One of the developers of the LEGO MMO LEGO Universe has now explained what prevents a large, open LEGO game: Penises.
What actually prevents a large LEGO MMO where players have the freedom to build whatever they want? Something like Minecraft, but with LEGO bricks. It would surely be a huge success, so what is standing in the way? “Penises,” is the answer from Megan Fox, a senior coder at NetDevil, who was responsible for LEGO Universe at that time. The game was discontinued in January 2012.
Fox now recounts in Twitter posts on the occasion of the release of Splatoon (Wii U) that it was extremely important for LEGO to make the game age-appropriate, especially in an “online game where players can create as they please.” Because even in Splatoon, players have such freedoms. In LEGO Universe, nothing went live without someone reviewing it.
YOU could build whatever you wanted, but strangers could never see your builds until we’d had the team do a penis sweep on it.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
So a large team of moderators had to be maintained, who only approved buildings after they had checked them to ensure that there were no inappropriate things present – like “penises.” Those were significant costs.
They actually had a huge moderation team that got a bunch of screenshots of every model, every property. Entirely whitelist-based building. — Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
“What’s the nonsense? Just allow penises,” some said. But that wasn’t possible with LEGO. LEGO has the full trust of parents. That was something that they didn’t want to risk at all.
People saying “well just allow dicks” – LEGO’s brand is utterly trusted by parents. We had to uphold that trust. Which meant zero tolerance.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
And LEGO doesn’t understand any fun when it comes to this. A developer who built a penis on his own property was almost fired. A child wandered onto his property during a test.
We even had an employee very nearly fired for building a penis. It was on his own property, but a kid wandered into it during a kid test. — Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
According to Fox, this attitude from LEGO explains why no further LEGO MMO allowed as much freedom in building as LEGO Universe did back then and why there is no reason to expect such a thing in the future. You can’t compete with Minecraft and other games like Trove if you have to spend so much money to make it “child-safe.”
Anyways, “all of that” is why every single successor to LEGO Universe has been small and missing build play. LEGO knows how expensive it is.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg) May 29, 2015
Mein MMO says: A mystery remains open even after these enlightening statements: What does everyone online have with these penises that they constantly need to be built? Is that a new phenomenon? Or were there more sand penises than sandcastles on beaches in the past – which we just repressed?
The title image is by Pangolin2, the developer requested to include it when someone writes about the “Dong Detection.”
