Sheer Child's Play

From C21Media:

Sheer child’s play

Children’s producers are increasingly looking to gaming as a way of extending their TV brands. But what is the key to getting it right? Andrew McDonald reports.

The days of television firms dealing in just TV shows are long gone. Merchandise, online extensions and multi-platform strategies have existed for years, but with the continuing rise of devices like smartphones and tablets, the possibilities of the web and the enduring success of consoles, gaming is in rude health and providing rich opportunities for broadcasters and production houses.

Though companies are taking different approaches, there seems to be a consensus that rights owners need to meet kids across all the media platforms they engage with. But with children spending more and more time playing games, are spin-offs just brand extensions or revenue earners in their own right? And how tricky is it to marry gameplay with a linear television show format?

Steven Andrew, creative director at Zodiak-owned UK kids studio The Foundation, says it would be crazy to ignore the fact that this generation of kids “grew up always knowing the internet, always knowing video games,” though he is still cautious about how and when to launch a gaming extension. For him, such properties are still really about offering “cut-through of the brand.”

“Quite often in the first season, when you’re developing something from a television point of view, the online component might be the second phase, because you want to be sure your season has got a life beyond the first series before you start racking up the costs that are associated with it,” he says, citing Waybaloo – a successful Foundation kids’ brand that is only now being turned into a smartphone game.

Viacom International Media Networks’ head of consumer products Michael Connolly agrees. He sees gaming as part of an overall franchise strategy, with a licensing package only deployed once a TV show is proven as a hit.

Despite this, the firm, which houses Nickelodeon, now has a rich gaming business that extends across all the major games consoles and online properties, with casual online games for the likes of Kung Fu Panda and SpongeBob SquarePants augmented by games for systems like the Xbox 360. “With evergreen status being the ultimate goal in lifecycle management, properties need to first be given a chance to connect with audiences, gain critical mass and build momentum. This takes time and as a general rule we will seed a property for a minimum of 18 months before launching a product,” says Connolly.

Toonbox Entertainment is a small Canadian animation house that has made TV shows like Bolts & Blip, about a pair of intergalactic robots, and The Nut Job, about a squirrel and rat duo that work together to find food. The firm’s VP Thom Chapman jokes that the extra revenue stream it is starting to get from gaming is like “pennies from Heaven.”

Toonbox recently released Bolts & Blip: Quest of the Battle-Bots, a game for the iPad and iPhone, in partnership with Korean animation studio RedRover and app maker LeftRight Studios. The £0.69 (US$1) title is a good way for kids to interact with the show, claims Chapman, who says the development also made good financial sense compared with other gaming options. “A console game is just a lot more work and not as cost-effective as doing an iPad game and we wanted to keep the game as high quality as possible as far as the animation and the image quality are concerned. We felt we could only really achieve that going through an iPad,” says Chapman.

Though he admits the game was something of an afterthought, with the firm only starting work on it after the show was complete, Toonbox is now working on a social game tie-in for its upcoming animated series The Beet Party. It also plans to launch a game ahead of a planned feature film spin-off of The Nut Job, “to start getting some brand recognition out there.”

Japhat Asher, executive producer at UK kids broadcaster CBBC, quips that with the amount of traffic its site gets, the diginet’s TV shows “are brilliant advertisements for the great games that we have online.”

“On CBBC online, games are by far our most popular content. It’s fair to say that it’s often the case that we get more traffic going through the main games page than through the homepage,” he says.

To capitalise on this, CBBC is working to take a more “iterative approach” to its online, web-based gaming strategy. This can be seen with The Beakeriser, a game spin-off from the CBBC TV hit Tracey Beaker, which Asher says is among the most popular content CBBC has had online over the past year-and-a-half. The kidcaster is currently working with games studio Agency 42 to add new functionality and games to the title.

CBBC, which lets out the majority of its development work to third parties, is also looking to apply successful games mechanics to different properties: “We currently have a game called Dick & Dom Let Rip!, which is based on what we call a ‘flinger game,’ a catapult-style mechanic – a bit Angry Birds, I guess. But we’re finding it is a mechanic that kids love and that’s applicable to other brands,” says Asher.

In addition, the BBC’s broader online aim is to offer 10 core services (including CBBC) across four screens – television, PC, smartphone and tablet – and as such the channel is focused on continuing its online gaming experience on more platforms.

Turner Broadcasting System Europe’s director of digital entertainment Louise Okafor says that “mobile is becoming more and more important” for her firm too, though the Cartoon Network parent has previously concentrated heavily on online games.

On Turner’s Cartoon Network site, games linked to TV shows like Ben 10 are proving the most popular. The Ben 10 Game Creator, which lets kids build their own custom Ben 10 game, has notched up around 1.8 billion worldwide plays since it launched in 2008.

As an action show, Ben 10 has been easy to adapt into a number of different spin-off games titles, Okafor says. However, she warns that “not all brands lend themselves to gaming.”

To try to find a logical gaming fit with one Cartoon Network hit, The Amazing World of Gumball, the firm decided to focus on a single part of the show. “There are lots of characters in there, but it is a very situational sort of show. So what we did was take just one element of it – an action element – and then put much more of a comic spin on it.” The result, Suburban Karate Master, created by UK studio Pre-Loaded, has now had 75 million game plays since the summer.

Outside the core kids’ market, production companies from across the TV industry are also tapping into the kids’ gaming space by producing spin-off mobile device apps aimed at the family market.

New Zealand-based digital studio Runaway is one example. A subsidiary of factual television producer NHNZ, it recently brought out a premium iPhone and iPad game called Howling Mouse in partnership with Nat Geo Wild – a brand extension based on the adventures of a scorpion-killing Arizona grasshopper mouse.

“While our games are accessible to a younger market, they’re very inclusive in that they’re played by all ages. With that said, we do think there is an opportunity for the key factual brands to utilise the pedigree of their brand to attract a younger audience through games content,” explains Runaway director Tim Nixon.

Similarly, UK-based indie Wide Eyed Entertainment recently secured an ‘app of the week’ accolade from Apple for the spin-off iPad app of its feature-length TV show March of the Dinosaurs. With the app priced at £5.49, Wide Eyed CEO Jasper James says this is not purely a marketing exercise. “We’re an independent production company that doesn’t have thousands of people. We have to put our time into stuff that can actually create money. Our feeling about this, the way we look at it, is go big or go home.”

Produced with UK-based app maker Touch Press, the app is “part storybook, part reference work,” says James, and was “not as expensive as many TV shows.” The firm is now looking to develop more of its properties in this way and says doing so starts to make sense financially when it costs a “lot less than an hour of any programme.”

Even the other end of the demographic spectrum, Zodiak Kids, which mainly focuses on preschool properties, is pursuing an active app policy. The firm recently brought out an iPad app for its Little Princess series, Little Princess – I Want To Play!, which was developed by Neon Play subsidiary Jick Jack and is priced at US$2.99.

Zodiak Rights’ senior VP of strategy and planning, consumer products, Jennifer Lawlor explains: “In the past 12 to 18 months, everything you see has a digital strategy. Anyone who doesn’t have one is missing out. There are properties that are reversing the trend, that are coming from digital – things like Moshi Monsters – so it becomes very prevalent that we as licensors think you have to have the full mix.”

Mind Candy’s decision to expand its Moshi Monsters brand from online games to online video may reverse the trend of games growing out of TV shows, but the example is not unique. Angry Birds maker Rovio revealed last year it is making a spin-off TV series to accompany its massively popular mobile game, while video game maker Ubisoft has also set up a studio arm called Ubisoft Motion Pictures to turn its properties into TV shows and films.

Though there are interesting example of the two-way traffic between the games and TV industries, Lawlor doesn’t see this as anything new. “I come from the background of things like Pokemon, which was coming from Nintendo and was very much a video game with trading cards.”

Nicole Blake, executive VP of global marketing and consumer products at US production house Classic Media, agrees. “Kids IP comes from whenever there’s something that starts to resonate with children, that they want to interact with. It can come from publishing, TV, a movie, a band or a stationery product. It can come from almost anywhere. Gaming is just the latest addition to that.”

Classic owns popular TV-based IP such as Lassie, He-Man and Casper the Friendly Ghost but chose Where’s Wally? as the starting point for its app-based game strategy in 2009. Though a short-lived TV show in the 1990s, the Where’s Wally? franchise (Where’s Waldo? in the US) has become a global hit thanks to its long-running series of picture books, which have sold some 55 million copies to date and have been translated into 30 languages.

Blake says the inherent search-and-find play pattern in the Where’s Wally? books translated easily to mobile games, with a string of Wally games now available for various mobile phones and a third iOS game due to launch in 2012 to coincide with the property’s 25th anniversary (Classic bought the rights to the brand in 2007). The firm is also currently in development with MGM Studios on a Where’s Wally? film.

“I don’t think kids today differentiate between TV and games. They see it all as entertainment and it’s all driven by the character and the brand,” says Christina Glorioso, chief marketing officer at video game publisher Majesco Entertainment.

Majesco has focused in recent years on the console-based casual gaming market, developing titles for motion-sensitive games systems like the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation Move and Xbox 360 Kinect, as well as hand-held systems like the Nintendo DS and PSP. However, it also works on PC, Facebook and iOS games.

The firm recently launched a dancing game for Kinect, Wii and Nintendo DS consoles to tie in with the latest Alvin & the Chipmunks film, titled Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. Majesco worked with 20th Century Fox and Bagdasarian Productions, the firm that created the Alvin franchise.

Glorioso has high hopes for the game, thanks to the popularity of the brand, claiming that parents will buy the game for their children because they remember the characters from their own childhood. However, Majesco is also looking to turn one of its gaming properties, Cooking Mama, into a video series after it performed well as a string of games for the Nintendo DS, Wii and on Facebook.

“We’re exploring different business models. That would be video, which could be anything from television to movies to even direct-to-video with a big retailer. We’re also exploring other licensed products – the whole gamut,” says Glorioso.

Though gaming is increasingly taking up the time and affections of kids, TV firms are seeing the opportunities this can provide, while the importance of TV is shown by games firms continuing to try to push into this space.

Tim Westcott, an analyst at media-focused research house IHS, claims that interactive technology may affect traditional TV in the long term but this threat has been overstated, with “more significant disruption” so far coming from the fragmentation of audiences because of the multiplication of channels.

As CBBC’s Asher concludes: “The numbers tell us that our age group at CBBC – between seven and 12 – is watching just as much TV as ever, and in some cases more. So it’s not that there is some drop-off in television and they’re all going to play games now. However, there is clearly a real love of games and when you can bring together a great game with a great brand you’ve got a very powerful combination.”

Andrew McDonald
06-03-2012
©C21MediaSHOWS: Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, Angry Birds, Ben 10, Bolts & Blip, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Dick & Dom Let Rip!, He-Man, Kung Fu Panda, Lassie, Little Princess, March of the Dinosaurs, Moshi Monsters, Pokemon, SpongeBob SquarePants, Suburban Karate Master, The Amazing World of Gumball, The Beakeriser, The Nut Job, Waybaloo