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

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

You’re basically describing Roblox.

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

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.