The Toy/Game Hybrid: Will It Fly?This week Activision has launched Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, an ambitious attempt to create a hugely successful cross-over between toys and games. Activision isn't the only company doing that this Christmas; Disney is launching AppMates, an integration of toy cars with an iPad. Is this integration of toys and games going to be the Next Big Thing in gaming, or is it just another good idea in search of an audience?
The toy-game hybrid is a cross-over genre that's been tried before without mixed success, most notably with Webkinz, the toy stuffed animals that come with a unique code allowing you access to a virtual version of the pet online. The plush toys have limited online integration, though. Another competitor was Smith & Tinker's Nanovor multiplayer collectable card game/online game combination. Other games and toys have attempted to add online or real-world components; Nintendo has tried this with cards for the 3DS, but this is mostly a demo and not a serious effort to sell a product.
Activision is rolling out the big guns for Skylanders, though. The project was originally budgeted at a typical level for a video game project, but as the concept developed Activision told the developers to go bigger. Ultimately more than 200 developers worked on the game, and the scale of the project puts it more on a level with Call of Duty than a standard release, according to Paul Reiche, head of Toys For Bob, the studio behind Skylanders. No expense was spared in putting the game together, including using top talent like two of the writers behind Toy Story, Alec Socolow and Joel Cohen. The Skylanders project ended up taking an extra year to refine, and Activision has slated a marketing budget to match the scale of the development efforts. Toys R Us is also backing the project in a big way, and early buzz pegs Skylanders as one of the big hits of the holiday season.
One of the keys to Skylanders is the multiplatform nature of the title, and the real utility of the toys in the game. The game is shipping for Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, PC, 3DS, the web, the iPad and the iPhone. The toys work on any platform, and they retain information about your character. So you can play the game at your house on your Xbox 360, and then take your toy over to your friend's house and play with her on her PS3, using all your character information. Players can play cooperatively or competitively, and there are more than 30 characters that sell for $7.99 apiece.
Currently Skylanders has an 82 Metacritic score, but that's on only 4 reviews. Those scores have to be considered skeptically, as the reviewers are certainly not in the target market for the game. The real question is how kids respond to the game, and whether sales will meet Activision's expectations. Given the scale of Activision's investment, they would like to see millions of units sold this quarter, and enough enthusiasm to warrant a long series of add-ons and expansions. This could be as big as the music game genre, if it hits the right audience in the right way. (Of course, we all remember what happened to the music game genre after a couple of years of strong sales.) Activision's marketing campaign will be an important factor in the success of this game. Activision has to not only make people aware of the game, they have to explain what this unusual product is and why it's cool.
Activision isn't the only company with dreams of combining toys and games. Disney's Appmates are special cars from Cars 2 that use your iPad as a virtual playmat. You get to run the cars over the iPad and use their special abilities, so the car in effect becomes your controller. The iPad will recognize each different car and customize the experience to go along with the car. Of course, mom or dad will have to surrender their iPad to the kids, which may turn out to be a big stumbling block. Then again, you have all the marketing muscle of Disney behind this, and they have had an app (Where's My Water?) overtake Angry Birds in the App Store in the paid apps category. So you have to take them seriously.
Another player in the toy/game hybrid space is Nukotoys, seeking to bring collectible trading cards to life with the iPhone, the iPod, and the PC, and working with licenses from the Ology book series (Monsterology, etc.) and Animal Planet. They have enlisted a number of experts to help them, including Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering and the Pokemon trading card games. Their cards use NFC (Near Field Communication) along with a small scanner that plugs into a USB port; the scanner should be less than $20, and a pack of cards should be even lower.
More distantly, Nokia has rolled out some NFC-enabled games, which are another way to integrate real-world objects with games. These are more demo apps than fully realized games, and of course without an installed base of NFC enabled phones this technology won't get off the ground. Eventually, though, it's likely that both Android and iOS phones will come with built-in NFC chips, and you can bet games will be one of the apps to take advantage of them. Nokia's efforts right now are just an illustration of what can happen when the hardware is commonplace.
The toy/game hybrid genre is going to receive a lot of marketing dollars and attention this holiday season. The real question is whether or not kids will respond as they have to other hit toys in the past. If a toy/game hybrid becomes one of the must-have toys, the sales could be huge. Of course, there are plenty of toys every year that come out and don't catch on, ending up in the remainder section with a big discount sticker. Unfortunately, there's no good way to tell which path a toy will end up on before committing to the development, production and marketing costs. With multiple companies trying to succeed with this general concept, we'll see a lot of awareness of the idea. Whether that translates into sales is something we won't know until next year.
