Game play reinvented for children

MANILA, Philippines - Much of the known world has turned turtle when the world turned digital from books to music and movies to gaming. What is it like now to be a kid born in the Internet era with all the gadgets and technologies at one’s disposal?

Children still make trips to the toy store and even the mom-and-pop shops in the neighborhood. But most kids in the United States and much of the developed world also get scratch cards that dish out random codes entitling them to a round of play on the toymaker’s website.

That’s how it goes, at least for two very popular kiddie games in the US - ActionJetz and Sqwishland.

ActionJetz is an educational online airplane game for kids and the young at heart. But to enter this virtual world of aviation, one needs a pass code provided for free when one buys an Actionjetz airplane at the toy store.

The plane is not your ordinary plastic or rubber plane, though. It’s die cast metal and a collector’s item in itself that sells for $19.99. The pass code entitles the kid to navigate the Actionjetz world, select an avatar, play mini games, and talk to other players in the true marriage of the online and offline worlds.

Another game, Sqwishland, takes off from the popular fun pencil toppers that school children love. Like Actionjetz, Sqwishland sells sqwishes or soft collectible animal figures that could be used as pencil toppers at vending machines in the US for 25 cents and carries a pass code that entitles one to join the Sqwishland world online.

Sqwishes are very much like the candy, bubblegum and small toys we find in vending machines in groceries and hypermarkets.

Though the jets and the sqwishes are not available in the Philippines, the design team of the game development company that brought this innovative game play, Funguy Studio, is based in Manila and has a manufacturing base in China.

It’s one thing to develop a killer app and completely another thing to find the elusive business model that will bring in revenue. But Funguy Studio somehow found a way to connect the missing, often invisible dots between game creation and sound business strategy.

Specializing in casual massively multiplayer online (MMO) game and creating platforms for high-quality games available through premium content subscription, free-to-play and micro-transaction models, Funguy Studio is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona and a partnership between Filipino game developer Darwin Jerome Tardio and Graeme Warring, a 20-year veteran of entrepreneurship and building youth-oriented brands.

 Niche gaming market

It was a niche gaming market and the combination of skills of Tardio and Warring that proved to be the potent brew for the market success of Actionjetz and Sqwishland game plays.

In an interview, Tardio said that as of April this year, around 30,000 Actionjetz had been sold in the market, only two years after the game’s inception. Sqwishland, on the other hand, has sold millions of sqwishes in vending machines through Brand Vending.

Tardio disclosed that hardcore gaming for teenagers and young adults is already an overcrowded market that he and partner Warring decided to focus on educational online games for children, taking also into consideration their respective professional expertise.

The idea of the vending machine as a retail outlet for small toys is ripe in the sense that it is widely deployed in convenience stores, movie theaters, gas stations, malls, train stations, airports, bus terminals, arcades, theme parks, and even pizza parlors in America.

There are actually around 3.7 million vending heads in the US and the potential market size of this retail space is around $465 million a year. Between May 2010 and April 2011, it is estimated that 58 million Sqwishland characters will be sold by Brand Vending.

Tardio said Funguy Studio, which now has a staff of 50 in Manila, expects to launch in other markets in Europe and Asia in the near future, and possibly in the Philippines when vending machines for small toys becomes more widespread in the country.

In the meantime, the company is expanding at a rapid pace in the country. From only four game developers with Tardio at the helm, the Manila team is now composed of 50 staffers.

Bright future

Tardio, who sits in the board of the Game Development Association of the Philippines (GDAP), said the future is bright for game development in the Philippines, considering the talent that abounds in the country.

In the US alone, game development is said to be a $90-billion industry and still growing. It is just a matter of continuously attracting young people to take on game development as a profession, Tardio said.

Tardio is himself a classic example of a veteran hardcore teenage gamer who transformed his youthful passion into a profession and made it big. He said he played the stuff most gamers in his generation were into - from Atari to Counterstrike to War Craft – before tucking in a Computer Science degree and eventually crossing over to coding and action scripts.

From tech to business and the continuous, ever-evolving loop of the online and offline worlds, Tardio is right at the center. Long after he coded his first program, he could very well say again, “Hello, World.”