LEGO Minifigures Online

» see minifigures.lego.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

lego minifigures online sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. in 2015 i was 31 with a full-time job in ankara, not the target audience for a lego-branded isometric mmo. the pitch was aimed at kids somewhere around eight to twelve, plus the adult lego fan community that also plays traveller's tales lego star wars.

funcom shipped the game on 29 june 2015 for pc, ios and android. the format was isometric role-playing over a hub-and-worlds structure. each themed world (space, pirate, fantasy, and a few more) had dungeons attached. the party was up to three minifigures at once with quick-swap combat between them. brick building sat in the world in a light form. leveling and loot ran on the modern lego video-game pattern rather than the older lego universe subscription mmo model.

the odd part of the history is the business model whiplash. funcom announced the game in august 2013 as free-to-play. between then and launch, the model switched to a paid buy-once title on all platforms. six and ten-month minifigure memberships had been tested through 2014. the final shipped version cost real money at the door with no ongoing subscription. neither shape found the audience funcom needed.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

funcom disclosed in its 2016 quarterly reports that the game was falling short of internal revenue forecasts by a significant margin. that was the polite way to put it. by early june 2016 the studio removed the game from sale, disabled in-game chat, and posted a shutdown notice. the announcement gave players three months to finish anything they cared about.

the lego license itself was scheduled to expire around october 2016. funcom did not seek a renewal. by that point the studio was reorienting around conan exiles, which shipped in early access early the next year and did much better commercially.

~ the day it died ~

servers went off on 30 september 2016. the game was always-online, which meant the client on your ssd stopped working the same day. no offline mode, no lan patch, no fan-server sanction. the ios and android versions were pulled from their app stores in the same window.

the lego group had already lost lego universe in january 2012 for the same broad reason: the price-to-audience math never balanced. minifigures online was the smaller of the two shutdowns and drew less coverage. its main historical role is confirming that a lego mmo, in any pricing shape, was not going to work.

~ what carried over ~

almost nothing playable. the client is preserved by a small archival community but the always-online requirement makes it hard to run without an emulated server, and no darkflame-style reverse-engineering project produced a public release. funcom moved the team to conan exiles. lego group let the mmo experiment lapse and stuck with the offline traveller's tales games from that point onward.

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