Lego Digital Play has acquired ForthStar, a mobile game studio created by the founders of Golf Clash maker Playdemic.
The aim of Lego Digital Play is to create authentic Lego mobile experiences and Manchester, United Kingdom-based ForthStar will help ensure that happens, said Aaron Loeb, president of Lego Digital Play, in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.
Loeb started Lego Digital Play as a separate company from the Lego Group at the beginning of 2025. Now it has slightly more than 100 people, mostly in London and Denmark, and it is adding around 30 people with ForthStar, said Paul Louge and Alex Rigby, cofounders of ForthStar in an interview with GamesBeat.
Louge will become head of mobile games across Lego Digital Play, while Rigby will lead Fourstar as a flagship studio. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The ForthStar team will stay in place in Manchester.
It’s a big day for Lego Digital Play.
“We were founded at the beginning of last year in 2025 as a separate company from the Lego Group to create new, unique, and authentic Lego experiences and in the digital world that that are wholly owned by us,” Loeb said. “We’ve been growing quietly in the background ever since then, and now we’re about 100 people, mostly in London but in Denmark as well.”
One of the ways the company has been growing is by bringing in new studios, he said. Loeb said the company is focused on early stage studios in mobile gaming.
“When we look at the mobile market, it is the most democratic market where all the world’s gamers are, and it’s where we can reach kids of all ages in every country on the globe,” Loeb said. “Our commitment is bringing play to everyone around the world. This is probably the best place we can we can start what we’re doing with Lego Digital Play, and ForthStar is a fantastic group for us to bring in to do that. We’re super excited about it.”
Background
Gouge got started in the game industry in 1999 with a casual massively multiplayer online game dubbed BattleMail. He and Alex Rigby built that business and sold in in 2002. They also created Rockball Games, which was an early studio focused on Brew and Java-baed games. That business was acquired by Eidos, part of Square Enix.
Then they started Playdemic to make free-to-play mobile games starting in 2010. They created the top-grossing mobile sports game, Golf Clash. .
“What was most exciting, really, about the development of that studio was really understanding among a team of people that we’d worked with for a long time exactly how to run live operations at scale, from a technological point of view, from an operational point of view, and also from a creative point of view,” Gouge said.
He added, “We all know that now, in a more mature mobile marketplace, that those skills are the essential elements of trying to build a longevity in product and business.”
Warner Bros. acquired Playdemic and then it sold it to Electronic Arts. Golf Clash is still doing well under EA’s ownership, he said.
“We started ForthStar as a studio to really continue to push for excellence. All that experience we built up over that time frame really came to fruition in ForthStar. I think every time you start a studio, I’d like to think you’re a little bit better than the studio you had before. You bring all the all the mistakes you’ve made before and all the successes you’ve had, and try and build something that’s more successful. So, ForthStar is is the best incarnation of the team that we’ve worked with for a very long time.” Gouge said.
When Loeb reached out to Gouge to talk about working togeher, it was exciting because Lego is an “incredible brand,” Gouge said. “So when this opportunity arose, we leapt at it because it gives us an opportunity to to work with Aaron and this group, and me more widely with the studios group, and try to really bring Lego to the prominence that it truly deserves on mobile.”
He noted that Lego has had great success in the console and PC space, but now it hopes to bring that success to mobile. Loeb noted that Gouge had opportunity to work with the Lego brand while helping Lego’s TT Games division make Lego games.
Louge and Rigby previously built Playdemic, a maker of mobile games such as Golf Clash, which generated more than $1 billion in revenue and is approaching $2 billion, with hundreds of millions of downloads. Warner Bros. bought Playdemic for $35 million in 2017. Then EA bought Playdemic and the Golf Clash brand in 2021 for $1.4 billion.
Rigby and Louge left to start ForthStar in 2023 with the vision of making mass-market games that millions of people enjoy daily for years. They intended to create and operate live service games at scale.
Strategy and values
Loeb said Lego Digital Play is focused on authentic Lego experiences that bring the Lego system in play—the compatibility of bricks across generations—into digital play. But neither Loeb nor the ForthStar leaders are disclosing game details yet.
Loeb said that the company chooses to acquire teams that have people-centered values, creative culture, and cohesion, and aims to create new games rather than acquire teams solely for mature products. The leaders cited shared culture, challenging work, and creative opportunity as reasons the teams may stay on board with Lego.
Lego Digital Play is adopting its own mobile strategy, and it has previously acquired Light Brick Studio, which was owned by Kirkbi, a company that owns a controlling interest in the Lego Group. Loeb also said that Lego Digital Play also owns Offroad Games, headed by Geoffrey Gilles. Offroad Games was acquired in September.
The mobile gaming market is appealing as it is the biggest part of games with more than $120 billion in revenue and billions of players.
One of the investors was Griffin Gaming Partners, the venture capital fund with the most gaming assets under management. Louge said that Griffin has been supportive of the team throughout its journey. He said, “I’m very pleased that they’re they’re getting a good outcome. That makes us very happy, and we found them to be a very supportive venture capital company on a number of levels.”
Loeb said the company exists to create authentic Lego brand experiences and bring the Lego system in play, which is a term of art that not everybody knows. But the system in play is our term for the way the bricks all fit together. That that essentially how it was invented, where a brick created in 1954 will snap together with a brick in the stores today, Loeb said.
“That backwards compatibility, interoperability is the system in play. We’re dedicated to bringing the system in play to the digital builders of tomorrow. So that is what we’re we’re focused on,” Loeb said.
I asked if ForthStar would focus on new Lego products like the Lego Smart Play introduced earlier this year as Lego’s move into electronic bricks. But Loeb said he could not comment on specific new products.
Loeb said, “We’re bringing in leaders who are really people-centric with values that we share. These are teams that have an enormous amount of team cohesion. So these are people who love working together, and so that, to me, that is the best predictor that people are going to stick around. We’re hiring people who love working together and we’re giving them big, hairy audacious goals.”
As Loeb said, Louge agreed that a company’s culture is the ultimate challenge.
“We’re at a point in our career where, it is the culture, it is the challenge, it is the opportunity that’s the most exciting thing. We’ve been fortunate to have quite a lot of success in our career, and we’re fortunate to be able to get to choose what we do, and we are choosing to do this because we’re very excited about it.”
He said he is looking forward to personally working with Loeb, as they’ve known each other for a long time. Gouge said he is excited about being part of the leadership at Lego because there’s a “blue ocean opportunity for us here” on mobile.
“It’s somewhat underexploited, and we have an opportunity to build something together with Aaron and his leadership team, which is very exciting that hasn’t really been done before. So for us as game makers and entrepreneurs, that’s an enthralling challenge for us to take on. And then finally, and maybe in some respects most importantly, that cultural connection is so valuable,” Louge said. “We are at a certain time in our in our lives where we we can decide what we want to do and and how we want to wake up in the morning. To wake up and know that you’re going to do something really exciting, with an incredible brand, with incredible trust,” to express your creativity.
The potential of the Lego brand in mobile games
Loeb said that Lego is a brand with very specific values about fun and making things that are appealing to children as well as adults.
“We are going to pursue the path that is right for us in how we get to mobile,” he said.
I noted there’s a pull in games toward fun on the one hand and toward addiction on the other. In mobile, the latter is characterized by excessive monetization and loot boxes. Those are things that can’t be targeted at kids, Loeb agreed.
I noted that it’s important for mobile games to be social, as that’s how people want to play these days — with their friends. But it’s also important to protect kids from predators and otherwise ensure online safety.
Loeb said, “It’s a quintessential question of where we’re at right now. I think we both know that this generation is uses games as a social outlet. This seems like a problem that one must solve, particularly if you’re dedicated to making safe experiences.”
Loeb noted that Lego’s brand is super popular with adults and kids, and so Lego’s gaming strategy is to go after fans who are both adults and kids.
As for the state of mobile games, Loeb said, “We’re in a fascinating spot with mobile, which is still by far the largest part of our industry, and yet people are using language like ‘mobile is dead,’ which strikes me as a very funny thing to say. It represents half of the industry’s revenue. I think we got used to the idea that there would be limitless free installs forever, and so that built up a lot of the thinking about the mobile market. And we’re just now in a different landscape”
He added, “But there are still billions of mobile players. If one cannot look at that and see that there is an opportunity to make wonderful, great games for people all over the globe, then one lacks imagination. Neither I nor the folks on my team lack imagination. We’re just finding a different approach and a different way of thinking than the systems that we used to build Golf Clash, to build Marvel Strike Force. The successes of our past are not the automatic blueprint for the successes of the future, and that’s actually the kind of challenge that I relish, and I believe Paul does too. The rumors of Mobile’s death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Louge agreed with Loeb on that.
“Mobile is a $120 billion market and it’s still growing at decent single digit percentages versus PC and console. More than three billion players — it’s the single biggest market, and for game makers who believe in creating mass market experiences, it would be insane not to be here,” Louge said.
He added, “From my perspective, it’s competitive. The games industry is competitive. The entertainment industry is competitive. We’re competing against short form video. We’re competing against social media. We’re competing against streaming television. Now we’re in a hyper competitive marketplace. But that’s also the fun of the challenge. We’re trying to create highly engaging, compelling pieces of entertainment that people want to to be part of. And so if that’s what you get up to do every day, then pointing yourself at the single biggest market makes absolute sense.”
And Louge said, “No one here is going to say it’s easy, but then again, it was funny when we were building Golf Clash. I remember having a conversation with a with a venture capitalist who we all know. He said, ‘Look, Paul, don’t bother. All the winners have been declared. You won’t get into top 10 grossing list. It’s been done.'”
But Louge said he and Rigby still see opportunities for talented teams to break through.
I asked about the regional opportunities and growth in mobile.
“One of the great opportunities in mobile is that you can both be global and also highly regionally specific simultaneously, and there’s like not really been a lot of entertainment industries in our history that that give you that capability,” Loeb said. “The Lego brand itself also is able to be global and very regional, and so the way in which we will show up in places through events, through the the gameplay we make, will obviously lean into that capability.”