Lego says it wants to start to bring video game development in-house
22 comments
·March 13, 2025Danieru
stryan
> 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.
owenpalmer
> 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.
shakna
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.
knowknow
Isn’t this what Lego is basically doing with Fortnite?
owenpalmer
I meant open-platform, not open-world.
andrewxdiamond
You’re basically describing Roblox.
jandrese
Roblox games often even come with a rather LEGO-like aesthetic, including measuring distances in "studs" and even having visible studs on surfaces.
owenpalmer
Yep, but hopefully without the child predation!
pdpi
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
Whiskerwood looks an improved version of Timberwood, one of the best colony sims I've played. Thanks for the link, I've enjoyed it!
billfruit
Im most reminded of Ratropolis, but likely it is nothing like it. But Ratropolis is a fairly interesting game, its a very busy game where you need to make decisions constantly.
dangus
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.
breckenedge
TT?
Uvix
Traveler's Tales, the developer of most of the LEGO video games over the last 20 years starting with the original LEGO Star Wars.
fumufumu
[dead]
PaulKeeble
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.
null
windowshopping
Anyone here ever play Lego Alpha Team twenty years ago?
In hindsight it was my first exposure to programming-like logic. Loved that game.
andrewstuart
The risk antenna extend to maximum…..
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.