Lego Worlds is now live on Steam Early Access, but you may be wondering why it took so long for Lego to get a Minecraft competitor. As a former Lego dev revealed, they actually had good reason to vacillate on it.
Glass Bottom Game founder Megan Fox worked on Lego Universe, an MMO which allowed you to build models of personal properties with bricks you collected in the course of gameplay. The game was only live for 2010-2012, and Lego cited unsatisfactory revenue as the reason for closing it, but there was more to the story after all.
Developer The Lego Group was keen to remove fan made penises from the game. Unlike Minecraft, Lego has to protect their own brand, particularly because parents would be keenly observing them. They placed controls so that fan creations would be reviewed and moderated before other players got to see them. Unfortunately, they found the costs of moderating the content prohibitively expensive.
Lego also found it impossible to make software to detect fan made penises, so they opted for an automated process. The human mods who needed to be at the tail end of this process became one of the biggest cost center from Lego Universe’s total operating cost.
The Lego Worlds Steam page makes no mention of any censorship or moderation tools. Of course, there is an even bigger opportunity to make penises in this Minecraft-like game. We don’t know what solution Lego has in mind for this issue now, but fans are bound to press the issue throughout Early Access. Perhaps they're hoping to find one during Early Access itself.
What do you think Lego Worlds should do regarding this issue? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
