Here's a Lego Universe Thread. I'm so, so sorry.

[Samprimary]

Good! Legos are awesome.

[rrazcueta]

It makes no sense why this isn't a F2P title. Add a "BUY CUSTOM LEGO CREATION" button to the homes, encourage players to look at other players' homes, and LEGO sells even more.

[Simond]

It's just like play with real Legos!

I liked it, and furthermore it's gotten me to buy more real Legos.

Good! Legos are awesome.

The word "Lego" is singular. Always.

[Samprimary]

There are so many crazy rules about the proper use of the brand name that even you're doing it wrong. It can't be Lego, it has to be LEGO. In all caps. Always. It can never be used as a generic term or in the plural or as a possessive pronoun, and the use of the word LEGO has to be accompanied by a capitalized noun (making the proper plural LEGO Bricks).

And we were grilled on this. They were pretty anal about it, to no avail. We just kept calling them legos. If you ask what your kid is playing with, he's going to say he's playing legos.

[Simond]

No, not really. It's always been "playing with Lego" since I was a kid at least.

...

You know what? I bet this is another 'US vs the World' grammar thing like Math/Maths.

[Lantyssa]

It's been "playing with legos" since I was a kid.  I bet I'm older, so I win.  Nyah!

And who the hell uses 'Maths' except to sound like a lolcat?

[palmer_eldritch]

It's been "playing with legos" since I was a kid.  I bet I'm older, so I win.  Nyah!

And who the hell uses 'Maths' except to sound like a lolcat?

English speakers outside North America.

[Samprimary]

You know what? I bet this is another 'US vs the World' grammar thing like Math/Maths.

maybe? there were billund, denmark guys literally from lego headquarters who would call them legos, and were just as likely to grouse about it if they were given crap for not properly capitalizing/punctuating/formatting them as "LEGO Bricks"

[Yegolev]

I regard "math" like "soup" except that there is only one type of math.

[UnSub]

Ryan Seabury, ex-NetDevil on why "I'll never make another MMO". You'll have to wipe the kotaku off it.

It's probably nothing new to most here, but I did admire that a man who's likely made multiple millions of dollars from the sale of NetDevil can come out and proclaim developer freedom in the indie scene.

[Stormwaltz]

Ryan Seabury, ex-NetDevil on why "I'll never make another MMO".

Lum retorts.

[HaemishM]

It's probably nothing new to most here, but I did admire that a man who's likely made multiple millions of dollars after losing more millions of other people's money from the sale of NetDevil can come out and proclaim developer freedom in the indie scene.

Let me fix that for you.

[Modern Angel]

That dude is an asshole for all the reasons Lum detailed. It needs to be reiterated: NetDevil sucked, has always sucked and was always going to suck forever and ever. Amen. They never released anything good.

Call me when the guys from Blizzard get out of the biz and talk about how they're never making another MMO again. This is Gaute Godager or Mark Jacobs talking shit about a sub-industry they failed in.

[Samprimary]

My last project, LEGO Universe, took five years, around 250 people, and less than 1/10th the budget of Avatar (considered well-funded by industry standards!). Still, we produced over 100 hours of fully explorable and interactive 3D content

I really, really want to know the way he gets 'over 100 hours of fully explorable and interactive 3D content' — even the kids I knew playing this game (for all of a week) had seen the game in pretty much its entirety in under a day of play, or they never got through the content because they got frustrated/lost after nimbus station and quit. This counts seeing all the worlds and experiencing the minigames. Is 100 hours supposed to be an optimistic estimate of the time an average user was going to put into working on already covered activity and locations in-game? Because the average user (especially the average target demographic user) was bored/frustrated with it and back to playing Minecraft well before then, I would wager.

[UnSub]

My personal rule of thumb is that I divide all dev provided 'hours of content' by 4. Sure, there might be 100 hours of content if you repeat the same mission 100x, or absolutely have to grind out 70k items to get that epic achievement, but that's not me.

... mostly.

[Samprimary]

There's just so much wrong with what he's saying on a basic level!

- "It's [MMO] no longer a meaningful label." No. Absolutely not. It is still a very meaningful label. If you can't distinguish between an MMO and a game that features some degree of 'social feature layers,' that's not a problem with the label.

- "No one cares if something is "single player" or "multi player" or "massively multiplayer" anymore." Even removing the absolutes and saying "Most people don't care ..." I can't wrestle this into being plausible.

- "At NetDevil, we were never that interested in safe, cookie-cutter projects." This showed, but not in a way I imagine he would like to admit.

- "Are you a developer out there, working hard on some corner of a "AAA" title, on the edge of burnout?  Why not get together with a buddy or two in whatever off time you can squeeze, and make something for fun." — Is this his earnest recommendation for a person edging at the abyss of burnout? Is he confusing the risk of burnout as a very specific, very cripplingly real psychological crisis with just being 'worn out' or perhaps 'feeling overworked?'

Really, I think what needs to happen is that there needs to be a sincere and honest postmortem of Lego Universe, if not of NetDevil entirely. He mentions some 'impossible' standards enforced on the game development by LEGO and it's like he's pushing the desire to push some frustration on LEGO for having regulation on the project that made it impossible to succeed, and I want to know where ND's perspective was on this.

[UnSub]

You probably know better than I how much of NetDevil still exists.

I laughed the other day when Gazillion's President David Brevik (ex-Blizzard, ex-Flagship) was asked if Jumpgate Evolution was being worked on. He couldn't comment officially.

It wasn't a question about release, or features, or gameplay and it was from Gamasutra, so it was played fairly straight. It was a basic question to find out if the title was even being developed and he couldn't comment.

[Venkman]

I honestly don't know why ya'all (including Lum) are harshing on this guy. One man's opinion from the other side of burnout. It comes down to his statement about wanting to do more than 5 more games during his career. I'm sure his burnout is in part due to the meager successes they had. To Modern Angel's point, it's not like someone from Blizzard is complaining. Heck, we can't even really get developers from SOE to complain. He might want this to be an indictment of the industry, but it's really just an indictment of himself staying too long.

Farmville isn't an MMO, nor is Modern Warfare 2 (though I would debate Lum's assertion that you don't play MW2 to level up... if you played MMOs for a decade :) ). But there are so many conventions established in MMOs moving to other genres. And those genres are only taking the things that matter. Farmville isn't an MMO, but FarmTown before it was to a degree. And YoVille was, as were a few other early Facebook games.

None are really are inspiring iteration anymore, because the players don't really want it. What they want is what the mass market in those genres are grabbing: the MMOs parts that matter (achievements, currency, persistence, MTX, pretend-shared experiences mauybe).

Meanwhile, MMOs are WoW and a bunch of small titles for a specific audience that isn't growing at nearly the percentages as other types of newer platforms/genres.

That's fine for the players because we love it and are happy to pay. But it's tough for the developers when they watch their publishing (and then marketing/PR and sales) dollars go to other things that are cheaper to create (by orders of magnitude) and therefore less risky to try, while also being less life-sucking when they fail.

That I believe Ryan Seabury's point. He wants to go where he thinks the hype is and the risks are less. He also says the hype isn't as much on MMOs as they were, but that's probably more because of his own lense. I think he's chasing a bubble, and too much of his view of MMOs is because of the not-big success they had. But that's just me.

[Amaron]

I honestly don't know why ya'all (including Lum) are harshing on this guy.

He fucked up car combat in an apocalyptic setting.   He fucked up space ships with lasers pew pewing each other.   He even fucked with LEGOS.   I think you should at least be smart enough to understand why geeks might dislike him.

[Modern Angel]

He fucked up car combat in an apocalyptic setting. 

This, right here? This is why. I've never had a game infuriate me like Auto Assault. I'm still mad about it. I guess I got Dark Wind to soothe me, in the end, but that's not quite enough.

Thing is, if the guy had delivered on something, anything, that was good or had sticking power I would feel differently. If the guy just released ONE thing worth a shit and then said, "Man, these are taking too long. I want to check out other stuff" we're talking a completely different angle. As it is, this is a never was, not a has been, talking about how it's all oh so foolish to make MMOs and he needs a break. That's him projecting the failures of himself and his studio onto the vast future of the industry, which is silly.

[UnSub]

I honestly don't know why ya'all (including Lum) are harshing on this guy.

Because he decided to post an "u all suck, I quit" post and how he's moving onto the true calling of indie / casual titles?

I completely agree that MMOs cost too much for a single roll of the dice every 3 - 5 years. But the "I didn't like NetDevil's new culture" was a bit rich when ND has handed Lego Universe (his title) off to LEGO because it totally failed to attract players to it in numbers. And because he very likely cashed up in the sale to Gazillion if he is indeed a NetDevil founder, which makes his "if you grunts have a spare hour after grinding code for companies like NetDevil, why don't you make a fun game you'll like" a bit disingenuous.

I mock the letter because I find it dishonest.

You could dislike Seabury for the Tiny Penis thing (thanks again to Lum) but that was 10 years ago.

[luckton]

Going F2P in August

[DraconianOne]

Going F2P in August

Awesome.

Because, uh, I mean... my son is really into Lego and, uh... I he might like to play this.

[WindupAtheist]

You know what? I bet this is another 'US vs the World' grammar thing like Math/Maths.

I like to phrase it as "USA versus the whopping 25% of first-language English speakers who aren't from it" when this topic comes up. It really seems to stick in the craw of certain Brits on another forum I frequent.

[Yegolev]

Off-topic post is still off-topic, even two months later.

[Stormwaltz]

And it's dead.

Here's everything of substance at the link:

Since going free-to-play in August, "it has not been possible to convert a satisfactory number of players to paying subscribers," The Lego Group said. Lego Universe will officially close Jan. 31, 2012. Developer Play Well Studios in Louisville, Colorado, and the marketing division in Billund, Denmark, will be closed, affecting 115 people.

[Nebu]

Someone should warn Smedley. 

[luckton]

Is this the part where we go into a 20 page dissertation about the rise and fall of Lego Universe a la SWG? 

[HaemishM]

I'm not surprised Lego Universe didn't succeed as a F2P product. Target audience for Lego is young, much younger than a traditional MMOG like EQ2, and much less hardcore of an audience.

[Nebu]

Isn't it essentially the same audience that Toon Town and Free Realms was targeting?

[Samprimary]

I'm not surprised Lego Universe didn't succeed, full stop. Going F2P was just the last in a series of maneuvers to try to get any sort of revenue hike from that game before they invariably had to close it down.

Well, this sucks. Now I have a few friends out of work, probably!

[Merusk]

Isn't it essentially the same audience that Toon Town and Free Realms was targeting?

Yes except the main joy of lego is building and in this one you had to grind for parts.  Even after you had parts you'd still have that niggling feeling of "Why am I doing this online with this frustrating interface.. why wouldn't I just do it with the real bricks sitting around the house?"

[Samprimary]

Isn't it essentially the same audience that Toon Town and Free Realms was targeting?

Yes except the main joy of lego is building and in this one you had to grind for parts.  Even after you had parts you'd still have that niggling feeling of "Why am I doing this online with this frustrating interface.. why wouldn't I just do it with the real bricks sitting around the house?"

'Why am I not just playing minecraft?'

[Xanthippe]

Isn't it essentially the same audience that Toon Town and Free Realms was targeting?

Yes except the main joy of lego is building and in this one you had to grind for parts.  Even after you had parts you'd still have that niggling feeling of "Why am I doing this online with this frustrating interface.. why wouldn't I just do it with the real bricks sitting around the house?"

'Why am I not just playing minecraft?'

Minecraft is so much more like what I expected Lego Universe to be than Lego Universe turned out to be.  I think I played it for about 2 hours.

[Margalis]

Why is it that there are so many lego games yet none of them let you build stuff out of legos?