Lego CEO Niels Christiansen says the toymaker plans to make video games in-house, after 2024 revenue rose 13% YoY to ~$10B; its Fortnite tie-up has 87M players
Danish toymaker beefs up digital capabilities after success with externally developed games — Lego is building up its capability …
Context & Ripple Effects
Lego’s move follows its 2022 long-term partnership with Epic to create a safer digital play experience for children, a collaboration that put Fortnite at the center of Lego’s online strategy. The reported 87M-player reach gives the company evidence that its brand can travel inside a large existing game ecosystem rather than only through physical products.
The wider relationship was reinforced when KIRKBI, Lego’s holding company, joined Epic’s $2B funding round alongside Sony. Building game-making capability internally is therefore an expansion of an established digital relationship, not a standalone pivot.
First-order effects
- Lego will need to hire or organize game-development, live-operations, and digital-product capabilities that it previously accessed through external developers.
- Epic remains a key distribution and collaboration partner through Fortnite, but Lego gains more control over which game experiences it creates and how it extends its intellectual property.
Second-order effects
- External studios that have built Lego games may face a smaller role in future flagship projects, while Lego can retain more product knowledge and potentially capture more value from successful digital releases.
- The Fortnite collaboration becomes a proving ground for Lego’s internal teams: its large audience can inform which Lego game formats and digital features are worth developing beyond partner-led work.
Third-order effects
- If branded consumer companies build and operate games themselves, game development increasingly becomes a core brand and customer-relationship capability rather than a licensing outlet for specialist studios.
- Lego’s path points to a capability-tiering trend: companies may keep major platforms as partners while selectively internalizing the creative and operational layers that matter most to their brands.
The trend: Consumer brands are moving from one-off game licensing toward owning more of the digital production and live-experience stack while still relying on established platforms for reach.