Lego Digital Play has acquired ForthStar, the Manchester mobile studio set up by Playdemic founders Paul Gouge and Alex Rigby.
According to GamesBeat, ForthStar will add around 30 people to Lego Digital Play, which currently has just over 100 staff, mostly in London and Denmark. Gouge is now Lego Digital Play’s head of games, and Rigby stays on to lead ForthStar from Manchester. Neither side disclosed what Lego paid.
“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,” said Lego Digital Play president Aaron Loeb, while Gouge said the deal was a chance “to really bring Lego to the prominence that it truly deserves on mobile.”
Gouge and Rigby co-founded Playdemic, which Warner Bros bought in 2017. EA then acquired the studio and Golf Clash for $1.4bn in 2021. They set up ForthStar in 2023 and revealed it in January 2024 with 14 former Golf Clash staff and $10m from Griffin Gaming Partners.
A month later, Gouge told us the studio was targeting casual male players, as “the casual competitive male gamer wasn’t particularly well served.”
Lego Digital Play was set up at the start of 2025 as a separate company from the Lego Group. ForthStar is its second studio acquisition in just over two months, after it bought Chrome Valley Customs maker Offroad Games. It has also previously acquired Light Brick Studio from Kirkbi, the company that holds a controlling interest in the Lego Group.
Loeb, who previously led FoxNext Games, said people “are using language like ‘mobile is dead,’ which strikes me as a very funny thing to say.”
“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,” he said. “The successes of our past are not the automatic blueprint for the successes of the future…the rumours of mobile’s death have been greatly exaggerated.”
