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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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/

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

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?

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.

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