The Lego Group and Epic Games: A Partnership for the Metaverse

Epic Games recently raised $2 billion from Sony and Kirkbi, the holding company that owns The Lego Group. Each company invested $1 billion, with Sony’s investment tripling its stake in Epic Games. The new partnership signals the future opportunities they plan to build together, including virtual experiences that will launch them into the metaverse.

This new partnership will aid in Epic Game’s goal to build virtual entertainment experiences that offers users of all ages a social component. Targeting people of all ages, from children to adults, these strategic partnerships will allow for a more rapid creation of virtual experiences, including sporting events and metaverse environments—3D landscapes where a gamer can socially interact with other gamers. The metaverse has existed in different forms for many years, with many crediting Sony and PlayStation for the first virtual environment with the PlayStation Home metaverse in 2008.

Lego and Epic Games announced their plans to use this investment to work together and create metaverse experiences for the whole family. They plan to build an “immersive, creatively inspiring and engaging” family-friendly digital experience. The Lego Group currently serves a younger audience and has promised to continue to entertain and engage these younger audiences in the metaverse. It plans to safeguard the experience for families with privacy features.

Since these companies are dedicated to servicing gamers of all ages, this partnership into the metaverse makes sense and will likely increase the prevalence and popularity of virtual experiences. Creating a family-friendly environment is an important step in making the metaverse assessable to all. This partnership, unsurprising yet exciting, underscores that the metaverse is a novel concept to many of us and it is still unclear who the winners, if any, will be. However, any capacity for competition in the space can hopefully only be a positive. The metaverse-type experience is now dominated by games and experiences like Minecraft and Roblox, so it seems only natural for both Lego and Epic Games to get involved. 

As with many gaming and entertainment companies, it is a competition for attention and engagement. If these types of enterprises cannot maintain and increase attention and engagement, people move on. This partnership allows Lego to maintain its presence in the market for its key demographic, and it extends Epic’s reach to a younger demographic of gamers. This will likely not be the last of this type of partnership between gaming companies in order to expand to new audiences and into the developing metaverse.