[Danieru]

Warner Bros has been trying to sell off their studios. So I can see Lego succeeding if they buy TT. Otherwise I think Lego will realize what many others have: starting up a new studio is hard, and having money makes it harder.

You cannot will a studio into existence with money. Google tried this. Amazon tried this. Microsoft has tried it a bunch of times.

Games can be a good business, I know my studio is, but it is hard in was that traditional business methods cannot cope with.

So Lego, make sure you acquire TT. That is your only clear opportunity to use money to solve this problem. Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade. Don't listen to that VP who is promising you can push XXXmillion into an org chart and get an effective studio as the result.

[phire]

I'm not sure buying Traveller's Tales is a good idea.

TT had a really good engine that allowed them to pump out Lego games at an impressive rate of 1-3 per year. They maintained that cadence from 2005 through to 2019, then they stopped.

In the following 6 years, they have only released a single game: Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, in early 2022. It's been a full 3 years since they released a game.

They built a whole new engine for Skywalker Saga, so the development time is understandable. But apparently that engine was too hard to work with, so they dumped it and switched to Unreal, which has probably set their development efforts back again.

Now, I'm not saying that studios need to continually release games. Many good studios have long development cycles. But it's a bad sign when a studio suddenly switches cadence, how much of the original TT team is left?

[travisgriggs]

I wonder if you’re both half correct.

There’s an assumption that TT is what the success is about, and then a counter claim about recent observed changes.

A very plausible anecdotal hypothesis would be that it was never “TT” per se, but a group of talented people that managed, for a period to find a chemistry that brought them and success together. And that as is so often the case, eventually this group of people lost that chemistry for any number of regularly observed reasons: poached talent, talent attrition, Puournelles Law, change in employer relations, you name it, we’ve seen them all.

So if I were Lego, I’d go find the people that used to be behind the regular success TT had, and investigate whether THAT arrangement could be resurrected in a worthwhile way.

[kristofferg]

Sounds like every other successful studio. On the contrary (to making this a bad thing) - they managed to pivot engine twice and ship without tanking.

[Dwedit]

"Funko Fusion" was developed 10:10 Games, a company founded by Jon Burton from Traveller's Tales. Unfortunately, the game got really bad reviews.

[stryan]

> Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade. Don't listen to that VP who is promising you can push XXXmillion into an org chart and get an effective studio as the result.

I think they did hire the guy behind Manic Miners[0], a very faithful and well-done remake of the Lego Rock Raiders game, so perhaps that is their plan.

[0]https://manicminers.baraklava.com/

[ehnto]

I had not heard about this remake, what throwback. I'm going to have to play it again to see if my memory aligns with reality.

[owenpalmer]

> find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games

I love this idea, imagine if Lego had an open game creation platform. So much potential for idea generation.

[shakna]

I think that was one of the ideas behind Lego Worlds, originally. It did end just as a sandbox, but I believe originally it was going to support scripting and sharing of games - with the idea being that Lego might pick up the most popular of them for standalone release.

Somewhere around the 2015, the beta releases dropped the capability. (Along with infinite landscape.)

There was some rumours about Blockland maybe threatening legal action if they kept it, but nothing concrete, so take it with a grain of salt.

[andrewxdiamond]

You’re basically describing Roblox.

[knowknow]

Isn’t this what Lego is basically doing with Fortnite?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Fortnite

[slightwinder]

> starting up a new studio is hard, and having money makes it harder.

But Lego is not just big business throwing money at a goal. They have a long history of games, and were probably more involved than just selling out a license.

> Google tried this. Amazon tried this. Microsoft has tried it a bunch of times.

They all tried with new unknown franchises. Lego is a well known name, and the games for them are more advertisement than a money-grab. As long as it's good enough and makes a break even in costs, they will be fine, I guess.

Lego is one of the few companies, probably even the only one in the world at the moment, who should have the best preconditions to not catastrophically fail with this.

> Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade.

That smells like the road to fail. They should start simple and conservative, build the studio, teams and collect expertise, just make new classical Lego-games. After some years and 2-3 games, when they established themselves, they can start experimenting.

Also, there are already experimental Lego Games. Most of them were not that well received, because experimenting is hard, especially if you compete with Minecraft and Roblox.

[rvba]

Amazon also has a TV / film studio where they take known franchises and kill them.

Their costs a lot of money, has bad scripts, old scipts are thrown away. And everything I saw (usually gave up fast) seems to have this "cheap CGI" feel. Yet supposedly it costed a lot of money to make.

[debugnik]

> They all tried with new unknown franchises.

Does Lego still have any strong original franchises, though? It seems most of their set themes are third-party licenses now, and their original themes can't hold a candle to e.g. Bionicle back when I was a kid.

Then again their most popular games were all Lego Star Wars.

[dangus]

As a tangent, I never understood why WB wanted to spin those off so badly. Isn't being a content company supposed to be entire purpose of their existence? If you sell off your content creation businesses what even are you as a company besides a shell corporation?

If they aren't succeeding with WB games they should restructure those studios and try to manage them better, not spin them off.

I see the same thing happening with 3D animated movies where companies like Dreamworks and Illumination are diving heavily into outsourcing. It is technically working for them from a financial standpoint so far but I am not totally convinced it's a true long-term solution.

It just seems like a way to become a valueless middleman in a world where distribution gets increasingly easier by the day. It seems like all their contract studios would be empowered to become competitors in the future.

[mrpippy]

WBD has had a crushing amount of debt since it was formed a few years ago, and they’re in “sell everything that’s not nailed down” mode.

[fumufumu]

I know Amazon tried. I haven't heard of Google trying. Sure they started Stadia but they had no internal game dev teams that I know of.

I have hard of MS's issues. The biggest issue is a game dev team is generally lead by a game-director. It's not a "design by committee, come to consensus" type of thing like software dev is at Amazon, Google, Microsoft. The way work happens is not the same. They might look superficially similar but as a simple example, at typical game dev team is 70% artists, 20% game designers, 10% software engineers (+/-) where as a typical team at Amazon, Google, MS is 95% software engineers.

[pjmlp]

Google had internal teams, and were naive to think studios would rewrite their tooling into Linux and Vulkan, given their fame.

On the last year before shutting down Stadia, they were finally addressing this.

"How to write a Windows emulator from scratch"

https://youtu.be/8-N7wDCRohg?si=lOU6iTtwi6MS_Bhw

[muststopmyths]

Jade Raymond was famously (gamedev famously that is) hired to lead a studio to create first party content for stadia

[ekianjo]

> Sure they started Stadia but they had no internal game dev teams that I know of.

They had. They just did not end up releasing anything.

[watwut]

Lego do know how to make toys tho. Google or Amazon never did. The existing lego games were good, so lego at least got the governance right. Again, Google and Amazon had no experience in that area.

[isk517]

You do make a good point. One of the largest gaming company started as a toy company, and their star developer started as a toy designer.

[bluescrn]

> Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade.

Find some Lego-loving indie devs and let them go wild. Fund the development of some prototypes, and let them build something that actually encapsulates the creative aspects of Lego, not just a generic action game in a Lego skin.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, this is getting especially hard as VCs learn not every title can be a AAA, nor there are enough people in the world to play all the games they pump out.

Which is something that the MBA driven approach of exponential growth will never grasp.

Art and entertainment don't have a mathematical formula for guaranteed growth.

[pdpi]

Completely off-topic, but your comment cued me to look at your profile. I don't quite know what it is, but the screenshots on Steam for both Whiskerwood and Railgrade tickle my brain in a very peculiar way. Will surely be picking them up at some point in the near future.

[golergka]

Whiskerwood looks an improved version of Timberwood, one of the best colony sims I've played. Thanks for the link, I've enjoyed it!

[reactordev]

The issue is you can’t approach game development the same way you approach SaaS software or traditional business (you obviously know this). It’s a creative business - no amount of money can create creativity - but money is needed to fuel it. Like you said, many have tried to just throw money at it to compete and failed, yet highly creative studios keep thriving (while once-creative studios keep recycling) and more indie games are being made everyday.

I hope Lego succeeds simply to be able to keep producing content and titles but I can’t stop but think there is a new frontier coming that I think Lego should be more focused on. Not console games.

[boppo1]

How does having money make it harder? Are we saying a small group of passionate, under-capitalized people is the best way to start a studio?

[transcriptase]

The evidence points that way.

Amazon built the most incredible open world pvp MMO, entirely player driven, dynamic, sandbox game someone could hope for. Entire player built cities, territories that could be held by virtue of players actually guarding it, massive guilds, server politics, or you could just ignore it all and do your own thing and explore a huge beautiful realm.

It was called New World (alpha test). Then because it was too novel and perhaps not fun for people who can’t handle that type of game, they destroyed what would have been an incredible hit and rebuilt it from scratch to be a mediocre half-baked clone of every other PVE mmo without realizing you can never make a PVE mmo player happy without endgame loops and a constant stream of new dopamine drips.

And when it failed because they were unwilling to go ahead with something a suit thought was too risky, they gave up.

[mcoliver]

Yes and no. It's all about the people and specifically the people in leadership positions. Money can make it easier for very obvious reasons (unlimited resources to hire the best people, have the best equipment, focus on the product and not the bottom line, etc..).

The reason it can make it harder is because if you don't have the right people being held accountable to make the studio successful on an agreed up timeline along with what the definition of success looks like from top to bottom and a well defined organizational structure that takes into account growth, those unlimited resources tend to result in over hiring before the recipe has been figured out, politics, moving targets, fractured focus, and organizational chaos.

[mcphage]

Part of it seems to be opportunity costs, perceived or otherwise. A small, passionate, under-capitalized team is willing to keep a game running to slowly capture an audience (if it’s good enough to do so) whereas a larger org expects a certain level of returns, and if it doesn’t achieve that quickly, it cuts and runs—killing the game and/or the studio.

[fatant]

I think various other things that come with the territory of being a larger company make it difficult to replicate the success of game studios that produce great video games? I'm not entirely sure but maybe there's typically bureaucracies that hinder making successful video games.

[YesBox]

Hi fellow indie dev!

>Games can be a good business, I know my studio is

If you dont mind sharing, how many people do you employ/long term contract with? "Games can be a good business" is entirely subjective to the studio's goals. So I guess I'm wondering: is your goal to stay solo+/micro/indie, or are you planning to grow with each successive game? And how big?

Sustainability is something I've been thinking about a lot recently[0]. I'm relatively close to launching Metropolis 1998, which falls squarely in a long tail genre (if done right)[1]. I'd love to build up a studio, in office, and along the way figure out what's the right headcount for my goals.

Whiskerwood looks neat btw. Good luck on the game. I'd love to hear why you chose to go with a publisher this time around? Was it an affordable luxury :P ? Marketing, community management, localization can be a PITA, but it's entirely possible to do even at solo scale.

[0] It is not cheap to operate a game studio that employs local people in the USA. It's frustrating because the COL in the mid west is <= 70% cheaper than the coastal cities (where the vast majority of studios are). There's a lot of cheap land where the industry could be to make art/games a lot more comfortably (ignoring the fact that N% people dont want to live there, which is valid if that's not what they want)

[1] Many people play Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999), SimCity 4 (2003), and the original City Skylines (2015) today. steamdb.info, OpenRCT, subreddit activity, etc.

Shoot me an email if you dont want to respond here?

[Danieru]

Hey YesBox! I've been watching your game for ages. I think since you first showed it on the indie subreddit. I'm excited to play it. Sim City 2000 was a big influence for me.

Overall though I'd say: coastal US is a market no one can afford to do gamedev with employees in unless you are a child company of a platform holder. We're based in Japan where cost of living is vastly more reasonable.

Personally I'd suggest you highly question yourself about what sort of studio you want to work in. The environment you want to work in, should be the one you try to make. For me that meant full remote with no offices. I'd honestly be surprised to meet ang gamedev who likes offices and commutes, much less one who list the extra cost.

[InsideOutSanta]

Damn, those little cars are so fricken adorable. Wishlisted.

[KolibriFly]

Yeah, history isn't exactly on Lego's side when it comes to spinning up a new game studio from scratch

[breckenedge]

TT?

[Uvix]

Traveler's Tales, the developer of most of the LEGO video games over the last 20 years starting with the original LEGO Star Wars.

[retinaros]

Did you buy any recent lego? Like the mario lego with qrcodes? Its clearly the best toy company on earth. Everything feels right about their product. They are winning and they will definitely bring this winning playbook to video games.