Its really hard to buy creative studios and the sort of mixed skills and culture that can make top games. Acquiring the studio is one way but inevitably companies want to push their culture into everything they buy along with their cost cutting processes and they often kill organisations like this.
Even organisations like Ubisoft and EA that have a history of making games are now too corporate and have repeatedly killed game studios they acquired along with the games they used to produce. Games at the top level are really hard to make, they are massive pieces of software, mocap, 3d models and story telling. They require rich experience of gaming to produce them and "fun" is something only a few people know how to produce.
This approach is very risky and highly unlikely to work and its going to take years for the first failures to become apparent and then will the executives even understand what they did wrong? Experience says no. This could stop the flow of Lego games for a long time.
Even when games were much simpler 20 years ago we tried to outsource some development to other studios and it was very difficult to find a good match, we were so unsatisfied with the results eventually brought all development in house. My experience using EA as a publisher back then is they were already ossified in their ways, nothing like their early days.
Their brand already has a strong identity, and they've managed to translate it into great games through partnerships. The real risk is whether they think they can replicate that success internally without the right talent and experience.
Even organisations like Ubisoft and EA that have a history of making games are now too corporate and have repeatedly killed game studios they acquired along with the games they used to produce. Games at the top level are really hard to make, they are massive pieces of software, mocap, 3d models and story telling. They require rich experience of gaming to produce them and "fun" is something only a few people know how to produce.
This approach is very risky and highly unlikely to work and its going to take years for the first failures to become apparent and then will the executives even understand what they did wrong? Experience says no. This could stop the flow of Lego games for a long time.