Now LEGO moves into toy-to-game market

The UK’s bestselling toy line is planning to turn up the heat on Skylanders and Disney Infinity.

LEGO’s popular pocket money line of Collectible Minifigures is to spawn its own game, with the toy line integrated into the title.

When LEGO Minifigures Online goes live next summer, it will be joined by a new range of 2 toys – and each one will include a code to unlock a virtual version of each figure for use in the game.

LEGO Collectible Minifigures are sold in ‘blind bags’ so buyers don’t know what figures they are getting. The toy is on its 11th wave as of September, and has been the UK’s bestselling toy line according to NPD pretty much every month since it launched three years ago.

Minifigures Online is being developed by Norweigan studio Funcom, which plans to include all the previous waves of minifigures as either unlockables of in-game purchases.

"We want players to get the same feeling they get from unwrapping a figure as when they get that character in game," explained Lawrence Poe, executive producer at Funcom, during the game’s first demos at Gamescom last week.

"LEGO games come with certain expectations of quality – and LEGO has very high values as a company – so Minifigures Online has to reflect all of that."

LEGO Minifigures Online will be released on PC, iOS and Android.

None of this slows down Warner Bros’ line of LEGO games, however: LEGO Marvel Super Heroes is out later this year and a tie-in game for the upcoming LEGO Movie is due in spring.