How To Make a Successful Lego MMO (Or How To Improve Upon The Mistakes of LU)

This is a subject that has had me thinking for the past week or so. How did Lego screw up so bad when trying to make MMOs? They had a good start with Lego Universe, but due to some pretty big mistakes, that flopped. Then they tried Chima and Minifigures, both of which are predicted by some to go offline in under a year. So, what happened, and how can Lego improve? Let’s examine LU first.

The first and most obvious problem with Lego Universe was the cost to have membership. No game should have a year-long membership fee of $90. That’s simply not possible. Lowering the cost of the membership would go a long way to making the game more successful. Another obvious problem I see with the game is the F2P model they had. It wasn’t implemented until almost a year after release. It wasn’t pay to win, but in a way it was worse. The F2P system of LU was to restrictive on the player. F2P Players could only access one area, and couldn’t progress the story after the first world. Combine that with the price tag for membership, and nobody wanted to upgrade. Giving the players more options with F2P, such as the basic faction gear, or access to other worlds and missions would give the diehard fans more of a reason to join membership.

I’ll have a similar breakdown of the Chima and Minifigures games out at some point.

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FINALLY! An LU breakdown, after all these years!

Personally, I think that the target audience, kids, was another factor of cost issues. I can’t exactly speak for other countries, but in the US most kids followed the system of “Finish homework first, then play games”. Because of this, the membership cards were NOT efficient, since the “game time” was not used as often during school season.

Not to mention most kids didn’t have the correct graphics cards.

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