Megaton's Cat Channon and Matt Yeo

There's two things. One, the reason it's never been done before is because is because getting it right is really hard. Two, we at the Eurogamer Network have been looking at doing a kids site for a number of years, but there wasn't really enough research to be able to know how children moved around the online space, what children wanted from a videogaming website and how best to provide them with that content. Fortunately, through years of talking to the industry and lots of focus testing, working with various people from big, interactive teams and talking to them about their research and conducting our own, we've been able to establish what we kids want and create a website off the back of it.

Mainstream games magazines have always catered to an older audience and the research we've done shows that kids have picked up the official Nintendo magazine but it's got too many words in it for them, it's pages of text. Or they'll pick up something like GamesMaster but it's got inappropriate games in terms of age ratings and such. A few publishers have tried to break into this market before and the problem has been they've understood gaming but they haven't understood kids. They've taken mainstream gaming content and are almost reskinning it for kids. But it's a different market and they're not great readers - boys are particularly bad - so what we do it concentrate on being visually lead. There is text on there so kids do get something to read, but it's about nuggets of information and boiling facts down to basics and presenting them in an entertaining and visually lead way.

The reaction from the industry has been really, really good. Publishers have been wanting something like this for a very long time and they're very supportive of it. They're very keen that this is just the beginning for Megaton magazine and the website. From the Eurogamer forum the feedback has been incredibly vocal and valuable because they are very honest in what they think and what they say, and they've come up with some really interesting points. It's going to be a continual work in progress to get the site exactly where we want it to be. We'll work with our audience, spend time with the kids and keep checking on new research to make sure that we're providing them with something that is actually fun to engage with. We wanted to make something that effectively is to kids sites what Eurogamer is to games sites. One of the things that makes Eurogamer so successful is it provides the audience with what it wants in a quality package. That's what we're aiming for with Megaton.

We're working on issue three and it's definitely the magazine that we first set out to do when we decided to create the first videogames magazine for kids. The response has been really good, we've done some research with kids recently and what was interesting was we asked them if they bought games magazines and they said “no, we didn't think there were any for kids”. So it really feels like we're tapping in to an untapped market. The best response has been from the games industry. For years the games industry has been crying out for a magazine that caters to kids and a dedicated website, and we feel that we fit into that. It's great that we're able to fit into the games industry and take a lot of titles that are often overlooked by the mainstream games press and we're able to shine a spotlight on them and go into a lot more detail on those titles. We can still cover the bigger titles like FIFA but also the titles that may have been overlooked previously. A game like Scribblenauts is a good example. We covered it in issue two and we thought that if kids knew it existed it's something they would get a lot of enjoyment out of. Really the games industry has been very supportive and understanding of what we're trying to do. I think they're looking at what we're doing with the magazine and the website and realising actually what the potential is for working together to promote kids videogames.

There are the one's who love everything and say it's all brilliant, so we've tried to speak in very general terms and not go in stating “this is our website and this is what we do” because then it just becomes about you. The feedback tends to be far more honest if you show them material in more general terms. We've done a certain amount of focus testing with the magazine guys as well and that feedback has been really good. It's difficult because quite often kids will suggest something that seems to make absolute sense off the back of one class of eight year-olds. But then we'll talk two two classes of nine year-olds and they'll say the complete opposite. So it's about taking it all on board and looking at the average combined with what we already know factored on our research, to find the best solution to make as many of the audience as happy as possible.

In terms of understanding your target audience we spent ten years producing highly successful kids magazines with Toxic and the official Ben 10 magazine, and that was about knowing what are the key drivers and triggers for kids, spending time with them and just asking them what they want. As adults making entertainment for children you may think you've got it right but until you sit down with them and ask them what they think you never really know. The research that gives you is absolutely fascinating, it always surprises us and makes us think “that's a great idea.”

There's an awful lot of great content out there. It's quite clear that with all the major kids sites that they have their own agendas, which is logical in terms of them being commercial ventures. Sometimes that can be pushed too far and become a compromise to what they are enjoying.

The point is we want the kids that visit the site to be the kids that enjoy playing games and have an interest in videogames. But according to our research and experience focus testing, they don't want to know about games in the same way that a Eurogamer audience wants to know about games. They want to be able to play with something, they don't have a long attention span. So telling them that something is coming out six months or a year off, which is where most PR and marketing campaigns start, really isn't that interesting for them, it's like dangling a carrot that's unreachable.

But if you give them an opportunity to play with the characters that are going to be in the game or engage with the environment, it's much more interesting. Offer them something for free, offer them something they can do or physically make and is fun with their friends then it is of interest to them. It is a commercial entity but the only reason it will work is if the kids are having fun and they are enjoying it. If we chuck out a load of ads on a website, that's not fun and your average 8-12 year old isn't going to come back and look at it. But if they can come back to somewhere that they can engage with their favourite characters and games and learn with something new and play well then they'll enjoy that.

Fundamentally kids aren't stupid, they're far more fickle than an adult audience and if there's nothing but a hard sell in it for them it just won't work.

I think the industry is keen to change and open to change. At the moment there isn't a dedicated kids gaming website. Internal resources at publishers are often very stretched and there are a lot of creative developers and marketeers out there who do have ideas about how to reach this audience, but just haven't had the opportunity to do it, by either not being able to outsource the work or there hasn't been the right media outlet.

The basic proposition of Megaton is what appealed to us. We knew we wanted to do a kids website and the Skyjack guys came to us because they wanted to do a games site. They have great experience because they launched Toxic and Ben 10 magazines and we've obviously got experience with games. The proposition of videogames and big robots online just seemed like a marriage made in heaven. The way it works is we license their content from the magazine and as the site grows we'll become more about creative content, downloadable content and playable content. We will continue to seek a certain level of editorial content and inspiration from the magazine but the website will become a different entity simply because to repurpose everything from the magazine online – its doesn't work because you're not making the most of the content and the medium. The web is interactive and magazines are great in the home and they're both different propositions, and we need to play to those strengths.

Yes, and again, it's something we've been doing for some time now. Quite a few mainstream videogame journalists that we've approached to do work for us have actually struggled with writing for kids. They usually have the luxury of many pages to write across and explain a game in detail, but for Megaton when it comes to writing for kids you have to condense it down. It's almost like caption writing but that's not to say there's not a skill to it. It's about condensing it down into as few words as possible whilst making it entertaining and funny and that's a real skill. It's tricky, writers struggle with that. As an adult reading the website you sort of think this is fluff or basic information but when it comes to kids reading that information that's the detail they're looking for and that's the way they want text presented to them.