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by slightwinder 454 days 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.

2 comments

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.

Looking forward to them ruining the James Bond franchise.
> 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.

They have their City theme, and offshoots. That’s still popular, and has also led to a few decent tv shows. And the video game TT made from it—Lego City Undercover—is (to me, at least) the best of the Lego games.
Yeah City is the only strong one, I just think it would take a lot of work to turn these generic themes into actual franchises capable of holding a large game studio afloat. Hence why TT mostly sticks to third-party licenses.

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?

> 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.