LEGO Is Hiring Staff for Its New ‘Metaverse Experiences’

https://www.brickfanatics.com/lego-hiring-for-new-metaverse-experiences

The LEGO Group is hiring three new staff members to lead its journey into the metaverse, which will fall under the company’s newly-established GAME organisation.

An acronym for Game, Activations & Metaverse Experiences, the LEGO GAME initiative is the first tangible consequence of LEGO Group parent company KIRKBI’s $1 billion investment in Fortnite developer Epic Games. That cash injection was one half of Epic’s funding round in early 2022, with the other 50% coming from Sony.

The LEGO Group had announced a week prior that it was teaming up with Epic Games to make the metaverse a safer place for kids, and KIRKBI CEO Søren Thorup Sørensen said at the time that the $1 billion investment demonstrated ‘a long-term focus towards the future metaverse’. The LEGO Group is now building the team that will lead its own journey into the metaverse.

There are currently three job openings the LEGO Group is looking to fill on the GAME team: a Senior Portfolio Manager, a Senior Marketing Manager and a Creative Lead. The listings for these roles all make heavy reference to the metaverse, and include responsibilities such as ‘delivering the best possible LEGO play in the digital space’ and ‘advocating for fun play [and] cool features’ on the product team.

From those descriptions, it essentially sounds like the LEGO Group is gearing up for its next fluid play experience, blending physical and digital play: the listings refer to both digital play experiences and physical products, alongside a ‘non-game area for metaverse experiences’, which will include ‘digital events, branded play [and] storytelling’. But are we looking at the next LEGOHidden Side, or something closer to LEGO Dimensions?

At this stage, it’s difficult to tell – but the safe money is on something much bigger and expansive than either of those initiatives, given the scope of the LEGO Group’s investment. The digital side of things will doubtless be much more immersive than Hidden Side, which championed augmented reality through an app, while the physical products will hopefully be more extensive than LEGO Dimensions’ microscale builds and minifigures.

Augmented reality and virtual reality experiences could both be in the mix, especially with one eye on what other companies – such as Meta (formerly Facebook) – are doing in the metaverse. Another previous LEGO title worth considering here is LEGO Worlds, which was effectively TT Games’ answer to Minecraft, and could well serve as a platform for the LEGO metaverse: a space in which gamers can build digitally, and perhaps upload and integrate their real-life sets and builds.

The possibilities are pretty much endless, but the biggest certainty right now is that we won’t see the fruits of this experiment for a good while yet. If the LEGO Group is only just beginning to hire the team to front the development of its metaverse, we’re probably at least a couple of years away from anything launching for consumers.