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.
I'm not sure buying Traveller's Tales is a good idea.
TT had a really good engine that allowed them to pump out Lego games at an impressive rate of 1-3 per year. They maintained that cadence from 2005 through to 2019, then they stopped.
In the following 6 years, they have only released a single game: Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, in early 2022. It's been a full 3 years since they released a game.
They built a whole new engine for Skywalker Saga, so the development time is understandable. But apparently that engine was too hard to work with, so they dumped it and switched to Unreal, which has probably set their development efforts back again.
Now, I'm not saying that studios need to continually release games. Many good studios have long development cycles. But it's a bad sign when a studio suddenly switches cadence, how much of the original TT team is left?
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.
> 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.
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.
I never heard of block land, I just looked it up, watched this YouTube video about abandoned multiplayer games https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1FEW7gxci2Q . It was a bit sad to see it in such decline. It reminded me of a non commercialized version of Roblox.
Roblox does seem to be particularly bad at moderating it. For example, the Wikipedia section on Club Penguin's child safety concerns [0] makes it look like Disneyland compared to the reports I've read about Roblox.
If I remember a video I watched on the subject correctly, creating a safe space for kids on the internet was the explicit goal of Club Penguins. Good moderation was a selling point in a time when most parents wouldn't let their kids "surf the web" alone (rightly so...).
Now that kids spend almost more time before the screen than not, and that the Overton's window been shifted to a place where it has become acceptable to market digital casinos to kids, no one bothers with costly moderation anymore.
That allows chat. Can go the hearthstone model where all you can say is “hi” and “good job”. Letting randos talks just is going to lead to bad times w kids.
There used to be a blog where a developer who worked for Disney and their Toon Town MMO discussed the absurd difficulty of trying to keep young kids "safe" in an MMO.
The bottom line is this: If you give kids literally any way to communicate, they will use it to bully each other and destroy the "kid friendly" nature of the game. If you let kids place objects in the world, they will spell out their home address for a pedophile by dropping objects to create words and then build a giant penis next to it. If you give kids the ability to emit only a few specific pre-approved sentences as a "chat" feature, they will find a way to sext with it, and then tell a pedophile their specific location through an ad-hoc code involving character facing direction and specific sentences.
Kids are smart, and imaginative, and don't understand or respect the concept of "You aren't supposed to do that" and don't recognize the danger of telling strangers your home address (in as much as there is actual danger there, as "stranger danger" is massively overstated) and will utilize ANY possible signal channel to explore taboo topics in an environment that seems safe.
Like, people in the Wii days shared friend codes in multiplayer shooters that had zero chat by using gunshot decals to spell out friend codes one digit at a time!
Either don't make a game where strangers can interact in any way, or pay shitloads for aggressive moderation like disney did. Those are your two options.
Or just do what roblox does and let kids be found by literal pedophiles who then go on to sexually message them and just somehow not have parents freak the fuck out? Also you get to literally profit from the work of children. I guess the moral of the story is to sell your soul to the devil because he has great PR
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I know Amazon tried. I haven't heard of Google trying. Sure they started Stadia but they had no internal game dev teams that I know of.
I have hard of MS's issues. The biggest issue is a game dev team is generally lead by a game-director. It's not a "design by committee, come to consensus" type of thing like software dev is at Amazon, Google, Microsoft. The way work happens is not the same. They might look superficially similar but as a simple example, at typical game dev team is 70% artists, 20% game designers, 10% software engineers (+/-) where as a typical team at Amazon, Google, MS is 95% software engineers.
Yeah, GDC talks from Google even nowadays, seem mostly marketing and telemetry related, I keep wondering if they ever bothered to have folks with actual game development culture.
Depends on the depth. “Pizza box” generally referred to the smaller rack mounted stuff that could fit in the 24 inch depth racks. They were called pizza boxes because 19 inch width and that depth made them nearly square.
A typical 1U full sized server is 40+ inches though. Those are really annoying to put at a desk.
Not sure what you mean, but nobody I know of referred to the 4ft long servers as pizza boxes. Because the name sort of implied it was something small enough to throw on a desk and stack stuff on.
Lego do know how to make toys tho. Google or Amazon never did. The existing lego games were good, so lego at least got the governance right. Again, Google and Amazon had no experience in that area.
> Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade.
Find some Lego-loving indie devs and let them go wild. Fund the development of some prototypes, and let them build something that actually encapsulates the creative aspects of Lego, not just a generic action game in a Lego skin.
Yeah, this is getting especially hard as VCs learn not every title can be a AAA, nor there are enough people in the world to play all the games they pump out.
Which is something that the MBA driven approach of exponential growth will never grasp.
Art and entertainment don't have a mathematical formula for guaranteed growth.
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.
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.
The issue is you can’t approach game development the same way you approach SaaS software or traditional business (you obviously know this). It’s a creative business - no amount of money can create creativity - but money is needed to fuel it. Like you said, many have tried to just throw money at it to compete and failed, yet highly creative studios keep thriving (while once-creative studios keep recycling) and more indie games are being made everyday.
I hope Lego succeeds simply to be able to keep producing content and titles but I can’t stop but think there is a new frontier coming that I think Lego should be more focused on. Not console games.
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.
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.
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.
>Games can be a good business, I know my studio is
If you dont mind sharing, how many people do you employ/long term contract with? "Games can be a good business" is entirely subjective to the studio's goals. So I guess I'm wondering: is your goal to stay solo+/micro/indie, or are you planning to grow with each successive game? And how big?
Sustainability is something I've been thinking about a lot recently[0]. I'm relatively close to launching Metropolis 1998, which falls squarely in a long tail genre (if done right)[1]. I'd love to build up a studio, in office, and along the way figure out what's the right headcount for my goals.
Whiskerwood looks neat btw. Good luck on the game. I'd love to hear why you chose to go with a publisher this time around? Was it an affordable luxury :P ? Marketing, community management, localization can be a PITA, but it's entirely possible to do even at solo scale.
[0] It is not cheap to operate a game studio that employs local people in the USA. It's frustrating because the COL in the mid west is <= 70% cheaper than the coastal cities (where the vast majority of studios are). There's a lot of cheap land where the industry could be to make art/games a lot more comfortably (ignoring the fact that N% people dont want to live there, which is valid if that's not what they want)
[1] Many people play Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999), SimCity 4 (2003), and the original City Skylines (2015) today. steamdb.info, OpenRCT, subreddit activity, etc.
Shoot me an email if you dont want to respond here?
Hey YesBox! I've been watching your game for ages. I think since you first showed it on the indie subreddit. I'm excited to play it. Sim City 2000 was a big influence for me.
Overall though I'd say: coastal US is a market no one can afford to do gamedev with employees in unless you are a child company of a platform holder. We're based in Japan where cost of living is vastly more reasonable.
Personally I'd suggest you highly question yourself about what sort of studio you want to work in. The environment you want to work in, should be the one you try to make. For me that meant full remote with no offices. I'd honestly be surprised to meet ang gamedev who likes offices and commutes, much less one who list the extra cost.
At the same time, this is absolutely a ship of Theseus situation. TT has existed since at least the 90s, and grew with the industry. They were responsible for lots of good games, lots of ports, lots of Movie/toy tie-ins, and lots of bad games, like specifically Sonic R. They grew with the industry as a whole into the 6th generation (Gamecube, Xbox, PS2), after struggling significantly in the previous console generation, seemingly a victim of Sega's abysmal console "strategy" at the time.
In the 6th generation, they basically made shovelware, right up until Lego and LucasArts gave them a chance to make this radically new and very LEGO game that also happened to be star wars. Lego was dealing with their own stagnation and "what do we do now" view on Lego games, after having hits like Lego Racers and Lego Island in the late 90s. The original Lego Star wars was great because it was extremely casual, very simple, and had an entirely new "Feel". Everything was made of Legos, everything was interact-able in a very Lego way etc. The characters in Lego Star wars didn't say anything, they "acted out" the story of star wars with a lighthearted feel and a pronounced "charm". That's why the original games were so good. But then everyone saw dollar signs and Disney just threw every property they owned at them. Eventually it got played out.
They've tried to reimagine the formula a couple different times but it hasn't worked very well. This announcement is basically "We completely used up the TT lego game formula and need to innovate somehow".
So, there have been AT LEAST three eras of Lego video games, and at least 2 eras of TT Lego video games. Buying TT now would not give you the people and ideas that created the initial, very innovative formula, and you would not be able to recreate the "Well we aren't making any money with these properties now" situation that allowed TT to even be given the rights to all sorts of different IPs.
Did you buy any recent lego? Like the mario lego with qrcodes? Its clearly the best toy company on earth. Everything feels right about their product. They are winning and they will definitely bring this winning playbook to video games.
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.