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Today, December 7, marks the release of “Lego Fortnite,” a collaboration between the popular Danish toy brand and Epic Games. The launch is one of Epic’s most ambitious brand partnerships to date – and it showcases Lego’s skillful use of video games to market both its core products and local intellectual properties.
The crux of the long-term partnership between Lego and Epic Games is a large open-world game built inside Epic’s Unreal Engine. The game worlds of “Lego Fortnite” are 20 times larger than the digital environment of “Fortnite: Battle Royale” — and users can populate them with numerous structures made of virtual Lego bricks, making the experience a showcase from the Lego brand. .
“We’ve pretty well recreated about 10,000 Lego bricks in this digital form,” Eric Williamson, creative director of “Lego Fortnite,” told reporters at a Dec. 4 demo event for the game. “But we’re taking it a step further in ‘Lego Fortnite’ – so everything you see in the game, or in the trailers, are things you can recreate in the real world with Lego bricks. »
Lego has been integrating its products and intellectual property into video games for much longer than many other non-endemic brands. The company launched its first premium video game, “Lego Island,” in 1997, and has since sold tens of millions of copies titles such as “Lego Star Wars” and “Lego Indiana Jones”. With this wealth of play experience – and a suite of games intrinsically linked to the brand – Lego understands that high-quality gameplay is the most valuable way to retain customers and spend.
“Above all, we are product-driven, not marketing-driven,” said Remi Marcelli, vice president of gaming and metaverse experiences at the Lego Group. “We love marketing, of course, and we’re doing our best to make the Lego brand more relevant to more people every day, but delivering a great game has been and will remain our No. 1 priority. »
Although Lego already has its own pre-existing games department, the brand’s decision to partner with Epic Games to build its metaverse platform allows it to connect with the hundreds of millions of players already active in “Fortnite” and other Epic titles. Users can link their Epic Games accounts to their Lego Insiders IDs, making integrating the two companies’ online communities relatively simple.
“Honestly, it’s a brilliant partnership,” said Margot Rodde, founder of Fortnite studio Creative Creators Corp. “It’s even more brilliant on the Lego side than on the ‘Fortnite’ side, because it’s very simple. to put it in a digital environment that already exists.
There are also compelling reasons for Epic Games to partner with Lego. Currently, platforms such as Roblox and Minecraft are perceived by some brands as more kid-friendly than “Fortnite,” which is built around a first-person shooter with violent elements. Integrating Lego into the platform could allow it to become more family-friendly and capture some of the audience of competing metaverse platforms. It doesn’t hurt that “Fortnite” is much more user-friendly than Minecraft.
“As a marketer, you always think that platforms cater to an older audience because they have more purchasing power,” Rodde said. “But I think Fortnite wants both. I think they would like to attract an older audience through the main game “Fortnite” and Fortnite Creative, then partnering with Lego was their strategy to attract a younger audience.
For now, “Lego Fortnite” remains primarily an entertainment product and not an e-commerce opportunity. However, given the presence of thousands of authentic Lego bricks in the experience, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which users could build inside the game and then order their creations shipped to their door to build them in real life. Marcelli was reluctant about the commercial potential of the collaboration, but left the door open for future expansion in this area.
“As for physical Lego sets connected to ‘Lego Fortnite,’ we have nothing to announce today,” he said. “But who knows where our partnership could take us in the future.” »
2023-12-31 23:56:29
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