of it seems to be opportunity costs, perceived or otherwise. A small, passionate, under-capitalized team is willing to keep a game running to slowly capture an audience (if it’s good enough to do so) whereas a larger org expects a certain level of returns, and if it doesn’t achieve that quickly, it cuts and runs—killing the game and/or the studio.

mcoliver• 1 year ago

Yes and no. It's all about the people and specifically the people in leadership positions. Money can make it easier for very obvious reasons (unlimited resources to hire the best people, have the best equipment, focus on the product and not the bottom line, etc..).

The reason it can make it harder is because if you don't have the right people being held accountable to make the studio successful on an agreed up timeline along with what the definition of success looks like from top to bottom and a well defined organizational structure that takes into account growth, those unlimited resources tend to result in over hiring before the recipe has been figured out, politics, moving targets, fractured focus, and organizational chaos.

reactordev• 1 year ago

The issue is you can’t approach game development the same way you approach SaaS software or traditional business (you obviously know this). It’s a creative business - no amount of money can create creativity - but money is needed to fuel it. Like you said, many have tried to just throw money at it to compete and failed, yet highly creative studios keep thriving (while once-creative studios keep recycling) and more indie games are being made everyday.

I hope Lego succeeds simply to be able to keep producing content and titles but I can’t stop but think there is a new frontier coming that I think Lego should be more focused on. Not console games.

retinaros• 1 year ago

Did you buy any recent lego? Like the mario lego with qrcodes? Its clearly the best toy company on earth. Everything feels right about their product. They are winning and they will definitely bring this winning playbook to video games.

PaulKeeble• 1 year ago

Its really hard to buy creative studios and the sort of mixed skills and culture that can make top games. Acquiring the studio is one way but inevitably companies want to push their culture into everything they buy along with their cost cutting processes and they often kill organisations like this.

Even organisations like Ubisoft and EA that have a history of making games are now too corporate and have repeatedly killed game studios they acquired along with the games they used to produce. Games at the top level are really hard to make, they are massive pieces of software, mocap, 3d models and story telling. They require rich experience of gaming to produce them and "fun" is something only a few people know how to produce.

This approach is very risky and highly unlikely to work and its going to take years for the first failures to become apparent and then will the executives even understand what they did wrong? Experience says no. This could stop the flow of Lego games for a long time.

stevenwoo2• 1 year ago

Even when games were much simpler 20 years ago we tried to outsource some development to other studios and it was very difficult to find a good match, we were so unsatisfied with the results eventually brought all development in house. My experience using EA as a publisher back then is they were already ossified in their ways, nothing like their early days.

KolibriFly3• 1 year ago

Their brand already has a strong identity, and they've managed to translate it into great games through partnerships. The real risk is whether they think they can replicate that success internally without the right talent and experience.

windowshopping• 1 year ago

Anyone here ever play Lego Alpha Team twenty years ago?

In hindsight it was my first exposure to programming-like logic. Loved that game.

androng• 1 year ago

i never realized that was a programming game but now that I think about it I think it is. I liked that game a lot because it had such nice visuals and gameplay. I still have the CD too.

payphonefiend• 1 year ago

yes

stevenwoo2• 1 year ago

Here’s my free ideas, Tears of the Kingdom but using Lego pieces to make objects. Or a kids starter version like Echoes of Wisdom. Or let people make and destruct the official sets digitally with physics in these games, which you unlock by buying the set IRL.

popalchemist• 1 year ago

These are excellent ideas.

7952• 1 year ago

Would be cool to have Tears of the Kingdom style flying and time slowing in an Outer Wilds style environment with little planets, gravity and atmosphere.

herpdyderp• 1 year ago

This gives me a lot of hope because I’ve been disappointed in LEGO games for a while. They’re really flashy now but they just aren’t as fun. I 100% the original LEGO Star Wars games again every few years.

bluetidepro• 1 year ago

My free idea, as others have put theirs, is why hasn’t Lego made their “Minecraft.” It goes hand in hand with Lego. Blocks. Creative. Building infinite things. Whimsical. Etc.

The Lego/Fortnite integrations are the closest we have to this but even those are far from what it could be.

jedbrooke• 1 year ago

they don't want to make building lego on the computer, since they want you to buy real lego to build with

ninkendo• 1 year ago

It’s interesting because I have a 2 and 4 year old and they absolutely love Lego, play with them whatever chance they get. But neither of them are close to having the skill to master video games yet (I tried playing Mario kart with them on the mode where it auto-steers and auto-accelerates, and they tend to just steer it into the wall, they literally do better by not touching the controller.)

At some point this is gonna flip, they’re going to “get” video games, and it’s likely they’re going to play with Lego less, and video games more.

But this is gonna happen regardless of whether Lego makes a video game, so wouldn’t it make more sense for there to be a good Lego game so that they continue to make money?

zitsarethecure• 1 year ago

I think a big challenge for them is going to be the advent of cheap and relatively easy to use 3D printers. My kid never really got into lego, but he took to using a 3D printer almost immediately. Most of the time it is pre-made models, but he is learning how to use things like tinkercad and even blender. At his age I was digging through buckets of random lego parts to try to find the "perfect" piece for something I was trying to build, and getting frustrated because I could never find it.

daemonologist• 1 year ago

My understanding is that they (TT) more or less did in 2017, it was called Lego Worlds. It seems to have been closer to Minecraft than the modern Fortnite thing is but I don't know much more than that.

ykl• 1 year ago

Before Lego World there was an effort between LEGO and Mojang to develop a LEGO version of Minecraft, and apparently that effort even led to the idea of LEGO buying Mojang being floated, but it eventually fell through [1].

I think it's hard to say whether LEGO buying Mojang instead of Microsoft buying Mojang ultimately would have been a good thing or not. For what it's worth, Microsoft hasn't been the most perfect owner for Minecraft, but at least under Microsoft, Minecraft is far from being abandoned and continues to grow.

[1] https://padandpixel.com/the-lego-minecraft-that-almost-was/

winrid• 1 year ago

They realized they could afford it by selling one additional Lego set.

dartharva• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/uEYf3

LarsDu882• 1 year ago

I wanted to throw out that one of the founders of Traveler's Tales, actually has a Youtube Channel (GameHut) where he goes over a lot of early videogame programming techniques for (mostly) the Sega Genesis and Sega Saturn.

It's quite eye-opening what this guy and his company was able to pull off in the early 90s with an 8 MHz processor, and a limitation of 2 MB cartridge storage capacity, and only be allowed to code in assembly (!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhMMK3QLxSM

Nition• 1 year ago

Just seconding this channel. It's full of super interesting videos about genius old coding tricks like the one you linked.

Dwedit2• 1 year ago

It's too bad that his most recent game (Funko Fusion) was a failure.

LarsDu882• 1 year ago

TT did all this crazy stuff in the 90s with limited hardware, but their biggest success was making licensed LEGO games.

Making games is hard, but getting IP that people _love_ to begin with is harder.

Might I plug my VR game Rogue Stargun (https://roguestargun.com) which totally doesn't have a certain space opera IP, and concordantly does not sell very well?

KolibriFly3• 1 year ago

On one hand, bringing things in-house could mean tighter creative control and better integration with their broader ecosystem. On the other, their best games (like the TT Games Lego series) were successful because of the external studios' expertise in game design.

nottorp• 1 year ago

That means they want to buy Minecraft off Microsoft?

Since that's the only true Lego game in spirit.

MortyWaves• 1 year ago

I just want a remaster or rerelease of all their classic LEGO games. The ones that made in the 90s and early 2000s.

maxglute• 1 year ago

Ok but do another DC Super Villians first.

lathiat• 1 year ago

MattKC recently did an amazing documentary on the development of Lego Island for PC. Quite a bit of the story was about the company behind it convincing LEGO to let them use their IP etc. Was a great watch: https://youtu.be/bG55COe_f8I

bargle0• 1 year ago

I want a sequel to Lego City Undercover with the building and driving mechanics of Lego 2k Drive.

hoherd• 1 year ago

Lego City Undercover was so good. It's one of the only game I have 100% completed. My kids and I spent many hours just goofing off in that world. I'd love to see a sequel.

One thing I like about it is it's not a third party franchise. I like that it doesn't bring any outside culture or baggage. It's self contained humor and storytelling.

DrTung• 1 year ago

I still have my copy of Lego Universe, hope this new initiative will fare better.

sourtrident• 1 year ago

Lego taking games in-house feels like Netflix making its own originals - could be bold genius or messy overreach, depending how it balances nostalgia with fresh creativity. Either way, Epic might want to watch its back on this one.

jjallen• 1 year ago

We have one of their PS5 games that my son plays some. If you start a new game you are forced to watch, without any way of bypassing, a 5-10 minute long incredibly boring video. One of the worst game experiences ever.

Lego says it wants to start to bring video game development in-house

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