LEGO Fortnite is a survival crafting adventure adventure, where the magic of LEGO building and Fortnite collide. Its launch in December 2023 marked the first digital play experience to come from the long term partnership between Epic Games and the LEGO Group, which aims to create fun and safe digital spaces for children and families. Its launch helped drive record engagement for both Epic Games and the LEGO Group, helping to carve out a fun and safe space in the metaverse, built with kids and families in mind from the outset.

Our starting point was knowing that children today are some of the internet’s most engaged users. But the internet as we know it today was not designed with kids in mind. The LEGO Group and Epic Games want to make sure that the future of digital spaces takes audiences of all ages into account from the outset.

And with the meteoric rise in popularity of gaming in post-pandemic years, the need for a fun and safe digital gaming space was paramount.

With this in mind, The LEGO Group and Epic Games needed to identify a way to build a safe, fun and engaging place for players of all ages to hang out, play and express themselves through worldbuilding and adventure.

Fortnite has evolved in recent years from a hugely popular Battle Royale game into a multi game ecosystem. The addition of LEGO Fortnite in December 2023 to the Fortnite ecosystem brought together two active and passionate fan bases, and showcased the LEGO System in Play in a digital setting like never before.

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

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!

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).

Together with Epic Games, the LEGO Group announced the game in Fortnite’s Big Bang Event, getting the community hyped about what’s to come. Key influencers were engaged to be part of this moment, capturing their first-looks and reactions to LEGO Fortnite as they dropped into the world as LEGO Styles for the first time.

Outside the digital environment, press events were held to give journalists and opinion leaders an exclusive preview of the game and hear the long-term vision of the partnership. Beyond presentations and gameplay sessions, there were also physical build activities to connect the digital experience back to the joy of LEGO building.

Additionally, four giant LEGO brick-built Supply Llamas popped up in New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney. Each built with 234,623 LEGO bricks, these models were 12 feet tall and served as prominent displays to get audiences from both the LEGO brand and Fortnite fandoms excited.

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.

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.