Mind Candy's Michael Acton Smith
The maker of Moshi Monsters discusses online kids games, as Moshi passes 15m users
Last week, London-based company Mind Candy announced its online kids social game Moshi Monsters had reached a massive 15 million registered users, throwing a party for staff, press and 100 of its young players at the London Aquarium to celebrate.
It was there that GamesIndustry.biz got to catch up with the company's CEO and the mind behind Moshi, Michael Acton Smith - formerly a co-founder of online retailer Firebox.com. And with a small army of young Moshi players trailing his every move, keen to get his autograph on their VIP tickets while digging for information on new Moshi monsters, he explained how Moshi has got to where it is today, and what challenges the kids market in particular has thrown up along the way.
No. I mean, you never know when you launch a new game - anything can happen. And it's quite slow at the beginning. Originally we were adding tens of users a day. It really took a while to get going. But we constantly tweaked and reiterated and polished, got better and better, and hit our tipping point last summer where we went from a million users last year to 15 million now. So we've obviously done something right, and it's been a fantastic journey.
I think the key realisation for us - the penny-dropping moment - was realising that kids love communicating and showing off to their friends just as adults do and if we could build a safe, social space, we could build a site as successful as Facebook is for the kids market.
So when we started adding more of these social features, so they could communicate with their friends - they could add their friends and see their news feed - then suddenly things started going through the roof. And they invited more of their friends to the site. That was a very important point.
Yes, I think that's it. To be honest, when we started we really didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know what the site was. We thought we were a virtual world, we thought we were a puzzle or educational site, we thought we were part a virtual pet. It was a really hobbledy-cobbledy mix. I think good teams and good entrepreneurs constantly look at the data and figure out what their audiences wants and so we constantly tweaked and checked where we were until we got to the point where we realised it's the social features combined with the gaming that makes it so successful.
It's a very different audience to building games for over 13s. Obviously safety is absolutely paramount - we hired the best safety engineers we could find, and spent a lot of time tweaking and ensuring our software and moderation policies were strong.
Aside from that, there are a lot of similarities. Kids love to have fun online and play games as adults do. We make sure it's easy to get into a game and that there's as little friction as possible. There are rewards and level-ups and all the traditional game mechanics you see in grown-up games can still be applied to kids' games.
When we were kids - not that we knew one another - I don't know about you but I had to beg my parents for a videogame, on the ZX Spectrum or whatever system - get down on my hands and knees, have a tantrum... It was Gremlin and Ocean and all those guys. Now it's so different. Kids are in control because they can play games for free. This free-to-play model is incredibly powerful. They can sign up and pay for as much as they want either through micro-transactions or through a subscription. We've found it to be so much more successful. There's no way we'd be at 15 million users if we required every user to sign up. It's not parents discovering these games, it's children finding them and sharing them with their friends and that's how the growth [in Moshi Monsters] has happened.
Absolutely, and that's the way most free-to-play games work because the cost of supporting an additional user is teeny. There are no costs involved because it's all digital content. So we welcome with open arms new players signing up and if one per cent sign up to pay - great. If 10 per cent or 20 per cent sign up - even better. And for these games, because they're so, relatively, cheap to run, you only need a couple of per cent to pay for it to be wildly profitable. So it's a really amazing business. We have gross margins of about 90 per cent, we deal directly with the end consumer. There's no retailers, there's no distributors, there's no money paid to be listed in a store - all these things the traditional boxed videogame industry suffers. It's an incredibly wonderful, efficient business and it's working very well for us so far.
It's a good question and it differs. It depends on the site. So, I've heard everything from one per cent to over 10 per cent in the kids' space. Parents need to feel comfortable with the site, so we ensure that Moshi is not just fun for the kids but that it's safe, and there's an educational component. That definitely helps parents feel happy with paying £5 a month.
The annual subscription to Moshi is £30 - which is about the price of a DS game. So for a year's worth of entertainment, they can sign up to Moshi or buy one DS game, which we think is great value. But I would say that...