MOMitization!

Monetizing kids via mom

This is a huge topic but one I’ve been immersed in for years. I have seven kids ages 2-30.? It is shocking to me how utterly ignorant the entire game market is about kid gamers.? When I was first getting into online game publishing over twenty years ago, I had a lot of eye-opening moments that I thought would be common knowledge today given how big the game market is… nope.? If anything everyone in the game business has gotten dumber over the years.? The ones who aren’t dumber are sometimes exploiting kids which isn’t exactly an improvement.??Sadly the vast of majority of market data we see on gaming demographics contains and amplifies this total confusion about who the customer really is for a game. Adults who are buying games for their kids (~50% of all game purchases) are usually confused with being the customer for the game.

What are the important properties of kid gamers that make them worth understanding really well?

1. Everyone through the age of 17 has no means of paying you!? Selling a game through mom is completely different from selling a game to Jr! Jr. has no money!
2. They’re hugely viral little game marketing machines to their peers AND their parents
3. They lie about their age to get adult accounts
4. They steal money from their parents
5. They don’t have $1000 iPhones, or $3000 gamer rigs, those are their parents machines
6. Most modern parents are ALSO gamers
7. PARENTS buying games for kids is >50% of the revenue in gaming, kids under 13 are ~30% of the money in gaming

So it’s really valuable to identify when you have a kid gamer, but kid gamers lie about their age online, they’re often using their parents' devices and accounts. You also take on legal liability when you ask someone's age and they say they’re under 13.? So how do you detect that you probably have have a kid gamer analytically and what do you do with them once you’ve figured it out?

As described in a previous article titled “Get your money for nothing and your clicks for free”, you get the user hooked on your game, get them to the point of maximum intent-to-purchase, and if they don’t purchase at that point, odds are very good you have a kid.? There’s a slight flaw with this thesis, which is that various payment platforms have done a great job of making it much easier for kids to sneak-purchase apps that mom doesn’t notice or care about on her credit card.? So you can get a lot of false negatives these days, which we’ll discuss separately.?

For the sake of discussion, lets just suppose that you’ve got your metrics tuned to detect kids with high accuracy, what do you do now?? Mom doesn’t buy her kids games because the kids like them, mom buys the kids games to shut them up.? Games are cheap daycare for parents.? That fact is an entire massive demographic difference in how you upsell games that nobody seems to get.? There’s one game company that really gets this and makes billions out of everyone else’s total ignorance on this point.? Nintendo is the only game company I know of that knows their entire brand is about selling games through parents and grandparents.? It’s the best-kept trade secret in gaming history.??

I’m exaggerating a little bit, way back in the 1990’s stores had PC game isles with entire sections of educational games.? Hundreds of them.? Back before the internet, computers were too expensive to let kids play with and kids couldn’t try games to see if they liked them, they were stuck with whatever educational crap mom bought them.? Those were the days when kids thought Reader Rabbit was the best game ever made.? So when parents had total control over the content their kids consumed for entertainment… they bought educational games!? My how times have changed.? Today parents will shell out for R***x just to keep their kids from trading sexual favors with online pedophiles to “earn” them.??

The problem is that the gamer kids sharing devices and accounts with parent gamers can be really analytically confusing.? One clear kid signal is not purchasing despite being hooked.? Teenagers often have their own devices these days, so they’re actually easier to detect, but when is mom letting the younglings use her device?? Not during school, not during breakfast, lunch, dinner or late at night.? It’s usually middle of the day on weekends and just after dinner… and in the car… which is moving… if your mobile game device is moving fast, you've probably got a kid playing in a car.

The point is, mom will buy a game she trusts, that is reliable at shutting up the kids.? Mom doesn’t trust and doesn’t value virtual goods or microtransactions.? Mom is good for a small subscription for young kids or a one off purchase.? If the game is confusing to kids, is loaded with tricky upsells, all the stuff that may work fine for adults with their own money, mom won’t buy it!? As a game developer trying to maximize revenue, if you can’t tell the difference between an adult gamer with their own means of payment and a kid gamer relying on mom to purchase, you usually throw the baby out with the bath water (literaly). The great brilliance of the Minecraft business model was recognizing that it was a game purchased for young kids by parents.?

Not to name names but suppose you make the mistake of crapping up Angry Nerds 2 with upsells and commerce gimmicks until it’s hopeless to buy it for your kids to play because they constantly need help and can’t be trusted not to run up a $200 app store bill.? What a shame!? Because Angry Nerds 2 is a great educational game if only they hadn’t ruined it for children!? My kids WANT to play it in my lap, I WANT to buy it for them, but I can’t, because they’ll be screaming for help constantly (the opposite of what I’m paying for!) and I’ll get a $200 appstore bill.?

How does this change your game design?? Well if you KNOW via great analytics that your player is probably a kid then you provide them with the support they need to close the deal with mom/dad.??

Remember those Apple iTunes cards that used to hang on the pegs at grocery store checkouts?? That was Apple’s way of helping kids buy music because the kid could just discreetly tip a $25 iTunes card onto the conveyor belt while mom was unloading the cart and never notice what she was purchasing.? *My daughters were really smooth at this trick.? I’m being partly facetious, although it is valuable to note that the retail connection between parents and kids is that they often shop together providing a context for kids to sell mom on a gift card purchase.??

In a purely online setting, once you’ve detected that the kid is hooked on your game, your upsell message and pricing needs to be designed for mom.? Mom wants to know that the game is safe, plausibly educational, trustworthy, cost constrained and most importantly, will keep the kid preoccupied.? The better a game is at occupying a kid the more mom will pay for it.? Game designers, especially mobile ones, constantly screw this up, which is somewhat understanable because Apple hides a lot of the data developers need to identify kid gamers.?

As kid gamers get younger their identity blends even more with their parents online until you reach a fascinating tipping point around the age of 8.? Around the age of 8 kids are literate enough to find their way around text heavy games like Roblox and Minecraft.? Below 8 is the Nintendo world of games like Animal Crossing and anything Mario is where parent and kid play behavior joins.? Text is minimized in favor of dancing icons.? The gaming device is dedicated because the kid is too young to share the iPhone or use the PC.? The purchasing mechanic for the game is simple.? All the characters speak in cute babble, because the audience can't even speak yet.

Mom can’t give young kids her phone to play on while she’s driving, it’s too complicated and distracting.??

Mobile phone makers are stunning idiots for not recognizing this, they lose BILLIONS in app revenues to Nintendo because they don’t grasp the value of a simple console game mode and, I’m going to coin a term here: MOMitization!

What’s really interesting about saying these things to people in the game business, is that they nod politely and ignore it.? They don’t hear it anywhere else, so it's a novelty observation.? To illustrate just how huge the disconnect is I’d like to direct people to try the following search on youtube; “5 little ducks”? Just scroll down the list of results and think about what those viewer numbers must mean.? Content targeting children under 5 is the #1 source of youtube clicks!? When you see 9 billion hits on “Baby Shark” consider the demographic for that video:

1. Can’t read, text, Tweet, post, share, link or hashtag!
2. Can’t use a computer without sitting in an adults lap
3. There are only 10 million toddlers in the US, they’d have to watch the same video ~1000 times each to hit those numbers!

Over the years video games have become so popular that TV viewership has collapsed for all age groups and demographics except one… toddlers.? Because they’re too young to play games without supervision, parents still use the TV as a babysitter for that age group.? This is significant because over 40% of all modern parents are also gamers themselves. Parents want to play games with their young kids but the TV is a simpler babysitter because aside from Nintendo, mobile device makers are hopelessly naive about this demographic.

Why is this important?? If billions of adults are sitting with illiterate toddlers in their laps watching 5 little ducks videos over and over and over… who is telling other parents to watch them?? Adults are!? The content virality among kids and parents is enormous.? In the school age ranges kids are hugely viral among themselves because the games they play is all they talk about with their friends at school.? Below 8 parents become hugely viral for kids content but because game companies (other than Nintendo) don’t recognize or know how to capitalize on the phenomena, the viral traffic goes to youtube videos and TV instead.?

Before the era of Smart Phones, Nintendo sold billions of dollars a year worth of GameBoys.? Parents bought them to occupy their kids.? Today Nintendo sells roughly 8 MILLION Nintendo Switches a year for $300 bucks each in the US because the mobile phone platforms don’t understand the relationship between parents and their kid's media consumption.? To be fair to the mobile game developers, there’s not much point in making kid friendly apps if a parent would never trust their kids with their phones.

*One of the reasons I keep having kids is to use them for social experiments.? I gave the Toddler my phone to play with to see what happened.? What a disaster.? Turn your back for a second and they’ve put the phone in Spanish language mode, turned on the flashlight and called 911.??

To summarize:

It’s important to think hard about kids in game design because;

1. They literally can’t pay you, only their parents can (0-17)
2. They are the foundation of most game virality (8-17)
3. There is a massive demographic of parent-gamers whose behavior is both viral and monetizable if you understand it. (2-8)

If you know when you’re dealing with a kid, you can adapt your pricing and presentation to sell through the parent instead of simply failing to monetize.? At some point I'll presume to speculate as to how Web 3.0 game developers should think about this when it comes to designing crypto games.