Lego is working to build up its in-house game development, the company’s boss has revealed.
Speaking to The Financial Times, Lego boss Niels Christiansen said the company was increasing its focus on video game experiences created by its own teams, following years of partnerships with outside companies.
“We can definitely say, as long as we’re under the Lego brand, we can cover experiences for kids of all ages, digital or physical,” Christiansen said. “[In-house game development] is something we’re building up. We have made quite a few investments in the future – I’d almost rather overinvest. That’s the benefit of being family-owned and long term.”
For over a decade, Lego games were mostly made by British studio TT Games, with a popular tie-in to a big movie franchise released every year.
For 15 years, TT Games pumped out dozens of annual Lego games with a familiar formula, based on Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel and DC characters. It also mounted the ambitious toys-to-life effort Lego Dimensions.
But that era of Lego gaming is largely over, with only one entry – Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – in the past six years. TT Games is reportedly still working on a further title, but it is not expected in 2025.
Since then, Lego has licensed its brand to a wider set of developers – most notably Fortnite maker Epic Games, and the recent launch of Lego Horizon Adventures, co-developed by Guerilla Games and published by Sony. Fortnite now has a deep integration with Lego, with minifigure versions of most of its digital skins, two large Lego game modes, and countless mini-games made by Lego itself and fans.
Lego Fortnite, now rebranded to Lego Fortnite Odyssey, is a Minecraft-y offering regularly played by around 50,000 people concurrently within the main Fortnite client. Last December, the company also launched Lego Fortnite Brick Life, a gentle life sim and house decoration game, to a smaller audience.
For now, The Lego Group has a small team of designers building and launching game concepts within Fortnite, which now has an impressive replication of Lego bricks and physics baked into Epic’s Unreal Engine. It’ll be interesting to see what’s next, as the wait for TT Games’ next old-school Lego game continues.
“I hope it will never be done,” head of Lego gaming at The Lego Group Remi Marcelli told Eurogamer last year, of the company’s big Fortnite mode, which continues to expand.