The makers of child-aimed social trading-card game Fight My Monster have just announced that they have reached their one millionth player. It’s aimed at boys aged between 3 and 11, but the average-aged player is 10 years old (10.4 to be precise).
According to the makers, the under-13 crowd is a tough sell in the gaming world. Keeping them engaged is even tougher. Fight My Monster has managed to do both so far. The challenge, the creators say, is getting the word out. Children under 13 may not always be granted access to social networking sites (like Facebook and Twitter) or personal email accounts.
They also claim four times the engagement of Moshi Monsters (a monster-based online world for kids) and almost twice that of Facebook among children in the UK.
Dylan Collins for Fight My Monster spoke with GamesBeat about the title and its growth, saying that they are the “fastest growing online game for boys in the UK.” Players have generated more than six million cards to date, and Fight My Monster has seen more than 32 million battles.
According to him, companies like Activision, Jakks Pacific, and Nickelodeon have each spent somewhere in the realm of $35 to $50 million to create titles such as Skylanders and Monkey Quest to cater to young boys. “We’ve done it with what they spend on a good night out,” says Collins, “$150k, to be exact.”
They’ve managed to raise $2.1 million in funding and have already gathered major investing from big names such as Greycroft Partners, eVentures, and some well-known angel investors. However, they’ve yet to touch that money. Those aren’t bad numbers for a company that just hired its fifth employee.
He adds that Fight My Monster is seeing “runaway playground growth” and has gathered “significant interest from the licensing world,” such as a TV production deal with BrownBag Films (which is behind Disney’s Doc McStuffins).
Collins thinks that some of the success comes from the fact that Fight My Monster is actually a trading-card game, “I think the reason we’ve grown so fast is that we’re not a virtual world. We’re an online trading-card game. Most of our direct competition is very much the former or a clone of the former.”
Check out the nice little infographic they put together: Fight My Monster Reaches 1 Million
More info at: Fight My Monster.
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