Playground Antics
Maarten Brands and Ilja Goossens on the challenges of making online products for children
Today we're kicking off a feature set called Kids Week, to celebrate the full launch of children's games site Megaton this week. The interviews this week will focus on the sector of the industry that caters specifically to kids.
First up is a chat with Maarten Brands and Ilja Goossens, co-founders of Virtual Fairground, a company that makes online worlds for children, and is hard at work currently on a project in association with Disney HD cartoon series, called Club Galactik. They explain some of the challenges specific to working in this space, and why they've decided to work with established brands.
We're an interactive entertainment company - we focus on browser-based MMOs and virtual worlds, and basically anything that has a digital distribution angle. We're a very young company, we only started in mid-2008, and we're probably best-known for Flash and browser-based MMOs.
One of the things we do is to focus on working with existing IP and licences, so we're creating an MMO right now called Club Galactik, which is based on the hit animation series called Galactik Football.
We've got some other cartoon projects in the works, some sports licences - basically doing in the online sector what EA and Activision has been doing in the retail space. We saw a niche there, and it's something that we want to fill.
In terms of finding and signing the projects we wanted to do, that's had a somewhat longer gestation period - but it's been within expectations I think, and we're growing quite rapidly. We're now 35 people, so it's hard to grow that, develop a company and build a product within such a short space of time.
But timing-wise, we're along the tracks that we thought would happen.
And we had the plan for some time before - we started working together in mid-2007. Maarten is from traditional retail gaming and I came from the social networking community-building background... so I was the website and he was the gaming. Then we started thinking about where the space was going - we saw that retail distribution wasn't the best model for developers, so we decided to take a different approach. In doing that, the next question was how we could stand out in the crowd, and that's the big challenge with more than 50 virtual worlds out there.
So we made a plan, to look for existing brands - trusted brands - which we could then convert into the interactive medium. Let's say you have a book brand, you want to make it interactive, non-linear and engaging enough for someone to play for nine months...
We took the time to create a good business model, find the right properties, went to comic book fairs... we started thinking three years about about how you can take a toy and connect it to an online world. We ended up with cartoon series' because they have a huge appeal. We decided to go for Galactik Football, because it's going to last for quite a few more years yet.
Because there is a risk that if you find a hit series and start developing the product, by the time you launch it could be declining already, so there are all kinds of factors to take into account.