LEGO to Begin Videogame Development Within Company

[Brick900]

Per title

[Mylenium]

Who cares? The last two LEGO-fied games were complete duds and the less said about the company's digital incompetence the better. Also look at the state of the gaming world in general. Companies are struggling left and right, even big ones. Getting into the game (no pun intended) may just not be a good decision at this point.

Mylenium

Edited March 20 by Mylenium
Added some more thoughts

[SpacePolice89]

Too early to tell if the future in house developed video games will be good or not but they should be very careful that the video game division won't become a bottomless pit that they throw endless amounts of money into. Back in the day Lego Media made some great games but was unfortunately shut down in 2004. I hope they make remastered versions of games like Lego Racers.   

[MAB]

Life of George 2.0

 

 

[danth]

I thought Lego almost went bankrupt last time they tried to make video games.

[Murdoch17]

  On 3/20/2025 at 4:03 PM, danth said:

I thought Lego almost went bankrupt last time they tried to make video games.

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My thoughts exactly! This is not going to be a good thing.

[Lyichir]

I think people here are mixing up cause and effect here. Back when Lego nearly went bankrupt, cutting expenses that were tangential to their main business like in-house game development or management of the Legoland Parks was one of the ways they facilitated bouncing back from that. But that's not to say the video game development was WHY they nearly went bankrupt—the much bigger factor was the decline of that core business of selling toys. It's a completely different situation from now, when their toy sales are stronger than ever and they have the means to fund projects like game development without compromising that.

 

[danth]

The video game ventures were losing money. That's why it's called an expense. You don't cut things that make money.

[Mylenium]

  On 3/21/2025 at 5:06 PM, Lyichir said:

I think people here are mixing up cause and effect here. Back when Lego nearly went bankrupt, cutting expenses that were tangential to their main business like in-house game development or management of the Legoland Parks was one of the ways they facilitated bouncing back from that. But that's not to say the video game development was WHY they nearly went bankrupt—the much bigger factor was the decline of that core business of selling toys. It's a completely different situation from now, when their toy sales are stronger than ever and they have the means to fund projects like game development without compromising that.

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Of course they were losing money with their games. Programmers, asset designers, play testers, QA people, marketing and all that costs a lot of money and you don't earn anything back until the game is actually released. Sure, it was part of a bigger problem, but it was a major contributing factor, not just some minor tangential thing as you put it. And what's different now? Have you even looked around? Ubisoft and Warner Gaming are on the verge of collapse due to a series of failed games, Playstation/ Sony has burned around 2 billion last year on failed games, EA is shrinking, Blizzard is no longer the gaming behemoth they were a few years ago and so on. Those are companies that at their height made many times over what LEGO makes every year and if they can stumble and fall, so can LEGO. Game development is a bottomless pit to sink money into and unless you have an eventual hit that recoups all those hundreds of millions of development costs any company in that business can fail. It's super volatile. You don't need to be a market analyst to see that. The only mitigating factor here is that of course LEGO aren't going to spend five years on developing a 300 million AAA+ game, but rather some simple games in the 20 million or less range. Even if those fail it's still a neat tax write-off as long as they're still generating enough money with their other ventures.

Mylenium