Two studios to close as money runs dry for free-to-play MMO
As many as 115 Lego Group employees have been given their redundancy notice, after failing to yield enough money from a free-to-play project.
The Lego Universe MMO, which launched in the Autumn last year, is to close on January 2012, the Lego Group said.
That in turn has led to the decision to shut two of the firm’s studios; Play Well in the US and a second facility in Denmark.
Lego Universe, a free-to-play game that offers bonus content for paying customers, has managed to attract two million players.
“Unfortunately, we have not been able to build a satisfactory revenue model on our target group,” said the project’s executive Jesper Vilstrup.
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He said the game itself won “very positive player feedback and a large number of players in the free play zone”.
The Lego Group said it would still partner with both TT Games and Warner Bros Interactive to produce further games based on its brand.
All affected employees will be assisted in finding new jobs, the Lego company said.
Yet a product like Moshi Monsters targets the same demographic and is hugely profitable? Are they doing something wrong?
So WHO messed up? The game is a good one, are they laying off the engineers because of a bad business or marketing decision? Hardly seems fair to me when all the people who doubtless put in thousands of hours of hard work get canned because some exec can't do his sums.
Apart from the whole developer team, pick and ask one of those biz dev guys the full name of the game.
I am sure they will pause for 10 seconds and think... that's why good developers lose their jobs.
To me it just shows what a false economy these free to play games are, everyone seems to be jumping on the band wagon and thinking this is the answer to spending millions on triple A titles. Sadly the same problems remain, Moshi Monsters was offered as an example of a FTP doing well but it is still a very small team and marketed well, if this is fully intentional or not it gets coverage. However I can't say the same for the Lego MMO, I can't think of any big push on it and did it really need 100+ devs on it?
Strange though it may seem, it does appear that people prefer to waste MORE money on games gradually (eg: at a pace of THEIR choosing) rather than having to pay a wacking great £40 up front or be locked into some overpriced subscription model.
In these economic times, People would rather "trickle-pay" that £40 over the life of the game. Afterall, it's better value for the customer because they can stop after the first £5 and avoid the sting some people get from paying out £40 on a title that... well, sucks (or their child stops playing after one day).
Moshi Monsters has cheap-to-do art, simpler programming, etc. Lego games are much more complex and require far more work. MMOs even more so.
Also, the elephant in the room is there are just TOO MANY games. TOO MUCH choice for such a bleak economic outlook. Only a few big-name derivative titles can truely avoid the dilution in the current games market.
LEGO - as a brand - is all about sandbox playing and building with cubes. And the present game offers very little in that direction.
#1 - obviously, they should have done a Minecraft version og Lego Universe. Makes so obvious sense it almost hurts.
#2 - equally obviously, LEGO never bothered with making the digital universe converge with the tactile, where they made all the moolah: Business model should have been "build something with digital cubes, click here, and presto: Next week, for a nominal charge, you get your very own LEGO creation in actual LEGO cubes by snailmail."
If LEGO wants #3 and onwards, they can contact me here....
