Tag Archives: Mark Hansen

Lego Universe has been delayed, and will not be released this year as expected.

Lego is also unsure if the MMO will arrive in 2010.

“Within the company we have made a strategic decision within LEGO to make a delay of LEGO Universe. It will not be coming out in 2009,” said business development bossman, Mark Hansen.

“The reason is, we have a luxury right now, the business is going good. We have products launching that are not digital, the physical products, with them going so well we don’t want to take focus away from them.”

Lego Group’s annual earnings report will be released on Monday.

Talking to Massively, Lego Universe project lead Mark Hansen has said that other IPs such as Indiana and Star Wars may be included in the MMO, although if anything is to happen it’ll be as an addition to the launch game.

“I think that IPs would be great to see in the game,” he said. “It’s not for the first launch.”

There’s still no date for this, but if there was ever an online game with “promise,” here it is.

Full thing through the link.

According to this Reuters article, upcoming MMO Lego Universe will use Lego bricks themselves as in-game currency and may head to consoles after an initial PC launch.

“The more a child plays, they collect more coins and more bricks. The more you play, the more you get to build things,” said project head Mark William Hansen.

The piece adds:

Lego Universe will initially launch as a PC game, available in stores or as a download, and may eventually be available on other gaming platforms. It will operate as a pay-as-you-go subscription service at a “competitive price”, Hansen said.

Worth a read, that, especially given the game’s likely to be large beyond belief.

Developer Netdevil’s director of business development, Mark Hansen, has said that the core driving factor behind Lego getting into the MMO space with Lego Universe is to “bring alive” children’s Lego fantasies. That and making a metric truckload of money, obviously.

“What’s really unique now is that the technology is at a level where we can get more than just a single child into a single-player game,” he said. “Now we’re looking at getting a mass of children into an area to play and interact with Lego. One reason for that is simply consumer demand – kids have been asking us about playing online with Lego and their friends. They see the space and the technology – things like Club Penguin – and they want something like that. We see the uniqueness of building a massively multiplayer online game to add on value to the physical product that we have. When the child sits and plays on the floor with an army and a castle and his Lego knights – that’s what we want to bring to the MMO experience, what’s in the child’s mind. It needs to be alive, we can bring that dream alive.”

Lego Universe has no release date as yet, but a trailer’s planned for this year, apparently. The game is to feature innovations such as being able to build anything from Lego in the game then ordering the exact Lego kit online.