Activision Publishing is one of the world’s largest video game companies (and a division of Activision Blizzard), and it’s been printing money for years with its $2 billion Skylanders franchise, which brings toys to life through a clever combination of toys and video games. To date, it’s sold more than 200 million Skylanders toys, and it is one of the top-20 video game series of all time.
In continuation of its dominance in the genre, the company launched Skylanders Trap Team, the fourth installment of the series, on Oct. 5, and it received decent reviews. But the company continued its streak of innovation by adding a new tablet version to chase after the kids and young adults who are starting to play games exclusively on mobile devices. That’s what it will take to hold off challengers in the toy-game market like Nintendo’s Amiibo and Disney’s Infinity.
Skylanders: Trap Team uses near-field communications to communicate data between the toy figurines, a wireless game controller, and an iPad, Android, or Fire OS device. It doesn’t have a ton of reviews yet, but the tablet version is rated at 90 out of 100, based on the review aggregator Metacritic. The console versions are rated 79. We talked with Josh Taub, senior vice president of product management at Activision, about the Skylanders tablet version.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Skylanders had apps in the past on iOS, but then you had a gap here. Are you bringing it back from a kind of lull?
Josh Taub: Our business is about the intersection of digital and physical. While we made some high-rated apps with proven mechanics, I think our fanbase looks for, how does that magic come to life? How do we continue around making toys and games together the center of the play pattern? We set out to do that this year with the tablet, making sure that we could put a product in front of the audience that gives them what they want, that intersection.
We did a game called Cloud Patrol, which was a 99-cent swiping mechanic leveraging the art and the character base. We continue to do a resource management game that’s doing very well. We’re happy with that in the market, Lost Islands. We have a third game called Battlegrounds, which was a premium action-adventure game with some different play mechanics. It did have the capacity to bring the toys to life, but it didn’t give kids a controller. It didn’t give any ability to level up the characters over time or travel with them on a journey.
With this year’s innovation — capturing evil and unleashing good, capturing villains and bringing something from the digital world into the physical world — that allows us to capitalize on all those different mechanics in our core product. We’re focused on making one product that’s great across platforms where kids play.
GamesBeat: Do you look at this as a relaunch?
Taub: No, we just look at it as an evolution. This is a triple-A game that, for the first time, is coming out day and date with our main release. Part of this is the technology catching up with our aspiration. Our ability to make this content playable has been nothing short of amazing, from our team up in Albany at Vicarious Visions. They’ve been able to provide an exceptional experience on the tablet.
It’s an evolution of how we view our audience and our mobile business. More than that, though, we think less about the distinct platform experiences and more about how we provide a great experience where our audience plays.
GamesBeat: You’re finding the addition of the wireless game controller makes a big difference?
Taub: We’ve been amazed with how the feel of the gameplay delivers. One of the things that happens, there’s this intimate relationship. Everything is close in. The tablet, in a sense, ceases to be a tablet and becomes a TV sitting right in front of you. That intimate setting, having the portal and your toys all together along with a controller that’s built for kids’ hands, it’s a really satisfying experience. It’s been very well-received. Our review scores are phenomenal. I think we have a 92 now on Metacritic.
Everybody starts off the same way. “I put my hands on this, and I didn’t think it could be pulled off.” Or, “Everybody somehow compromises the graphical experience or gameplay on the tablet.” But Skylanders has delivered. It feels like the exact experience you’re used to on the other platforms. We have trouble pulling people away from it.
GamesBeat: It looks like you don’t mind investing in the kind of things that are necessary to make the tablet part of a better game experience.
Taub: If you look at the four-year evolution of the franchise, you see that we don’t have a problem investing in making incredible products for our audience. Whether it’s that every game is stronger than the previous game, or that we believe there’s a portion of our audience on tablet and so we’ve spent time figuring this out in a meaningful way with both a hardware and software solution, that innovation around digital coming out of the screen and going into the physical world, all of these pieces are investment decisions and decisions around innovation. We prioritize that as important to our audience, delivering something that, year in and year out, is exciting, surprising, and magical.
It’s a long answer to your question, but no, we don’t mind investing if we think there’s a meaningful opportunity for our audience and for the company to participate in something that’s going to have scale.
GamesBeat: Did you get distracted for a while trying to get a touch screen experience to work?
Taub: I don’t think it was distraction. If you look at a lot of the properties out in the world today, creators use them as a way for players to engage in their franchise when they’re away from the core product. It offers different experiences with beloved characters. If you think about great franchises over time, those experiences are available on multiple platforms, multiple screens, and give people a way to interact with their favorite characters.
We did that, but what we realized is that a meaningful scale for us needs to have that intersection of digital and physical. That’s what we’ve prioritized in this effort, and likely going forward.