I believe that many LEGO fans or friends who have watched Lego movies (whether big friends or children) have fantasized that they can shrink by 10 times and enter a LEGO world where everything is made of bricks.
The streets are made up of gray granular blocks, lined with LEGO City series banks and department stores, walking by LEGO minifigures of different styles, and occasionally Bugatti LEGO sports cars and magicians riding broomsticks whizzing by.
If you have had a similar fantasy, then congratulations, your wish will soon become a reality.
Lego stepped through the metaverse gates
In an official announcement released on April 7 by Fortnite developer Epic, Epic will establish a long-term partnership with Lego and work together to create a safe and fun Metaverse for children.
Some friends who are allergic to "technology black talk" such as metaverses may start to be a little confused at this time: how can Lego make toys in a good way, and suddenly want to mix a foot in the metacosm?
Lego Group CEO Niels B Christiansen explained that children love to play between the digital and real worlds and enjoy seamlessly switching between the two, believing that children can develop lifelong skills that benefit from creating, collaborating and communicating through digital experiences.
So LEGO and Epic wanted to create an immersive and creative digital world for kids of all ages, and children's safety would be at the heart of that digital world, so they developed three principles:
Prioritizing children's well-being and safety, protecting children's right to play puts children's interests first, and protecting children's privacy Uses tools that allow children and adults to control digital experiences empower children and adults
Lego and Epic have not released any details about the LEGO metaverse at present, but combined with the keywords mentioned in the announcement, such as children, metaverse, and digital experience, it may not be difficult to imagine the form of this metaverse - a "Roblox" made of Lego bricks.
Today, when it comes to the children's metaverse, roblox is destined to be inseparable.
Roblox, which went public on the DPO last March, opened the way to the metaverse for a whole year with a prospectus, and people once regarded Roblox, which integrates social networking, games and creation, as the prototype of the metaverse.
Roblox is a sandbox game for kids ages 6 to 12, but unlike Minecraft, another sandbox game that has taken the world by storm, Roblox is more of a 4399-like platform where players are free to create and publish their own games for other players to play.
That said, users are both "developers" and "players" on Roblox, and this unique UGC (User Generated Content) model creates a strong user stickiness.
According to data released by Roblox, there are currently more than 40 million mini-games on the Roblox platform, and the average daily time spent by active users in the United States is 2.6 hours on the Roblox platform, more than social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Different from ordinary MMO online games, Roblox designed a unique economic system, players can use real money to buy virtual currency Robux proportionally, and then use Robux to shop, trade, and pay for game levels in the game, etc., developers earn from it, in this way, Roblox cleverly bundles the two identities of "developer" and "player".
The relatively complete economic system not only helps Roblox attract enough developers to enrich its gameplay, but also attracts brands such as Gucci, Nike, vans, etc. to participate in it, providing virtual services that players can buy virtual items of these brands in Roblox with Robux that is much lower than the reality, and bring an immersive experience through VR glasses.
Roblox's initial attempt at the metaverse proved the economic potential of the virtual world, and for a time the track of the metaverse was crowded with competitors such as Meta and Microsoft, and Lego was the latest player on the overcrowded track.
Lego is also a game company
Friends who are familiar with Lego may know that in addition to traditional plastic toys, Lego's exploration in film, television, video games and other fields is also quite active.
Just last week, Lego's latest release of LEGO Star Wars: Skywalker Legends also successfully topped the Steam sales weekly charts, ending the six-week consecutive championship record held by Eldon Law Ring.
LEGO has been associated with games for almost 30 years. Lego's first game was Lego: Fun to Build, released on the Sega Pico platform in 1995.
Players need to complete the LEGO model assembly step by step, and then they can ride the 3D toy model for adventure, which is relatively simple and simple.
In 2005, LEGO partnered with British game development company Traveller's Tales to release LEGO Star Wars, marking a new beginning for LEGO games, and with the help of Traveller's Tales, the LEGO video game world took shape.
Lego Star Wars was widely acclaimed by gamers as soon as it was released, with single sales equivalent to four-fifths of PS2's total sales, making it one of the best-selling games of the PS2 era.
Soon, film companies including Disney and Warner Bros. saw the potential of Lego's game adaptation and began to cooperate with Lego, combining their movie IP with Lego's building blocks to launch co-branded game works.
For LEGO fans, even if a story has been seen countless times, as long as it is replaced by the grainy "shell" of Lego bricks, the original tired story will become cute, interesting and attractive again.
Peter Gomer, game director of LEGO Superman, believes that a major feature of LEGO games is that every prop in it can be made with real LEGO bricks, and game developers can use their imagination to build some really interesting things with LEGO parts to experience players.
Although this digital experience cannot be compared with the satisfaction of two bricks in reality, when children play games, these game models can play an inspiring role in making children full of imagination for LEGO toys.
After years of development, video games have been written into lego's genes, but just having a solid foundation in games is not enough to build a metaverse that covers social, game, economic systems and other elements, so Lego has done more exploration.
Lego released a sandbox game called LEGO: World in 2015, which is similar to the "Minecraft" that swept the world at the time, by collecting materials to build its own buildings, except that the game's materials changed from pixel blocks to LEGO plastic blocks.
Players have mixed reviews of LEGO: World, and the free sandbox building system allows players to be creative, but the gameplay outside of construction is relatively single, and it is difficult to surprise players after a short period of freshness.
"Freedom", "imagination" and "creation" are the eternal keywords of LEGO bricks, so in the game, players also want to harvest the joy of this free creation.
If LEGO's games aren't free enough, what about letting players design their own games?
Just last year, LEGO partnered with the game engine Unity to launch a game development competition.
Participating developers can use the mods provided by LEGO on the Unity platform to develop their own games, and finally LEGO will score the work based on the creativity, artistry, shape and other aspects of the game.
Isn't this approach of letting players develop their own games a bit roblox?
▲ Although it looks like the same material, the gameplay is very different
The game development competition eventually received 1144 game entries, and interestingly, although the contestants used a unified LEGO brick module, there were very few games that were similar in shape and gameplay, and the brain-opening players used the same material to cook the "Full Han Table".
For example, laPeSi, which won the first prize, developed a farming game where players can use LEGO's farm tools to cultivate crops in the field and make a fortune by trading and trading.
Another first-prize winner, Magancete, has developed a space odyssey where players can build their own space stations in outer space and make spaceships to explore alien planets, like the LEGO version of No Man's Deep Space.
Through this game, LEGO proved that LEGO bricks are not only full of creativity in the real world, but also have a wealth of playability after bringing them virtual to the digital world, and the positive performance of the developers has also given LEGO the confidence to enter the meta-universe to some extent.
If you look back at lego's history, you'll see that Lego's attitude toward video games has undergone a huge shift.
At the beginning of the millennium, Lego had seen video games as an enemy to "snatch" children from its own hands, fearing that the Internet and video games would divide all the children's attention and snub plastic toys, so it overextended, resulting in the company once facing the crisis of bankruptcy and liquidation.
Lego then returned to the core gameplay, bringing more creative gameplay to the toys and winning back the hearts of the children.
At this time, how to maintain eternal youth is the next difficult problem left to Lego who has just survived the bankruptcy crisis. Julia Goldin, LEGO's chief marketing officer, said in an interview with The Observer that for LEGO every year, it starts from scratch because it means lego needs to re-attract a new generation of kids and make them excited about the brand.
Now, video games have almost become a part of the lives of a new generation of children, and some children may have been exposed to video games before they even played with lego physical toys, at this time video games should not be Lego's opponents, but the entrance to establish toy cognition in children's minds.
So, while child gamers around the world are fascinated by Roblox's free and rich gaming experience, Lego's deeper purpose in joining hands with Epic's "into the metaverse" should be to regain children's attention to plastic blocks once again under the new wave of video games.