LEGO Universe: Death of a Dream

March 3, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

LEGO® Universe launched after five years of development but was turned off less than two years after going live.

The $125 million investment in a LEGO brick-themed massively multiplayer online game failed for a number of complex reasons, according to the LEGO Group and those who worked on the game. They included the management machinations of the developer’s holding company, unfortunate timing, a lack of focus, and the LEGO Group’s own impatience with the game’s success.

That failure, though, did lead to a number of important lessons for the LEGO Group, which it still makes use of today.

In 2008, two years after starting development on the game – and under pressure to personally cover the expanding payroll of a blossoming staff – the owners of NetDevil decided to sell the company to Gazillion Entertainment.

Ryan Seabury, creative director on the game, said he wasn’t very happy about the sale but understood why it happened. He also held out hopes that Gazillion would bring in some industry veterans to provide support and new oversight on different facets of the project.

Unfortunately, the sale led to a number of major issues that both bogged down the already slow development and eroded trust between the employees and the new owners. Mark Hansen, senior director with the LEGO Group working on the game, called the new ownership a nightmare.

“This is the most disastrous decision the LEGO Group ever could have made,” he said. “It was just horrible from day one. It left management into daily chaos for me, [NetDevil co-founder and president] Scott Brown, Ryan Seaberry, and [NetDevil co-founder and art director] Peter Grundy; us four that were trying to leave everybody else to be creative with the game, but to take on all of the organizational impacts that we were taking.”

Fortunately, at the same time, the LEGO Group decided to build up a team of its employees in Colorado to be closer to NetDevil, allowing the company to be more responsive as development proceeded. So, while NetDevil management continued to bang hangs with Gazillion, the work on the game actually started to speed up, and the game began to come into better focus.

These were moments the developers still remember – like bringing the minifigure to life, introducing a Diablo-esque approach to character abilities, and finally settling on the game’s core.

That lost epiphany came after Seabury and a small team flew out to Manchester to meet with the TT Games studio and founder Jon Burton about the game, said Seabury.

“He looked at it and said, ‘… you’re calling this LEGO Universe, but it doesn’t feel as big as what you’re calling it,'” Seabury said. “And I thought that was a really salient point. I’m like, Yeah, wow, that’s good. Because, you know, we get so close to the grind, figuring out the details of what’s going on in the game and the interactions and the content that’s there. And sometimes it’s hard to take that step back and just look at it from just a plain point of view.”

That’s what led to the backstory of a planet, home to the imagination Nexus, blowing apart and creating chunks of playable worlds scattered across the universe, Seabury said.

As work on the game proceeded, and the studio released first a limited Alpha, then an Alpha, and a Beta; some at the studio and the LEGO Group couldn’t help notice the sudden, seemingly meteoric rise of a very similar game. A game about constructing, destruction in a world of building blocks: Minecraft.

But where LEGO Universe had one of the most famous toy brands in history behind it and a team in the hundreds, Minecraft started as the work of one person using cubes of rock, sand, and grass.

In October 2010, LEGO Universe officially launched almost exactly five years after NetDevil signed on to create the game. While the studio was delighted with the release, the relationship between NetDevil and Gazillion had deteriorated to the point of being untenable to some, including Ryan Seabury.

“There were more than a few heated phone calls I had with people, and it really started making me unhappy actually to be a part of that,” Seabury said. “They were asking me to do things I wasn’t comfortable doing as a leader. The tension really was getting pretty bad between leadership there.

Eventually, unable to deal with the daily stress and mismanagement, Grundy, Brown, and Seabury all left.

Seabury handed in his resignation before the game launched on October 26, 2010. Brown left in the month after the game launched. Both went on to start End Games Entertainment. Grundy left in January 2011 to join them.

Soon after the departure of the founders, the LEGO Group started investigating how it could buy back rights to the game and parts of the NetDevil studio from Gazillion. The sale to the LEGO Group went through in February 2011 but brought with it some significant changes to NetDevil, which was renamed Play Well Studios. Shortly after the acquisition, the LEGO Group laid off about 20 of the 100 or so employees working on the LEGO Universe project, throwing those who remained in a bit of disarray.

About six months after the game’s launch and about two months after the studio purchase, the LEGO Group started discussing what changes should be made to the game to try and improve the chances of its success over time.

The game’s launch wasn’t very strong commercially, and while it continued to grow, it wasn’t growing fast enough for an impatient LEGO Group. The initial ambitious goal was for the game to hit 180,000 subscribers by the full launch, with continued growth through the following years. Instead, the game launched with 14,000 preorders. That number grew to between 30,000 and 40,000 monthly subscriptions and then sort of plateaued.

To combat the slowed growth, the company decided to shift the game to free-to-play. They started giving the game away as a digital download (stopping the sale of the boxed copy for $40 each). While players could try early sections of the game, to continue playing they’d need to pay a monthly fee. The change boosted player numbers dramatically, with the game hitting 2.3 million registered players and just about 100,000 subscribers.

But soon, that growth, too, flattened out.

In September 2011, the LEGO Universe got its first major marketing push from the LEGO Group with the addition of characters and elements from the popular Ninjago line. Nearing the one-year anniversary of the game’s release, it finally felt like LEGO Universe was starting to hit its stride.

Unfortunately, it was too late.

As the first anniversary of the game came and went, things were not looking good financially for LEGO Universe. While the game was finally starting to show some signs of long-term life, its cost and a changing of the guard at the LEGO Group meant it was unlikely to survive.

In November of 2011, the LEGO Group officially announced its decision to close LEGO Universe. The company said it would be closing the game on January 31, 2012. While the game had more than two point three million players, not enough of them were paying subscribers.

When the game was shut down, the LEGO Group laid off 115 employees from Play Well Studios and some LEGO Group employees who handled marketing for the game in Billund, Denmark.

That same month, Minecraft officially launched, boasting 241 million log-ins daily and more than 4 million copies sold.

In retrospect, there seems to be a number of things that contributed to LEGO Universe’s ultimate demise:

Chief among them was an inherent lack of patience, confidence, and an understanding that transforming the LEGO Group’s business model and truly embracing digital play as a new pillar of the brand would take time – much longer than the one or two years it allowed LEGO Universe.

Throughout the project, a lot of new disciplines, processes, and capabilities were discovered and learned as the project evolved, but they were never matured and perfected to the same degree as the LEGO Group’s 89-year physical toy business.

Other issues included the long pre-production of the game, the unexpectedly high cost of developing and maintaining child safety protocols for an open-ended building title, and the lackluster marketing support from the LEGO Group.

The requirement for a high-end gaming PC was a poor fit for a market that had shifted suddenly away from boxed products purchased in retail stores to free games on Facebook and mobile devices, funded by advertising and micro-transactions, and didn’t seem to take children’s safety and privacy as seriously as the LEGO Group felt necessary.

Those deeply involved in the game’s development each had their own take on why the game ultimately didn’t survive much past its launch.

Hansen felt it never got the sort of full-throated support from the top that a project of its size needed to survive. Seabury said he felt the game was doing well but that its costs were a bit out of control for things like hosting and child safety. Also, he didn’t think it was making enough money for the LEGO Group.

Ronny Scherer, a director of development on the game for the LEGO Group, calls it the opportunity cost of keeping the game alive.

“Bluntly speaking, that was one of the challenges,” he said. “We saw everything we touched with the physical LEGO bricks turn into gold. There was this massive demand and interest in our brand from the physical perspective. And so you need to look at the opportunity cost, like, do we spend the time, money, and effort on these things that when we touch them, they’re instant cash? Or do we build this other new and complex business that’s totally foreign to us but will be a great business in the long term?”

About six years after the game’s closure, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, who is now the executive chairman of the LEGO Brand Group and was the CEO of the LEGO Group during the development of LEGO Universe, said that in retrospect, it was a mistake for the company to shut down the game when it did. Looking at the tremendous successes of Minecraft and Roblox, now two of the biggest games in the world, he said he realized that LEGO Universe could have probably grown into something not just successful but amazing.

“I consider this one of my greatest fiascos: that we weren’t persistent,” he said in that 2018 interview. “It was obvious that something digital had to happen with the LEGO Group.”

From the LEGO Group’s perspective, that investment in and support of LEGO Universe led to more than simply the game itself; it also proved rich in lessons for the company. Scherer was adamant that the LEGO Group’s significant investment would lead to, at least, lessons for future LEGO game-makers and leaders within and outside the company.

Where others retreated from the project to recover from the stress of having such a monumental effort so quickly shut down, Scherer set about documenting that work for future generations. That included speaking with the Royal Library in Denmark and the National Archive of Electronic Games at The Strong in Rochester, New York, about the best methods for archiving and documenting online games.

And despite the decision to close LEGO Universe – although at a different level – the LEGO Group’s interest and investment in online games continued. As part of its digital play efforts, safe, social and creative play online remains a big area of interest for the LEGO Group to this day.

Games whose roots could arguably be traced back to LEGO Universe include titles like LEGO Legends of Chima Online – which was based on a relatively new theme that was initially destined to be added to LEGO Universe, LEGO Minifigures Online, and even LEGO Worlds.

While the years and money invested in the game ended up helping the LEGO Group learn valuable lessons in the space, the impact of the prolonged development and sudden closure of the game and studio behind it wasn’t so positive. Seabury found the triple hit of leaving the studio he helped to build up, the decision to shut down the game, and the studio shuttering a hard one to deal with on a personal level.

“It really became a part of you,” he said. “And to have it sort of just stop is pretty jarring. I was feeling pretty down about myself, and all my self-value is sort of tied to that achievement, and then to have LEGO Universe – this thing I was super proud of – just gone, was a pretty big hit. I didn’t really realize the impact it had on me for probably a good year. I had to really separate my self-identity, self-value, mental framework from my work which in my first 30, 35 years of life was in inexorably tied together.”

Brown, too, was deeply impacted by the closing.

“It was devastating,” he said. “I don’t have a better word than that. It was devastating. Because we thought we had built something that was going to be a game for decades.”

And not just because the game shut down or even because of the closure of the studio. But also because of the impact it had on the people behind the game, including Brown himself.

“I miss these people dearly,” he said. “I loved going into work every day. I truly loved it. And you miss it horribly. It’s a reminder of what could have been. It was the greatest, the greatest times. I remember seeing kids crying when they were shutting the game down. That’s not a failure. Those kids loved it.”

This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.