Roblox Meets Minecraft in China’s LEGO Cube
July 7, 2021In many ways, LEGO Cube is the ultimate realization of what the LEGO Group is trying to achieve with its games. It delivers a fully explorable LEGO brick world where fans can explore, interact, and – perhaps most importantly – create.
The only problem is that the mobile game is currently stuck in a sort of release limbo as it awaits approval from the Chinese government. The companies involved – The LEGO Group, Tencent, and NExT Studios – are weighing next steps, even as they continue to support the beta-locked title.
At a minimum, the LEGO Group’s Sean McEvoy says that the company has learned a lot from creating the mobile-first title.
“I think one thing that has really been evident to us as a team, and via our partnership with Tencent, is that there are tremendous learnings in terms of play experiences that could be broadly extensible worldwide to an audience of fans of LEGO play anywhere in the world,” he said. “Those learnings do not have to stay exclusive to Mainland China, they’re extensible worldwide, and so even if the game stays within the borders of Mainland China, we really feel like there are global benefits to that experience in social creative play, and in bringing world class experiences of child safety, and structures for fair and transparent monetization.”
LEGO Cube started out about six years ago as a loose idea to publish a game in China, developed by a Chinese developer for a Chinese market.
That eventually led to the LEGO Group setting up shop in China and – after an extensive search that included speaking with 15 companies – partnering with Tencent and its developer NExT Studios to make a game.
Once the LEGO Group found its partner, the companies spent another six months or so essentially getting to know one another and, in the words of the LEGO Group’s Micki Fjeldgaard, immersing Tencent in LEGO Games culture.
“A natural sort of like first step was obviously to introduce them to our many guidelines and manuals or documentation as to what kind of ways do you present the minifigure?” he said. “How do you animate the minifigure? How do you portray various types of conflict? How do you best deal with combat in a child-friendly game, and stuff like that. Following that, and sort of like getting a shared understanding of what this is, we then had multiple creative workshops in Shenzhen in Tencent’s office around the game and explored various avenues as to how we could incorporate creativity and imagination into the game.”
Initially, the game that NExT was working on leaned heavily into combat, but as time went by, the game opened up to be more creative and became something that incorporated more creativity, choice, and building into the experience.
LEGO Cube isn’t just an important part of the LEGO Group’s gaming strategy, but its overall strategy in China. And China is a huge market for the LEGO Group.
LEGO bricks have been a beloved part of play for kids and adults for generations. That’s not the case in China, though, where LEGO bricks didn’t officially arrive until 1993 with the opening of a small third-party store in Beijing. In 2001, the company lined up an exclusive distributor from mainland China, and 15 years later in 2016, the LEGO Group launched its first flagship store there – a gorgeous, two-floor store by Disneyland in Shanghai. The LEGO Group now has four flagship stores in China and plans to greatly increase the number of stores there by the end of 2021. The company’s expansion into China also includes growing digital efforts – and, of course, video games.
McEvoy said that China is “hugely important” to LEGO Games, and LEGO Cube is a big element of that effort.
As of 2020, China is the largest market in the world for video games, accounting for more than 27% of global revenue for the video game industry. That’s 2% more than North America, which is now the second biggest, and 5% more than Asia-Pacific, which is the third largest. It’s also important to note how quickly game industry revenue grew in China. In the past 10 years, total China game industry revenue grew by about 760%. And much of that growth is in mobile games.
As of 2020, the games market in China was about 80 percent mobile. So it’s easy to see why LEGO Cube, a mobile-first game designed for China, in China, is so important.
LEGO Cube is an open-ended sandbox game that is best described as taking the best of LEGO Worlds combined with the best of Minecraft, and combine that with the best of Roblox, built for mobile first.
“It sort of has these inherit LEGO values in its core design, which was all about creativity and open-ended play and exploration,” said the LEGO Group’s Ronny Scherer. “And that combined with a platform of which players could make their own worlds and share those with the rest of the player community in an easy way from your mobile device.”
In late 2017, Scherer recruited the LEGO Group’s first local employee in China: Long Cao. It was Cao’s job to ensure that the game stayed on schedule and that it was tested and prepared for launch as soon as possible. Joining Cao shortly after was Nannan Li, as associate product lead on the game.
When both Li and Cao started, LEGO Cube was still very much in the early stages of development. About 30 people were working on the game, which hadn’t yet been announced. The game was officially unveiled in September 2018, about a year after Scherer moved to China. In the announcement, the LEGO Group called LEGO Cube the first game developed under the strategic partnership between the LEGO Group and Tencent and noted that the game was expected to be publicly available by the end of 2018. With the release window now public, Li said that development and recruitment for the game’s dev team sped up, eventually hitting about 70 employees.
The team did several closed tests for LEGO Cube, and then the game was soft-launched on August 8th, 2019, an auspicious date in China because the number 8 is considered lucky. And that luck seemed to hold – at least for a while.
“LEGO Cube and soft launch has done phenomenally well by our standards,” Scherer said. “It’s been consistently in the top three performing titles in terms of reaching engagement.”
Currently, the game features four major modes. In survival mode, players explore the world, collect materials, and craft tools they use to create other items that help them survive. Then there is the user-generated content platform, which allows players to create their own experiences within games inside the game, and then invite players to come and play their created games with them. Next is creation mode, which gives players plenty of open space, all of the bricks they want, and allows them to build anything they can imagine. The final mode is parties, which features the LEGO Park, a land where you can build your house and live a minifig life.
What the game doesn’t feature – at least not yet – is a way to make money. That’s because it still hasn’t officially been released.
Nearly two years since it first went live, LEGO Cube remains, essentially, half launched. That’s because it’s awaiting final approval from the Chinese government.
“In order to release a game with a foreign brand in China, you need to acquire two different kinds of permits,” Scherer said. “One is an ISBN license that’s akin to an ISBN license in the West for releases of books and what have you. The second part is a publishing license, which you cannot, for either of them, acquire that as a foreign company. You need to be a Chinese-owned entity in order to apply for and receive those permits.”
To obtain those licenses in China, a company has to go through companies that the local government trusts will respect Chinese culture and local regulation. That’s true of anything that conveys any sort of message to the public or allows the public to communicate with one another. But internet culture products are considered even more sensitive. A game like LEGO Cube needs this prior approval but can in some cases still be soft-launched to the public for testing, if it follows the regulatory requirements and does not charge its players without all of the approvals.
Now drop into this complex release system a change that hit in early 2018 when there was an organizational restructuring within the Chinese group that led the approval process. That led to a temporary freeze in the authorization of new game licenses, which lasted for the rest of the year. And then in 2019, China enacted new laws regulating video game playing time for minors, which also must be addressed in game design.
While the approval process is once again active, the change in regulation and licensing has created challenges for games not yet approved and a longer delay for those seeking approval. Essentially, there’s a line to get approval, and LEGO Cube is still waiting in it.
“So right now, our goal is to find a way to sustain the game for long enough that we’ll be able to monetize it eventually,” Scherer said.
“Currently, that doesn’t include releasing the game outside China,” said McEvoy.
While the game isn’t officially released yet, it does enjoy a passionate following. That’s in part because players can make their own creations in the game and share them with one another.
The LEGO Group said it also feels like what it’s learned from the experience and the partnership has been more than worthwhile, regardless of the outcome for the game.
“I think this game itself is really great,” Nannan Li said. “It’s a huge engagement for the LEGO brand with players and kids in China because, compared with other Western countries, the LEGO Group as a toy brand is fairly new for Chinese consumers and players. I’m really happy to see that we finally brought a LEGO title and fully developed for China to the Chinese market.”
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.
Explore more…
In order of appearance:
LEGO Minifigures Online – LEGO Minifigures Don’t Have Knees
LEGO Universe – Death of a Dream
LEGO Worlds – Wikipedia
Tencent – Official website
NExT Studios – Official website
