Building the Metaverse: LEGO begins to scale up their Metaverse team

January 11, 2023 | 7

I think a lot about LEGO’s future. A future that will undoubtedly see some sort of convergence between physical toys, and the virtual world.

Ever since LEGO dropped a bombshell announcement that it would invest a billion dollars (yes, billion with a b) in Epic Games to build a metaverse, I’ve had this on my radar and have been keeping my eyes open for any new developments here.

And this week, we finally have some developments here, as LEGO begins to grow and expand the team responsible for building the LEGO and Epic Games Metaverse – a newly established team called GAME, an acronym for “Games, Activations & Metaverse Experiences”.

• Creative Lead, Interactive Experiences, GAME
• Senior Portfolio Manager (GAME)
• Senior Marketing Manager, LEGO® Metaverse Experiences

Great news if this is of interest to you, and if you have the prerequisite skills/experience and want to be part shaping LEGO’s Metaverse experience.

You can tell a lot about the direction a company is heading towards from job openings, and it’s pretty interesting that they’re beginning to scale up the team, which means that we’re edging closer to what this could all mean.

I would like to preface this piece by stating that all information sourced here has been from publicly available sources, and am in no way in possession of privileged information from the LEGO Ambassador Network, and there will be healthy amounts of speculation in this post which may or may not come to pass.

But first, what’s a metaverse, and why should I care?

Think of the metaverse as a loose term to describe a collective virtual shared space, where the physical and digital converge into some form of virtual realty. Think Ready Player One

It’s a concept popularised by science fiction and video games, but some of the biggest technology companies are betting big on it as the next big thing, as technology and virtual reality continues to become more immersive and integrated with everyday life.

Companies like Meta have sunk in billions in R&D and acquisitions (and changed their company name) to build software and hardware for their version of the Metaverse. Apple is heavily rumoured to announce their own virtual/augmented reality device (which may cost US$3000), and many others are gearing up for a potential metaversal future.

While interest in metaverses have cooled somewhat because crypto/NFT has subsided, but this is still potentially talked about as a successor to the internet as we know it, and how we interact with one another in the dystopian future.

At the very least, it’ll be cool to live in a giant video game.

Yeah, but why does LEGO care?

Potential disruptive technological concepts like the Metaverse SCARE our LEGO Overlords in Billund to their very core, the same way that video games has been an existential threat to LEGO, because of the fear that kids (and adults) might turn away from the once-beloved brick, where a world of play becomes purely digital, rendering The LEGO Group obsolete.

This is a valid, but overblown fear, as LEGO has never been as big as it is now, despite the ubiquity of technology and video games but you can’t blame LEGO for adopting a defensive position here. Just in case, we all eventually get plugged into the matrix.

LEGO’s new metaverse jobs

Now let’s look at the new internal team that LEGO is developing – GAME, which stands for Games, Activations & Metaverse Experiences.

It’s a really interesting acronym, as the remit sounds quite large, and the crucial part here is that GAMES are included in this, suggesting that LEGO has ambitions to launch, or at least meld video games into the eventual metaverse.

Check out the job descriptions below.

A few things stand out:

• Build clear marketing vision and strategy for LEGO® Metaverse Experiences.
• The LEGO® Games team is responsible for all game products across the company. It is our ambition to demonstrate, that games based on the LEGO® Idea can be the most fun, creative and collaborative, while being safe. Developed for everyone and loved by children.
• delivering the best possible LEGO Play in the digital space.

It’s still early days, and LEGO is of course going to leverage their partnership with Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite and more importantly, Unreal Engine which powers plenty of modern video games like Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Fortnite, Gears of War and more.

Coincidentally, LEGO have also been hiring Unreal Engine developers!

What could the LEGO and Epic Games Metaverse look like?

To see the future, it’s imperative to look into LEGO’s past. I believe that LEGO’s metaverse will take the form of a massively multiplayer online (MMO) LEGO game.

Keep in mind that this does not necessarily include failed digitally-infused themes like Hidden Side or Vidiyo, but they do still play a part in LEGO’s ambition.

Putting my futurist hat on, it might look like an online world where physical and digital bricks co-exist, where you take the form of a minifigure avatar, and this virtual world will be an extension of physical LEGO sets that you may already own.

For example, people would be able to use their actual LEGO sets to unlock metaverse versions of the sets within this world, creating a seamless transition between physical and digital play, or as a means to digitally archive your LEGO collection.

I can see a mix of Minecraft-like freebuilding type game, or story-driven games where players must find and collect virtual LEGO coins or studs scattered across different themed worlds.

The metaverse may also integrate AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) technologies, letting you shrink down to minifigure size and explore and experience LEGO sets from a minifigure’s POV, or supersize your LEGO sets and experience them in the real world via augmented reality.

All this wrapped within a child-safe cocoon where kids and young metaverse builders are shielded from the… unsavoury parts of the internet.

Sound cool? Well if you’ve been paying attention, LEGO have already explored many of these concepts and experiences in various games.

Let’s look to the past, to see what the future might hold – a popular LEGO playbook, some might say.

The building blocks of LEGO’s metaverse

LEGO has experimented with MMOs in the past, with LEGO Universe, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game from 2010, that allow players to play as minifigures, and customize, build and bring their own creations to life within the game.

It ran until 2012, where it was shut down as it wasn’t driving enough revenue, and like with many big bets, might have been the right thing at the wrong time.

There is a fantastic series on LEGO’s own Gaming Youtube channel, which goes deep into the development and creative core of the game, which might give you an insight into how some of the metaverse boffins in Billund are approaching this.

This is a sound concept, which was revisited again in 2017, with LEGO Worlds, a cute but still rough-looking take on the same concept, minus the massively online game nature.

Now imagine those concepts, applied with the incredibly photorealistic graphics that we saw in the recently published puzzle game Builder’s Journey?

Apart from job postings, another great place to peer into the future of LEGO is their patent arsenal! LEGO is constantly investing millions into research and development (R&D) and intellectual property (IP), as they aim to build out their digital capabilities, some of which were likely developed and patented for their metaverse.

If you look at some of LEGO’s patent filings… we can already see some of the tech and innovation that LEGO is working on, that may be useful in scanning and translating minifigures, sets and more into a virtual world.

Here are some very interesting patents that have been granted, or are currently pending.

• Method for creating a virtual object
• Toy construction system for augmented reality
• System and method for the construction of interactive virtual objects
• System and method for toy recognition

If some of these technologies look familiar, you might probably remember them from Hidden Side or Vidiyo. Both themes get a bad reputation from fans, and are labelled “failures”, but what if they were just incredibly expensive learnings and maybe even a beta test for things to come?

Side note: watch very closely and also pay attention to what’s going on with LEGO Mario.

And of course, pair this all with LEGO’s and TT Games’ pedigree and experience crafting spectacular games like LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga…

Side note: I would not be surprised if LEGO makes a move and acquires TT Games, to bring the developer in-house, especially given Warner Bros’ Discovery’s (TT’s parent company) umm.. continued financial woes.

Either way, it’s exciting to see LEGO’s next big thing start to take shape, and continue to grow, although I do need to caution that these things, especially building cutting-edge technology and teams takes a LONG time and a lot of resources, so I doubt we’ll see or hear anything concrete for a while, especially as this team continues to grow and take shape.

On the Epic Games front, they too are developing technologies and solutions that will help bolster whatever LEGO is doing, such as the recently announced Cabined Accounts, a way for kids to safely join the Metaverse, a non-negotiable requirement from The LEGO Group with ANYTHING it does online, and with kids.

If you’re a fan of the traditional LEGO building experience, and dislike anything technological that LEGO is doing, it’s perfectly fine to ignore this. LEGO’s physical product is not going anywhere, and is unlikely to ever change, but I still think it’s important to keep abreast of the more innovative and experimental parts of LEGO, and have our eyes on the future of play – whatever it may look like.

If anything else, it’s reassuring that despite uncertain economic times, that LEGO is still committed to innovation, and experimentation, because who knows, this could be the next big thing, and we all meet, build and compare sets in the Matrix.