Some thoughts on LEGO Fortnite...
I've wanted to write about this topic for a while. Also I needed an excuse to start a Substack for everyone who refuses to engage with LinkedIn Newsletters.
An incredibly brief introduction
I’m almost certain you’re here because you either know me or are interested in hybrid builder/investor topics or general digital media business-building. But if you don’t fall into that category, here’s a quick bio.
Now on to the actual content
So I can finally stop giving a polite smile to the people asking me what Epic is actually doing with LEGO. Based on what seemed to be the former taking over most of the world’s media this weekend1, I’m assuming you know what I’m talking about but in case you missed it, the LEGO Fortnite survival crafting game (and several other things) has been announced.
As someone who had a small role behind the scenes on this partnership, I have a few observations which I’ll try and limit to the less obvious:
Although this is a game and not a UEFN experience, it marks a real platform moment for Fortnite. Is this the metaverse you’re looking for? I’m not sure but it’s fair to say that to all intents and purposes Fortnite is now a virtual console. Even though everyone is now quite comfortable in the game-to-UGC model, it’s quite another thing to be launching an entire title from within another game.
While I don’t believe that any UGC platform can be long-term sustainable (or at least commercially interesting) without enabling brand dollars for builders2, I also believe that for brands, true success will only come from moving away from transient marketing budgets and thinking long-term about games and a platform commitment and revenue generation. LEGO has laid the blueprint down for what this architecture could look like.
I think it’s worth saying this again: it’s almost impossible (and getting increasingly so) for a startup to recreate a Fortnite or a Roblox. If you want to know what the top creator platforms will be in ten years time, it’s likely mostly those who exist today. I feel a lot of investors still underestimate this.
Both LEGO and Epic are founder-run businesses3 and as such, tend historically to be better at thinking long-term than companies led by non-founder teams. Now, there are all sorts of qualifiers to that statement but it’s hard to imagine many other companies collaborating to this degree, with what most people will assume is a high level of operational complexity and over a short (ish) space of time.
While a lot of people will say that this is Fortnite moving younger in sort of the same yes-kind-of-but-no way that Roblox is moving older, I think a better description of both platforms is that they are transitioning from a cohort to a generational model. While there are valuation pros and cons to both (I haven’t thought deeply about this but presumably some enterprising investment analyst will), it’s pretty clear that the latter has far more consequences for the long-term entertainment landscape.
Sort of on the same topic or at least a follow on question is why exactly did Epic Games spin out SuperAwesome in the context of LEGO Fortnite? I have done my best to keep a straight face while listening to a great many theories and the whole topic was noodled on in a recent Naavik pod which rabbit-holed into the many challenges for game developers, platforms and parents thrown up by young audiences. In what appears like a well coordinated strategy but which was in fact utter coincidence I wrote a long post about this topic a few days beforehand. Ostensibly directed at parents (but a pretty good primer if your boss has just asked you to figure out a digital strategy for young audiences), it’s a reasonable walk through what has actually been achieved and what the main impediments to solving the rest of the problems are.
Congratulations to all the marketing teams, even my mother was aware of what was happening.
At some stage I’ll write a longer post on this topic.
Kind of. LEGO is family-owned and control the board.