Lego Worlds is the latest among the company’s other diversifications in recent years, such as the Lego Movie series including Star Wars and Batman franchises, TV shows and other merchandise.“The multiplayer online gaming world is hugely profitable, but hugely dangerous for Lego.” “What do you do if a kid builds their phone number and address out of Lego on their house?” he asked. According to Roberts, Lego was worried that it could unwittingly aid pedophiles lurking in a multiplayer environment, because kids could accidentally reveal their address and phone number while playing the online game. Still, it is a risk, and Lego has spent a few years developing it.If you could tell the story and get kids involved with the story, then you make the bricks irresistible.” “It was really the stories that animated those bricks. The patents had expired in the 1980s,” Robertson said. It is taking its bricks and the stories that power them to the Internet to grow its business. “Lego realized that if all it offered were the bricks, then anybody could make those bricks. With Lego Worlds, the $5.4 billion Lego Group is converting a potential threat from online games into a business opportunity.Interestingly, Lego two years ago partnered with Minecraft to roll out digital versions of its toy products including its Star Wars series, The Dungeon and The Iron Golem.
Lego Worlds will compete with Minecraft, a popular video game created by Swedish game designer Markus (Notch) Persson and published by Mojang, the firm he co-founded with two others.Here are six key takeaways from Robertson’s discussion:
LEGO WORLDS NEWS FULL
Wharton professor David Robertson, who is co-author of Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry, talked recently about Lego’s business strategy on the show on SiriusXM Channel 111 ( You can find the full podcast in the “Related Links” tab).
It plans to launch Lego Worlds, a new video game, on February 21, 2017. Lego, the 84-year-old Danish toymaker behind these interlocking bricks, has been turning that innovative spirit inward to expand its business model and its offerings. They are sophisticated, high-tech and sure to inspire innovation. Let’s face it, Legos aren’t just for elementary kids anymore. Have you heard of the latest Lego rockstars? Arvind and Sanjay Seshan – better known around the world as The Seshan Brothers - provide programming lessons for Lego Mindstorms robots to more than 100,000 users in 160 countries through their website, . In November the teen brothers, who live in the Fox Chapel area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, traveled to the World Robot Olympiad finals in Delhi, India, to demonstrate a Lego printer they invented, called PIX3L PLOTT3R. HCMG 001: Introduction to Health Economics.STAT 001: Introduction to Statistics and Data Science.FNCE 002: Essentials of Personal Finance.FNCE 001: Introduction to Financial Markets and the Global Economy.Management & Technology Summer Institute.