The LEGO Group’s mission has always been to “inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow”. However, it is increasingly difficult to reach younger, digital native audiences given the entertainment options and platforms around them, many of which are not fully safe for children.

We needed to introduce a new way of engaging kids and families, significant enough to get their attention and offer them an immersive, intuitive way to experience the LEGO System in Play and its endless creative possibilities.

How do we make the joy of building more accessible to a wide range of digital-first audiences in a safe way?

Objectives:

•Introduce digital play experiences for a wide demographic - designed to encourage creativity, experimentation and collaboration through play.

•Introduce a gaming experience that is fun and safe by design, with potential to bridge physical and digital play (as our audience is doing)

•Recruit digital-first audiences into LEGO users

To address what our audiences desired within the gaming space, a long term partnership between Epic Games and the LEGO Group was struck – with a core mission to develop fun and safe digital spaces for children and families.

The partnership’s first launch was LEGO Fortnite, a survival crafting game, whichbrings the magic of LEGO building into the Fortnite ecosystem.

The game gives players tools for creative building and social adventures, allowing them to experience the LEGO brand in a refreshing new way in this digital environment, whether playing Survival or Sandbox mode.

LEGO Fortnite offers many different types of play – players can collect food and resources, build their own shelter or style their homesteads, gear up to explore the environment to search for rare resources - and all while playing as their favourite Fortnite characters, but in LEGO Style (Minifigures).

Key things we examined in the gaming community were the significance of digital play being creative and expansive for kids and families, and the importance of digital wellbeing for parents and guardians when it comes to their families.

In the LEGO Play Well Report, we saw 77% of parents worldwide think digital play is beneficial for their children in thinking critically, building confidence and strengthening friendships. Research showed that kids themselves are passionate about creating and participating in the digital world.

Our Social Gaming studies also showed that parents feel responsible for educating their children about digital safety; and kids want to be part of positive communities with friends, playing and creating together.

By understanding the motivations of our audience groups, the key insight we took was that both parents and kids have the same desire to engage in a creative and immersive gaming experience that’s safe, fun, and collaborative!

The ambition of the LEGO Group and Epic Games’ long-term partnership is to create amazing play experiences that are safe and fun for all ages.

With the launch of LEGO Fortnite, we created one of the most exciting survival crafting games of all time that drove record engagement and excitement, and met all of the companies’ shared objectives for the launch.

Our campaign brought together two incredibly distinct brands without compromising on eithers’ unique voice – and engaged two incredible fan bases for a moment of true cultural impact, and the promise of an exciting future for the partnership in the years ahead.

Critically, parents and children loved the game. During the launch, we recorded a staggering 8M LEGO Accounts created, as they signed up to be part of a new journey with the LEGO brand, and LEGO Fortnite hit a peak of 2.4m concurrent players at launch, making it the most popular experience in the Fortnite ecosystem platform at the time.

We also saw the highest volume of Google searches for “LEGO” in the past 5 years - demonstrating the cultural impact of two beloved brands coming together.

During launch, LEGO Fortnite was #1 trending on YouTube Gaming, and a top 3 trending global topic across Google/X. We achieved 8.3M views on Twitch in the first month.

LEGO Fortnite was widely covered across media publications worldwide, such as BBC, Bloomberg, Fatherly, Hypebeast, Le Monde, Spiegel, Gamespot, IGN, Forbes and more, achieving 2.5B+ earned media impressions. Sentiment from gaming influencers was universally positive.