I'm not sure buying Traveller's Tales is a good idea.
TT had a really good engine that allowed them to pump out Lego games at an impressive rate of 1-3 per year. They maintained that cadence from 2005 through to 2019, then they stopped.
In the following 6 years, they have only released a single game: Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, in early 2022. It's been a full 3 years since they released a game.
They built a whole new engine for Skywalker Saga, so the development time is understandable. But apparently that engine was too hard to work with, so they dumped it and switched to Unreal, which has probably set their development efforts back again.
Now, I'm not saying that studios need to continually release games. Many good studios have long development cycles. But it's a bad sign when a studio suddenly switches cadence, how much of the original TT team is left?
There’s an assumption that TT is what the success is about, and then a counter claim about recent observed changes.
A very plausible anecdotal hypothesis would be that it was never “TT” per se, but a group of talented people that managed, for a period to find a chemistry that brought them and success together. And that as is so often the case, eventually this group of people lost that chemistry for any number of regularly observed reasons: poached talent, talent attrition, Puournelles Law, change in employer relations, you name it, we’ve seen them all.
So if I were Lego, I’d go find the people that used to be behind the regular success TT had, and investigate whether THAT arrangement could be resurrected in a worthwhile way.
TT had a really good engine that allowed them to pump out Lego games at an impressive rate of 1-3 per year. They maintained that cadence from 2005 through to 2019, then they stopped.
In the following 6 years, they have only released a single game: Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, in early 2022. It's been a full 3 years since they released a game.
They built a whole new engine for Skywalker Saga, so the development time is understandable. But apparently that engine was too hard to work with, so they dumped it and switched to Unreal, which has probably set their development efforts back again.
Now, I'm not saying that studios need to continually release games. Many good studios have long development cycles. But it's a bad sign when a studio suddenly switches cadence, how much of the original TT team is left?