The LEGO Group is recruiting three new staff members to lead its journey into the metaverse, which will fall under the company’s new GAME organization.
An acronym for Game, Activations & Metaverse Experiences, the LEGO GAME initiative is the first tangible result of LEGO Group parent company KIRKBI’s $1 billion investment in Fortnite developer Epic Games. This cash injection represented half of Epic’s funding cycle in early 2022, with the remaining 50% coming from Sony.
The LEGO Group had announced a week earlier that it was partnering with Epic Games to make the Metaverse a safer place for children, and KIRKBI CEO Søren Thorup Sørensen said at the time that the $1 billion investment proved “a long-term orientation for the future metaverse”. The LEGO Group is putting together the team that will lead their own journey into the metaverse.
There are currently three vacancies that the LEGO Group is looking to fill within the GAME team: a Senior Portfolio Manager, a Senior Marketing Manager and a Creative Manager. The rosters for these roles all reference the Metaverse heavily and include responsibilities such as “providing the best LEGO game in the digital space” and “supporting fun play”. [et] cool features” within the product team.
From these descriptions, it basically appears that the LEGO Group is gearing up for its next fluid play experience, mixing physical and digital play – the listings refer to both digital play experiences and physical products, as well as a “non game for metaverse experiences”, which will include “digital events, branded games [et] storytelling”. But are we looking at the sequel to LEGO Hidden Side or something closer to LEGO Dimensions?
At this point, it’s hard to tell, but the safe money is on something far bigger and more expansive than either of these ventures, given the scale of the band’s LEGO investment. The digital side will no doubt be far more immersive than the Hidden Side, which backed augmented reality via an app, while the physical products will hopefully be more expansive than LEGO Dimensions’ microscale builds and minifigures.
Both augmented reality and virtual reality experiences could be in the mix, especially with an eye to what other companies — like Meta (formerly Facebook) — are doing in the metaverse. Another previous LEGO title to consider here is LEGO Worlds, which was actually TT Games’ answer to Minecraft, and could very well act as a platform for the LEGO metaverse – a space where players can build digitally and perhaps download and integrate the their actual sets and builds.
The possibilities are practically endless, but the greatest certainty at the moment is that we won’t see the fruits of this experiment for quite a while. If the LEGO Group is just starting to hire the team to lead the development of its metaverse, then any consumer launch is probably at least two years away.
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