Different MMOs have different measuring sticks for success. World of Warcraft likes to broadcast its record-breaking expansion sales while Lord of the Rings likes to flaunt its revenues as a free-to-play game. But LEGO Universe is claiming victory in a totally different area: Popularity among tweens aged 8 to 12.
Lego Universe honcho Mark William Hansen revealed that the game “boasts an impressively high NPS score—the rating that measures how likely users are to recommend the game to someone else—above 70%,” based on surveys from its current playerbase.
Basically, what this means is that Lego Universe is getting some Bieber-levels of lovin’ from the tween gaming set and that social networks like Facebook, Twitter and the local school playground might soon be buzzing about the game as tweens recommend LEGO Universe to their friends. A big part of the game’s appeal to tweens is its builder program that lets them claim virtual property areas and build forts and castles from scratch. Those plastic lords at Net Devil even shared screenshots that show off some of the more impressive constructs that have been made since the LEGO Universe launch two months ago, like a Japanese-inspired mountain retreat and a Christmas-themed snow town.
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Lego Universe is also smart enough to know that tweens don’t create stuff in a vacuum; naturally, they want to show off their awesomeness with peers. That’s why the game is scheduled to introduce more community-based missions by 2011, plus a boatload of new pet features, faction kits, skills, weapons and achievements. All these should keep tweens and tweens-at-heart preoccupied well into the next year, and give enough time for LEGO Universe to figure out what pure imagination looks like in pixel form. Because you know, finding it is the real mission of the game, now LEGO Universe has gone viral among tweens.