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LEGO Universe Closing Down


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All good things must come to an end. January 31, 2012 will mark the end of LEGO Universe, the brick-themed massively multiplayer online game. It seems that even with the influx of players in their free-to-play mode, they were unable to get enough paying subscribers. If you're a Universe player, enjoy the next three months, and see to it that the games goes out with a bang! Read on for the full press release.

 

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This isn't much of a surprise. It was obvious that the MMO wasn't doing that well and, unfortunately, this news has confirmed it.

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Even though I haven't played the game, it's depressing for a game like LEGO Universe to go on with a great start, but had a short run and crashed into the wall.-Tomdroidser

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I'm wondering how this'll affect the likelihood of a Bionicle MMO in the future. IMO Bionicle would make a fantastic MMO on Spherus Magna.

Seeing as the Bionicle fanbase is miniscule compared to the general-Lego fanbase, and seeing how much the Lego MMORPG failed, I can't see a Bionicle MMORPG doing well at all. And of course there's the fact that Bionicle is no longer a current product line regardless, so it'd be a doubly dubious business venture.
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May LEGO learn from this failure(I'm not saying it was horrible).

I doubt that it was an overall failure from a business perspective, with a subscription thing like LU, you may have enough subscribers to make a profit at the beginning, but then later lose subscribers and be losing money for every day the game is running. Probably they're taking it offline to avoid an overall loss.- 55555
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It was a good idea, but was fraught with some issues such as overpricing, in my opinion. LEGO really did as much as they could to push LU (I noticed a large footprint at BrickFair) but it just wasn't enough to keep it from going belly-up.Well, that means I'll have to load my free BrickFair copy and try it out before it goes defunct.

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I would say that I'm not particulary surprised.Things that hurt Lego Universe:-The controls. They were wonky and nonintuitive and the game made my computer lag a ton. As with many MMO developers, take note from WoW. Copy their controls. WoW controls are extremely easy to use, very clean, and can be rebound if you like. -Price. WoW costs ~ $20 (basic) plus $15 a month, but you get a huge world you will have to play through more than once. Runescape is free with $6 a month and while is kind of cool, is also really cheap. LU had near WoW price but with nowhere near as much content.-Content. Now I know Lu is aimed mostly at 8 year olds, but a major problem with this is how much money does an 8 year old often have? Had they upped the amount of content as well as aimed it slightly higher, (say, 11+) LU might have very well done good.-Parent Reaction. How would you, as a parent, feel if you bought your child Lego toy after Lego toy (which frankly look a lot alike), then they come up to you and want you to start paying a monthly fee for a computer game that they'd waste a lot of time on and then get bored with. All in all, LU was rather doomed.Now, a HF MMO with similar controls to WoW, (with equipment being armor on the heroes) could very well succeed if developed and priced right. Heck, I'd spend 5 bucks a month to play as a custom hero defeating baddies.RiV

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Their buisiness model was not right at all. The fact is that they set the price too high for the price point that they were gunning for. It's difficult to do an MMO for that age group. Are parents really gonna want to pay $15 a month for their kids to play a computer game? They would have to either have to aim for an older group (not going to happen) or price it lower and have a nominal F2P portion. From what I understand, F2P games only need about 10% or less of their players to actually subscribe in order to be profitable. I guess there just wasn't enough content there for subscribers to justify $15 a month when they could just go and play WoW for the same price.-don't touch my pocket protector

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I am sad to see LU go, maybe if every one on BZpower get's a account and get's there friends and family to start paying subscriptions maybe we might be able to save it. If not, is it possible that LEGO will allow a online mode because i honestly would still play it (can some one tell me the answer)Now i know most of the people thought it looked bad BUT it's actually the BEST builder MMO's (in your face Mine-craft Ro-blox) IF you get the full game, F2P stinks.Now for my personal comments, I have been playing the game for about 2 years (i was in beta and i also pre-ordered) so i have seen the game evolve. I'm ok with letting it go now because i haven't played much on it sense i got so far, however i will miss most of my LU buddies but i'm going to try to get most of them to come here to BZpower so i will still have contact with them.

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I would say that I'm not particulary surprised.Things that hurt Lego Universe:-The controls. They were wonky and nonintuitive and the game made my computer lag a ton. As with many MMO developers, take note from WoW. Copy their controls. WoW controls are extremely easy to use, very clean, and can be rebound if you like. -Price. WoW costs ~ $20 (basic) plus $15 a month, but you get a huge world you will have to play through more than once. Runescape is free with $6 a month and while is kind of cool, is also really cheap. LU had near WoW price but with nowhere near as much content.-Content. Now I know Lu is aimed mostly at 8 year olds, but a major problem with this is how much money does an 8 year old often have? Had they upped the amount of content as well as aimed it slightly higher, (say, 11+) LU might have very well done good.-Parent Reaction. How would you, as a parent, feel if you bought your child Lego toy after Lego toy (which frankly look a lot alike), then they come up to you and want you to start paying a monthly fee for a computer game that they'd waste a lot of time on and then get bored with. All in all, LU was rather doomed.Now, a HF MMO with similar controls to WoW, (with equipment being armor on the heroes) could very well succeed if developed and priced right. Heck, I'd spend 5 bucks a month to play as a custom hero defeating baddies.RiV

Brilliant. I agree completely.

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It wasn't doing very good, but when you think that it was LEGO's first attempt at making a MMO and it failed, this might put them off any future projects!It didn't have a lot of content, and really when you completed Crux Prime (and maybe Ninjago, haven't played that) that was really the extent of what you could do other than building. The gameplay was pretty boring, just sort of hold down the attack button and use a few items and the story was very basic too (but it is a kid's game, so you can't really expect much), it was just the simple "bad guys must be destroyed by good guys".It was very high priced too, and the price cuts and Free To Play section showed that LEGO was just trying to keep a dying game alive. Sad too see so much work ultimately fail. The pre-Alpha stuff had a lot of potential, but not a lot of it was realized in the end.What a rotten way to die. I might just hop on again for the last month, and wish this game that I Alpha and Beta tested a goodbye. Also Minecraft is sort of better in the building category, the LU building was just too fiddly to do anything right. What a shame.

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I tried it a few weeks ago.Ran with high lag even at the minimum graphics, boring setting and just. It sucked!To be honest I am not surprised with this news :V

the game stinks on old pc's but on a fresh new mac (like mine) it is awesome. Really stinks that most of the people who play have bad quality.
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i haven't played LU for a while now, but i might just reactivate my subscription for another month just to say goodbye, it was good while it lasted, and i'm kind of saddened by it's ending, even though i have plenty of other MMOs to play now.I think the main reasons it failed were:Too low of a target audience(as explained earlier in the topic)Fiddly building(A simpler way sort of similar to minecraft would probably make it better, although, since there's so many oddly-shaped bricks i'm not sure how that'd work)awkward camera and controls.Kinda glitchy.Subscription model. I think this was a bad move, maybe if it had a system akin to DCUO it might've fared better. I think if Lego were to make another MMO, I think it would probably work best with HF, the premise lends itself nicely to an MMO.So, steps to take for lego making a better MMO:Up the target audience a couple years(definitely keep the rating though, I think E10+ is a good rating for lego games)Improve the building.Better controls.Make it less buggy, better to have a bug-free game with little content than one with a huge amount of content and bugs everywhere.Go with a regular retail copy(they might be able to get away with $60 but 50 or lower would probably be best)and have it F2P afterwards, Possibly with MTs, they might even be able to get away with DLC.~ELM~

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I played LEGO Universe for all of Beta, and I've been playing the Live 1 release since October 26th, 2010. Although the game had its faults, I am still sad that it will be closing down. I will play until the end.

LEGO Universe; October 8th 2010, to January 31st 2012.

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It was a cool concept, but the pay model and target audience, as others have stated already, pretty much doomed it at the get-go. Honestly, in today's times it needs to be free AND appealing to a larger proportion of the internet population, i.e. teenagers and young adults, rather than predominantly pre-teens.

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Can't say I'm surprised. The basic premise never really caught me. What's really too bad about this is that LEGO hyped this up a lot more than they have their BIONICLE movies. And why on earth would you want to pay to play when you can play for free? I mean, I know you were limited in what you could do, but still.

 

 

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Can't say I'm surprised. The basic premise never really caught me. What's really too bad about this is that LEGO hyped this up a lot more than they have their BIONICLE movies. And why on earth would you want to pay to play when you can play for free? I mean, I know you were limited in what you could do, but still.

Have you even tried FTP? From the beginning it has been just an extremely limited demo, not comparing at all to the full game experience.Yesterday, I was quite mad at LEGO, but after sleeping a night over it, I guess I have grown to accept it. This must have been very hard for LEGO as well, especially for all the so greatly dedicated LEGO Universe staff. Congratulations and thanks to all of them for their great work while the game lasted! :)I will so miss standing on the Nexus Tower launching areas and looking out into that blue, misty sky with that great background music. :( In a few months it will just be memory, and only the music recordings will be left. :(~Gata. ;) Edited by Gatanui

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That's sad how LU had such a short life, but it's ever so slightly funny to me for whatever reason.I never got to play LU besides the F2P thing and the beta. I wish I could've seen what the full game is really like, but I'm not gonna buy a game that's confirmed to close down anyways, so I guess I'm never really gonna play it at all. ;~;I remember all the way back to that teaser page oh so many years ago, and as I said previously, I never played anything outside F2P and beta, and it's a shame that a good few years of work has to go to waste like this.

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I remember how I liked Beta and how I've been sad finding out that, once Beta was closed, I couldn't ever get a full LU again because of living in Italy... Well, it's a nicely done game with not so many features and contents at all, except for bricks, that are lots and lots ( on Beta I got to Forbidden Valley with my Rank 3 Space Marauder and my Rank 2-3 Samurai and, after that, I didn't enjoy so much playing it, just kept repeating Daily Missions - what a boring!- ), but I think they did a good work, even if it didn't have the success they expected to get. I say it was almost obvious to end so early, because of it's being open only to few countries and many couldn't get it if not buying it online ( someone neither this way... ). Shame.

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May LEGO learn from this failure(I'm not saying it was horrible).

I doubt that it was an overall failure from a business perspective, with a subscription thing like LU, you may have enough subscribers to make a profit at the beginning, but then later lose subscribers and be losing money for every day the game is running. Probably they're taking it offline to avoid an overall loss.- 55555
Quite. But in my opinion, although the game itself looked fantastic and full of potential, could Lego really expect a good number of people to pay the amounts they were asking? The price looked crazy.

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I remember how I liked Beta and how I've been sad finding out that, once Beta was closed, I couldn't ever get a full LU again because of living in Italy... Well, it's a nicely done game with not so many features and contents at all, except for bricks, that are lots and lots ( on Beta I got to Forbidden Valley with my Rank 3 Space Marauder and my Rank 2-3 Samurai and, after that, I didn't enjoy so much playing it, just kept repeating Daily Missions - what a boring!- ), but I think they did a good work, even if it didn't have the success they expected to get. I say it was almost obvious to end so early, because of it's being open only to few countries and many couldn't get it if not buying it online ( someone neither this way... ). Shame.

Of course you could play it in Italy, you could order the DVD from S@H, later you could have downloaded the FTP version and upgraded to a full account by buying membership with a credit card.~Gata. ;)

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this really annoys me. i was in alpha for 2 weeks and then lego dropped me out! I deserve those 8 months of beta i missed!

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Can't say I'm surprised. The basic premise never really caught me. What's really too bad about this is that LEGO hyped this up a lot more than they have their BIONICLE movies. And why on earth would you want to pay to play when you can play for free? I mean, I know you were limited in what you could do, but still.

F2P stinks, you can't chat, you can only be on one level (boring) and you can't even go to Ninjago (one of my favorite parts of the game.
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