115 jobs lost as LEGO Universe closes
Lack of subscribers blamed for MMO shutdown in January
LEGO is to close down its recently launched MMO this January following failure to generate enough subscribers.
The company's Play Well Studios in Louisville and marketing team in Denmark will be axed, affecting 115 employees.
LEGO Universe launched in 2010 after a protracted development, but in February this year the company bought the majority of the development team and the rights to the game from developer NetDevil. It then proceeded to lay off members of staff.
In June this year LEGO launched a free-to-play section of the game to help drive pick-up in the title.
"The LEGO Universe team can take pride in having developed and launched a great LEGO experience that many players will miss," said Jesper Vilstrup, VP of LEGO Universe.
"Right now, we have almost 2 million players in LEGO Universe, and we get extremely positive feedback from players. Unfortunately, we have not been able to build a satisfactory revenue model in our target group, and therefore, have decided to close the game."
Despite the closure, LEGO emphasised that it intends to continue its digital games publishing business and intends to pursue deals such as those currently in place with TT Games and Warner Bros.
"The development of our digital offerings continues to be a very important element in our strategy," said Mads Nipper, executive VP of the LEGO Group.
"We have more than 20 million visitors on LEGO.com every month, and LEGO video games are among the bestselling children's video games with sales of more than 60 million units in the last five years. Through our experience developing and running LEGO Universe, we have gained a lot of valuable insights, and we have a very strong foundation for future development in the digital area."
I think an MMO like LEGO Universe needs more than 1 year to meet or confirm its success (and maybe also a browser version).
But the mighty can fall, as we saw with Everquest. Loose focus and the hordes of competitors will have you.
It is probably the highest stakes gambling in the game industry.
Why log on to play your lego man with others who you can barely talk to and thus have no community feeling towards when you can play your offline Lego Indiana Jones or Lego Potter?
That said, had they not taken some of the steps that they did to ensure security and child safety, they'd have been crucified the moment anything untoward occured.
Point being, it KILLS me when a company builds something great, or offers a great service, then can't seem to build the ancillary billing system to take people's money. This isn't unique among mmogs, I just re-upped my paid LOTRO account and Turbine's billing system is bare bones at best with little customer feedback.
People who make games need to think about the whole process. I know that billing isn't as sexy as framerates and polygons, but what good is a city of gold if the toll road to get there is crap?
I agree with Thomas that it would have been good to see them explore other options, like ad-supported or item sales. It's a shame to see a good game shut down before it's had a chance to find it's legs.
Minecraft now suits the original vision of Lego better than Lego does. It's a world where you are given free reign to use blocks to build whatever you want - not some tie-in to a movie or whatnot.
No matter how great any MMO is, too much time and money is being wasted on these huge-ass projects where no one IMAGINES a day when paying customers will dwindle to the point where you have people losing their jobs over a bad business decision. That, and as someone who's been interested in preserving game history, seeing yet another title fall away is a shame.
You'd think that not only putting an offline SP mode in these games, but also supporting that with paid DLC packs (which keeps people WORKING, right?) would be a no-brainer. Hell, even some sort of level editor so even if the online portion of a game DOES die, those that love it will continue to play and share content (and hell, BUY a project that dev works on because they can rely on them to cover all those bases.
Oh well. Maybe someone will listen one day...
It is my opinion that MMO games should not be marketed to young kids at all because they are surely bad for them in many ways (physically and mentally). I think the business problem with Lego universe is that it was too fun and light hearted and didn't require a deep time investment. It was geared towards kids and that was a good idea for the kids but kids don't care about your revenue model and don't feel they should be loyal to your brand and don't care if they didn't log in that day to quest for better armor they need to kill the dragon. We should not expect younger children to be dedicated MMO players. We can surely expect that parents are going to be very happy to cancel that sub as soon as the initial interest has worn off.
Skylanders Spyro's Adventure is the type of game people should expect will do extremely well with a younger audience not an MMO. Subscription or micro transaction based it doesn't matter I would not let my kid play an MMO until they are ready to pay for it themselves but more casual games are totally cool and I would pay double out my pocket for something we can play together !
There is block building in Lego U but it was hidden behind everything else and contained to a small personal area that players would have to choose to visit.
This happened around the same time that the copyright on the design of lego blocks expired I believe. I guess the thinking is that if they can't protect others copying the bricks then can protect in other ways by creating new areas of the universe with new styles etc, or by licensing other IP and branding their breaks with it?
such a shame but i hope another LEGO MMO comes round soon, i think a good one with all the right stuff would succeed well.
Also never build a MMO for kids because you face two difficult possibilities, one from the kids who expect to play it for free, another from their parents who don't want their kids to waste money playing a game where they have to subscribe just to play it online.
These two factores are perhaps why LEGO MMO had failed, even though there are still allot of adult gamers who also love LEGO too.
It'd be interesting to see a comparison between Lego Universe and Cartoon Network's FusionFall, that started of as a FTP and is still alive and kicking.
Lego U is a fun MMO and, in my opinion, has got some great gameplay for the target audience. Launching it as a premium MMO was a fail from the start. If anything it should be a big commercial platform with the purpose of building and maintaining the Lego customer base and sell more physical playsets by bringing the different brands "to life". You can't do it by charging your customers to pay for your commercial, even if it's disguised as a game.
What a shame to see it go.