Minecraft competitor? Don’t get cocky
Someone think about the children! Likemy own personal brand, LEGO is a family-friendly,name-stealingcompany. And so the open-ended,Minecraft-like builderLEGO Worldshas some problem what with immature idiots’ propensity to build cock.Idiots like this one.
And so let’s strap in for a story fromHot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore a Fedoradeveloper Megan Fox who remembers one of the things that killed the last LEGO MMO,LEGO Universe, after hardly a year.
Hint: Don’t sleep on cocks.
Funny story – we were asked to make dong detection software for LEGO Universe too. We found it to be utterly impossible at any scale.
— Megan Fox (@glassbottommeg)July 22, 2025
Players would hide the dongs where the filtering couldn’t see, or make them only visible from one angle / make multi-part penis sculptures.
The moderation costs of LEGO Universe were a big issue in general. They wanted a creative building MMO with a promise of zero penises seen.
They actually had a huge moderation team that got a bunch of screenshots of every model, every property. Entirely whitelist-based building.
YOU could build whatever you wanted, but strangers could never see your builds until we’d had the team do a penis sweep on it.
It was all automated, but the human moderators were IIRC the single biggest cost center for LEGO Universe’s operational costs. Or close to.
And “that” is why Trove/etc were able to make better building MMOs. They didn’t have to worry about little kids seeing dongs. We REALLY did.
We even had an employee very nearly fired for building a penis. It was on his own property, but a kid wandered into it during a kid test.
This is a roundabout way of saying “never build an online game for kids / I have no idea how Minecraft hasn’t been sued over this yet”
