Lego, Epic Games Building Metaverse For Kids

Lego has teamed up with Fortnite maker Epic Games to create a kid-friendly metaverse, the Danish toymaker said Wednesday (April 6).

The companies refer to this project as “an immersive, creatively inspiring and engaging digital experience for kids of all ages to enjoy together,” and a “family-friendly digital experience will give kids access to tools that will empower them to become confident creators,” but offered little in the way of concrete details in the joint press release.

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“Kids enjoy playing in physical and digital worlds and move seamlessly between the two. We believe there is huge potential for them to develop life-long skills such as creativity, collaboration and communication in both,” said Niels B Christiansen, CEO of the LEGO Group.

“We have a responsibility to make digital play safe, inspiring and beneficial for all, and just as we’ve protected children’s rights to safe physical play for generations, we are committed to doing the same for digital play,” he said.

The news comes almost a year after Epic Games announced it had raised $1 billion, money it said it would use to fund its metaverse ambitions.

The company has spoken of building Fortnite, a massive, multiplayer survival game that has hundreds of millions of users, into a proper metaverse.

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As PYMNTS reported earlier this week, venture capitalized and developers have poured billions into various metaverse projects, sparked by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s prediction that the immersive virtual reality worlds were the future of social media, along with Citi’s vision of a $13 trillion economy by 2030.

However, it might be tough for blockchain-based metaverses like Decentraland and The Sandbox to see their user numbers scale the way Fortnite’s did, partly because the technology simply isn’t ready yet.

“Decentraland’s graphics look like something from a late-1990s Nintendo or PlayStation game,” Financial Times’ global technology correspondent, Tim Bradshaw, wrote on April 5. “Even so, my early-2020s Mac struggled to render them smoothly.”