Lego says it wants to start to bring video game development in-house
videogameschronicle.com
videogameschronicle.com
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.
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.
They had. They just did not end up releasing anything.
On the last year before shutting down Stadia, they were finally addressing this.
"How to write a Windows emulator from scratch"
How are we supposed to use a 1u devkit!? Had no one on their team ever do console work!?
Console devkits fit on a desk because that is where a console devkit needs to go. On the porting engineer's desk, so they can do the work.
In the end Google announced the non-sense business model and we saw the writing on the wall. I do not think that devkit ever got setup.
A typical 1U full sized server is 40+ inches though. Those are really annoying to put at a desk.
I love this idea, imagine if Lego had an open game creation platform. So much potential for idea generation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Penguin#Child_safety_and_...
Now that kids spend almost more time before the screen than not, and that the Overton's window been shifted to a place where it has become acceptable to market digital casinos to kids, no one bothers with costly moderation anymore.
The bottom line is this: If you give kids literally any way to communicate, they will use it to bully each other and destroy the "kid friendly" nature of the game. If you let kids place objects in the world, they will spell out their home address for a pedophile by dropping objects to create words and then build a giant penis next to it. If you give kids the ability to emit only a few specific pre-approved sentences as a "chat" feature, they will find a way to sext with it, and then tell a pedophile their specific location through an ad-hoc code involving character facing direction and specific sentences.
Kids are smart, and imaginative, and don't understand or respect the concept of "You aren't supposed to do that" and don't recognize the danger of telling strangers your home address (in as much as there is actual danger there, as "stranger danger" is massively overstated) and will utilize ANY possible signal channel to explore taboo topics in an environment that seems safe.
Like, people in the Wii days shared friend codes in multiplayer shooters that had zero chat by using gunshot decals to spell out friend codes one digit at a time!
Either don't make a game where strangers can interact in any way, or pay shitloads for aggressive moderation like disney did. Those are your two options.
Or just do what roblox does and let kids be found by literal pedophiles who then go on to sexually message them and just somehow not have parents freak the fuck out? Also you get to literally profit from the work of children. I guess the moral of the story is to sell your soul to the devil because he has great PR
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.
However Roblox was pretty barebones in comparison. I preferred Blockland. There were a decent number of players.
Eventually I got bored and a few months later, the first versions of survival Minecraft came out and my friends and I switched over.
It was wild to see many years later after I long stopped caring to see that Roblox had “won.”
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.
In the 6th generation, they basically made shovelware, right up until Lego and LucasArts gave them a chance to make this radically new and very LEGO game that also happened to be star wars. Lego was dealing with their own stagnation and "what do we do now" view on Lego games, after having hits like Lego Racers and Lego Island in the late 90s. The original Lego Star wars was great because it was extremely casual, very simple, and had an entirely new "Feel". Everything was made of Legos, everything was interact-able in a very Lego way etc. The characters in Lego Star wars didn't say anything, they "acted out" the story of star wars with a lighthearted feel and a pronounced "charm". That's why the original games were so good. But then everyone saw dollar signs and Disney just threw every property they owned at them. Eventually it got played out.
They've tried to reimagine the formula a couple different times but it hasn't worked very well. This announcement is basically "We completely used up the TT lego game formula and need to innovate somehow".
So, there have been AT LEAST three eras of Lego video games, and at least 2 eras of TT Lego video games. Buying TT now would not give you the people and ideas that created the initial, very innovative formula, and you would not be able to recreate the "Well we aren't making any money with these properties now" situation that allowed TT to even be given the rights to all sorts of different IPs.
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.
>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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Undercover might have been good, I haven't played, but I'm sure originally releasing on Wii U did it a disservice. Do you think there's some design formula or lesson in it for future original Lego games?
I think so—the big picture design is "GTA but with Lego", and it worked pretty well. At the very least, they should be able to pull off a sequel—perhaps set in a new city.
One advantage it had over more realistic GTA games: the city was divided up into districts, and each district had a different theme, inspired by a different real city or part of the world. That works well with lego, but not as great in a more realistic setting. So leaning on the juxtaposition of different elements would show off lego's breadth as well as emphasize the toy nature of the games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
In hindsight it was my first exposure to programming-like logic. Loved that game.
The Lego/Fortnite integrations are the closest we have to this but even those are far from what it could be.
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?
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/
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.
Since that's the only true Lego game in spirit.