Return of the LEGO Star Wars Battles

September 29, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

LEGO Star Wars™ Battles was a great smartphone game concept that simply couldn’t get over the hump and go live until it was killed and brought back with the help of Apple Arcade.

The title lingered in soft launch for nearly two years, never quite hitting the metrics needed to release it widely, before the LEGO Group, developer TT and Apple came together to give it another chance at life as an Apple Arcade title.

“There was a belief that this game really could do something, could be a game that people would really enjoy,’ said Vaughan Wallis, the LEGO Games producer on the title. “So I think everyone was reluctant to close it down.

“Those metrics are kind of a validation. Is this game fun? Does it have legs, from a gameplay perspective? How do we bring this game to market? “

LEGO Star Wars™ Battles went live as part of Apple Arcade in late September 2021, the culmination of a journey that started back in 2017 at a service station on the M25 motorway in England.

Tom Stone, a TT Games founder, rang up Jason Avent, who he knew from his work at Electronic Arts, to talk about starting up a new studio.

The two met at that gas station, and Stone managed to convince Avent to come out of a semi-retirement to help launch a new TT Games studio dedicated to making mobile games from the ground up.

The studio knew almost immediately where it wanted to set its first game: the brick-ified universe of LEGO Star Wars™.

Chris Bowles, the creative director at the studio, said the group wanted to create a Star Wars™ game that could tap into the full history of the franchise and deliver a kind of player-versus-player battle arena to players.

With an idea roughly sketched out, the team put together a video presentation to show LEGO Games and the LEGO Group what it would look like in action.

The video showed players plucking minifig characters off of digital cards, dangling them over a playfield, and dropping them into the world of the game. Once on the battlefield, the minifig would come to life and start fighting.

Wallis said the game was very appealing to the LEGO Group, not just because of the mashup of LEGO bricks and Star Wars™, but because it would appeal to a broad audience, so the concept was quickly greenlit.

The team set about pulling in all of the characters they wanted to include and coming up with a framing device that would explain why players are having these battles.

When you launch LEGO Star Wars™ Battles, C-3PO explains that the game is actually a battle simulator designed to train future generals in the Rebel army. As he walks you through the game’s rules, 3PO says that any general worth their salt needs to know what the enemy is thinking – and that’s the narrative justification for aligning yourself with the Dark Side, too. Because you’re a general in training, exploring the full history of Star Wars™ and all of its locations and units makes sense.

But Bowles said that, even with that framing device, the team had to figure out what they could fit into the game.

“We just wrote a list of all the characters that we knew, knowing that that wasn’t going to be nearly enough to kind of populate the game,” Bowles said. “So it was really a journey of discovery, of kind of digging and finding all these great characters that existed in all these different expansions to Star Wars™.”

Among the many characters, players can pluck and drop onto a battlefield, are the adorable porgs.

Avent said that the idea of including the space puffins as soldiers in a mobile strategy game may have been helped along accidentally by the LEGO Group and a bit of knitting.

“We got some LEGO kits from the LEGO Group as part of the partner program and one of them was a giant porg,” he said. “One of our programmers, his granny gave us a little woolen hat, and it ended up being on the top of this porg. I think that might have been the kind of the creative inspiration for them being in the game because it is this giant thing right in the middle of the office that you kind of chuckle at when you walk past it.

“What you initially think is that they’re not going to be able to harm anyone. And then you think, ‘Well no, but that’s funny, isn’t it?’ And that’s what LEGO toys bring to the LEGO Star Wars™ brand.”

The studio also had to monetize the game. And since it was destined for smartphones, the most obvious choice was the free-to-play model. But that gave LEGO Games pause. Avent and his team, coming from a long history of success in the mobile game market, had experience with free-to-play, but they also understood that the LEGO Group may not be open to the same format they’ve used before.

Ultimately, the developer and the LEGO Group agreed on a form of free-to-play with relatively light monetization based around a concept of fairness and transparency.

“Is the game fair and transparent in its business model?” Wallis asked. “We really wanted to make it very clear – in terms of communication and simplicity of the business model – what you could actually purchase in the game, and then making sure that the game was really razor sharp in terms of communication to the user so that it was crystal clear as to what they were buying.”

A lot of work went into nailing that approach, and ultimately it didn’t just set the rules for LEGO Star Wars™ Battles, it also helped to solidify the sort of approach the LEGO Group would ask other developers to take on future free-to-play mobile games.

The game went into soft launch in India and the Philippines in September 2019, after a year of development. Months later it rolled out to a few other markets including Canada and Denmark.

Typically, in this process, once a game hits the sort of engagement a developer is looking for, it is then rolled out to the rest of the world – or most of it.

TT and LEGO Games soft-launched Star Wars™ Battles to test the gameplay and get feedback from as many players as possible. The studio even worked closely with a playtest company to get deeper stats and more clarity on play issues early on. With the service allowing players to narrate and record their experience as they played.

Bowles said those early days in soft launch provided not just key learnings, but big challenges about how they could improve and push the game to become what the team envisioned when they first put together that demo video for the LEGO Group.

That included things like shrinking the battlefield to speed of the time between encounters and tweaking the camera angle to offer players a better view of the combat.

While TT made some major changes, LEGO Star Wars™ Battles still lingered in soft launch, first for months, and then approaching years.

It wasn’t until November 2020, a bit more than a year after the game’s initial soft launch, that Avent said he started thinking about Apple Arcade. Apple’s monthly subscription service strips away external monetization. Players don’t need to buy a game or app or contend with in-app purchases or loot boxes. They can play any game in Apple Arcade as much as they want for that single monthly subscription fee.

Avent said he thought it was a perfect fit, and the LEGO Group loved the idea, too.

With the decision made, TT now had to take a game that had been live for more than a year, that was designed as a free-to-play game, and remove it from the app store, rebuild it, and relaunch it.

In May, the developer announced that LEGO Star Wars™ Battles would be “closing” and that it would no longer be available after July 1, 2021. And players were not happy with the news.

“When you have a player base who engaged with your game daily, and you’re about to pivot, you’re aware that it’s probably not going to go well,” Bowles said. “And when we did close the game, we knew we were going to Apple Arcade, but we couldn’t communicate that to the player. That was a shame. It would have been great to deliver that message at the same time. It’s just not possible sometimes, you know? That’s the way it is.”

In August, TT was able to tell players that LEGO Star Wars™ Battles would be returning as an Apple Arcade exclusive in September.

Typically, the biggest change that comes when a free-to-play game makes the leap to Apple Arcade is having to strip out all of the game’s monetization methods.

But Avent said that, because TT developed the game using the LEGO Group’s fair and transparent philosophy, it actually wasn’t that difficult.

And because the game was offline and being retooled for Apple Arcade, the team also decided to rework other elements of the title as well. Those changes include minor tweaks like delivering players access to a broader roster of heroes more quickly and adding events. But also some big changes like what came with the game now being available on the iPhone, iPad, and television, through Apple TV.

Wallis said the LEGO Group is very happy with the result, which essentially turned a free-to-play game with built-in monetization into a premium experience tethered to Apple Arcade’s subscription.

“I think TT has done a really wonderful job in converting the game into an Apple Arcade offering and into a non-free-to-play game,” he said. “I’ve been super impressed with the way that they’ve actually converted it to a premium game.

“I also think this was one of those games that really sort of helped to start having more discussions, and start outlining a framework really, where we can have these discussions internally with our child safety team, and so on.”

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.