Dr. Mike North likes building stuff. A lot. At the start of his Sunday morning SXSW panel, North showed video of a trip to Lithuania, where he and a bunch of other engineers decided to build a snowbike by replacing the front wheel of a bicycle with a small pair of skis. North showed footage from the television show he used to host on the Discovery channel, Prototype This!, where he and his team built (amongst other things) a suspended, spinning plastic ring that became, for all intents and purposes, an infinite water slide.
These days, however, North is in the toy business as the Chief Technology Officer for Nukotoys, but he still likes to build things. Quickly. And tinker with them quickly. And iterate them constantly to make them as engaging as possible. Quickly. North says that’s an advantage that small companies like Nukotoys has over the bigger players in the industry. The “monolithic” companies like Mattel and Hasbro, as North described them, have so many internal steps and bureaucracies that they “mostly innovate through acquisition.”
There’s also a new potential headache for the toy giants. The iPad was the number one request gift by children last year, a fact which “scares the shit” out of the Hasbros and Mattels of the world, North said.
“Here comes this app store that’s gonna eat their lunch,” said North.
How to combine North’s love of the prototyping process with the popularity of the iPad? And how to make something that’s not merely a video game but also a toy, a physical object that encourages creative play? Nukotoys decided that it had to be “a video game company that parents could get behind.” That meant no violence, no digital bodies littering the ground, and products that held some educational and creative value.
The solution to all of these problems has come in the form of trading cards, real tangible objects that interact with Nukotoys’s various iPad games when touched to the device. Want to play as a giraffe in the Nukotoys Animal Planet game, Wildlands? Touch that game’s card to the pad. Touch another one to make your animal zebra striped, even if it’s an elephant. (A discovery North said his young playtesters found unbelievably hilarious.)
The iteration and tweaking comes into the picture when Nukotoys can tweak the effect of the cards on the games whenever it wants, based on data gathered about how the cards are used.
North calls it the “toys-as-a-service” model, and it seems to be working for Nukotoys so far. Pointing out sales figures for Skylanders and Minecraft ($500 million in U.S. sales and $80 million since launch, respectively), the Chief Technology Officer for Nukotoys jokes that his company was catching up.
Smiling, North allowed himself a small boast.
“We’re the number one kid’s game in Bulgaria.”
Comments are closed.