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From Club Penguin to Imagine Island: Building Games That Last a Generation
44 Plays29 days ago
📖 Episode Summary:
This episode of Player Driven, in collaboration with Community Clubhouse, dives into the future of kids' gaming and digital safety. Greg speaks with Karin Johnson, co-founder of Magic Potion Games and a former leader at Club Penguin and Fortnite, along with Kieran Donovan, founder of K-ID and a regulatory compliance expert. Together, they explore how studios can build engaging, age-appropriate games while staying ahead of global compliance challenges. From the development of Imagine Island to the regulatory maze K-ID helps developers navigate, this is a must-listen for anyone creating games for younger audiences.
🔑 Key Topics Covered:
- The rise of Imagine Island as a spiritual successor to Club Penguin
- Why building “kids-first” (not just kid-appropriate) matters
- How K-ID simplifies global compliance across age bands, chat, and monetization
- Best practices for launching safe online games with embedded trust and safety
- The business value of early compliance and community-focused design
- How emerging web game platforms are helping studios reach more players
💡 Highlight Quotes:
“We’re not just building a safe game, we’re building one our own kids would play.” – Karin Johnson“Compliance is no longer optional. It’s a foundation for smart monetization and trust.” – Kieran Donovan
“The rules are evolving fast. One week it’s Europe, the next it’s Indonesia. Studios need to plan now.” – Greg Posner
📌 Resources & Links:
🎯 Who Should Listen:
- Game designers building for Gen Alpha
- Studio leads exploring COPPA and GDPR-K compliance
- LiveOps and trust and safety professionals
- Community managers seeking to scale safe social play
- Parents curious about the future of kid-friendly gaming
📣 Call to Action:
Enjoyed the conversation? Subscribe to Player Driven for more episodes that blend player experience, safety, and smart business strategy. Leave a review and share this episode with fellow game developers, educators, and community leads.
Recommended
Transcript
Building Kid-First Games
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Player Driven. Here's what you're about to listen to. Today we are partnering again with Community Clubhouse to provide a conversation between Karen Johnson, the co-founder and chief product officer at Magic Potion Games, along with Kieran Donovan, the founder of KID.
00:00:17
Speaker
We talk about why it's important to build kid first, not just kid appropriate games and what the differences between that are. The Rise of Imagine Island, the game from Magic Potion, and how it's a spiritual successor brought to you by the people who helped create Club Penguin.
Global Compliance and Monetization in Kids' Games
00:00:31
Speaker
And we also talk about KID and how they help global compliance and how they provide a path to monetization. um and best practices for launching a safe and online community. The guests have such great chemistry together. It's a really insightful and fun episode, and we hope you enjoy it. And if you've been a longtime listener of the podcast, or maybe this is your first episode, please be sure to subscribe, like it, share with someone that you might think get out of it. It really goes a long way, and we appreciate it, and we hope you enjoy today's episode.
00:01:04
Speaker
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Player Driven Podcast. Greg here. Today we have another joint episode with Community Clubhouse that I'm really excited about. We are meeting with Karen Johnson. She is the chief product officer and co-founder at Magic Potion Games.
00:01:19
Speaker
And Kieran Donovan, he is the founder of KID. I am super excited because kids games are something that's super exciting to me, something that's really fun and passionate to talk about. Before we do go on, Karen. Kieran, thanks for joining me.
Magic Potion Games and Safe Environments
00:01:32
Speaker
Karen, how is your day going?
00:01:34
Speaker
Great. Yeah, just, you know, having my coffee. Sunny day in Raleigh, North Carolina. Can't complain. How do you take your coffee here? It's nine o'clock in the morning. Just a little bit of cream. That's it. It's all I need. All right. There we go.
00:01:45
Speaker
And Kieran, it is bright and early for you. You are joining us from Games Beat Summit. How are you going? Doing? I'm great. I'm great. It's been, yeah, it's been an amazing couple of days out here and great to hang out with everyone and excited to join the podcast.
00:02:00
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited to have both of you on this podcast. I think the two products you two represent are very ah telling for what community clubhouse believe in and the things that they want to accomplish. They have kids games. They want to make sure players are safe in these communities. They want to keep building up these communities and encourage best practices. And you both have both games and tools that help provide that. So Karen, maybe we can start you from start with you from the studio perspective.
00:02:27
Speaker
What is Magic Potion Games building? What's it going to look like? Yeah, absolutely. So we started Magic Potion Games a couple years ago. I joined just over a year ago. um My co-founder and the CEO, Stephen McDonald, we worked together at Club Penguin.
00:02:44
Speaker
ah So we worked together at Disney. It was a really... um know, just impactful place to work. It obviously impacted an entire generation of kids, but even the people that worked there, you just knew you were working on something like really meaningful and special and positive and wholesome for the world.
00:03:01
Speaker
um We went on to do other things. You know, he went to EA, I went to a Fortnite. We had really exciting, amazing careers. And then- when he kind of reached out to me and said, hey you know, all these games went away. know, Roblox came and like Moshi Monsters went away, like all these kind of kids MMOs.
00:03:20
Speaker
really just went away. and And the world needs that. You know, the world really needs like a safe, wholesome, magical, age-appropriate place to play. Let's do it. And i even though I was working arguably my dream job at Epic, it was like kind of a no-brainer. I'm a new mom. So ah more than ever, I'm kind of like, yes, kids need a safe place to play that we we would feel good putting our own kids in.
Comparing Target Audiences
00:03:45
Speaker
Like that's what that's the bar that we set at Magic Potion Games. So yeah, we pulled together this and amazing team. Even the co-founder of ah Club Penguin jumped on when he heard what we were doing and who was involved. And so we talk about Imagine Island. That's our our game, Imagine Island, ah being a spiritual successor to Club Penguin, just really taking...
00:04:06
Speaker
that magical formula that that Club Penguin was and re-imagining it into a new world, a new IP and like a modern spin for kids today, tech to today, how how kids are gaming.
00:04:19
Speaker
um But really that wholesome online social space that teaches like good positive community citizenship um and just games and experiences and storylines that are designed for kids.
00:04:33
Speaker
So I love all that. my I think my generation was the one right before Club Penguin because I know my brother-in-law was huge into it and he loves it it. And can you explain to me and maybe some of the listeners, where is the gap between Fortnite or Roblox and what Imagine Island is planning on building out?
00:04:52
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I mean, Fortnite and Roblox are both amazing, amazing products um in a bunch of different ways. But Even the companies themselves will be the first to tell you that they weren't designed for kids. They weren't meant for kids.
00:05:04
Speaker
um You know, Fortnite and Roblox are both aging up. They're putting in more, you know, mature content and kind of like, hey, we want young college kids in here. This wasn't really meant for kids.
00:05:15
Speaker
um where you know Club Penguin and Imagine Island, like we are designing for eight to 10-year-olds. And we want you know six-year-olds up to 13-year-olds in there playing. And this content is like designed for them. It's meant for them. It's appropriate for them. And you know they're emotional and their mindset at this time. So those games are great. They're just they're just designed for an older, more mature audience.
00:05:37
Speaker
um So it's just not ideal for that kind of late elementary audience that we're really hoping to provide a better space for. I think that's great. And my son just turned seven and i won't lie. i let him play Fortnite every once in a while. But ah I think having a space like that where it's safe, he can communicate with friends. He can play on rides, do games, play things like that where you don't have...
00:06:02
Speaker
um older kids, and I don't know what the best way to put it is, right? Come in or or young adults come in it and kind of stomp them and be mean to them. I think it's a fantastic thing. And again, my kid goes to school and he plays games at school. It's a prodigy game. It's a learning game. And I know Imagine Island's not learning as perfect, but being in that environment, you know that they're safe, right? You can kind of walk away and say, all right,
00:06:24
Speaker
I am not worried about any bad influences coming in here to help protect them. and I think more of those spaces are needed and I think it's awesome.
Navigating Regulatory Challenges Globally
00:06:31
Speaker
um With that, Kieran, KID, I think you're building a platform, you built a platform that helps this scale, helps us remain safe and lets us kind of protect our family. Can you kind of break down what KID is?
00:06:45
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And i e I'm an attorney by trade, so I'm sort of not the typical founder DNA necessarily. But what I i was doing in in my day job was advising game publishers on how to go to market with whatever features they might have with whatever monetization model they might deploy and navigate all of the regulatory challenges that exist worldwide.
00:07:10
Speaker
And that actually is one of the biggest barriers to building for younger audiences. Because if you if you just want to take, for example, the age of a child, you know, we've been talking about kids, the age of a child differs across dozens and dozens and dozens of countries.
00:07:27
Speaker
The way that you need to build for younger audiences and in teenagers isn't just different creatively, but it's also different in terms of the regulatory challenges.
00:07:38
Speaker
The best examples I can give you, hey, the chat needs a parent to switch it on in a range of different countries for for younger kids. And for teenagers in a suite of different countries and in a number of states now, you need to go through certain checks and balances. You need to moderate it in certain ways. You can, in some cases, only let folks that are under the age of 18 talk to other kids under the age of 18 and not necessarily adults.
00:08:04
Speaker
And so there's this sort of infinite decision tree of complexity. And if you're a game publisher sitting there and facing that, I've just given chat as an example, but you could take loot boxes, you could take advertising, you take whatever it might be.
00:08:16
Speaker
That's a really, really hard thing. And so it's so easy to say, Maybe we should just, can we just have that pop up? I confirm I'm over 13 and then we'll worry about that later. And to Karen's point, you end up with these games that end up being retrofitted after the fact to try and navigate all these regulatory challenges. Okay, now we can think about the younger audience.
00:08:37
Speaker
And so part of what we built the entire platform of KID around was, well, let's let's reduce the barrier to entry. Let's democratize access to all game publishers so that anyone can build for youth out of the gate.
00:08:49
Speaker
And obviously with with everything that Karen and Steven building, it's super exciting for us because that's exactly philosophically what aligns with why we created the company. I think it's fascinating. And it wasn't until our first conversation when you started talking about that, that the compliance ah of kind of age regulation across the world is completely different.
00:09:11
Speaker
And it's mind boggling. And I have to imagine studios, at least if I started my own studio, which didn't, I wouldn't even think about this until it's kind of like the, oh, crap moment. We're already too far. And what do I do now? Right. Is that maybe your biggest struggle is the understanding of it this is a much bigger issue than just are you over 18?
00:09:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly it and and that's that's why I talk about monetization. Because if, for example, you are you have advertising, you are going to have to turn targeted advertising off in a suite of markets. And if that's you the primary way through which you derive revenue for the title,
00:09:48
Speaker
but That's an existential question for you. do Is it even possible for us with our current monetization model to go sub 18, to go sub 13? um Does that work?
00:09:58
Speaker
What happens to the user experience, for example, if you have cosmetic loot boxes, so randomized rewards are part of it. You can roll you roll that that die and you can ah you you can get skins, you can get all sorts of different things.
00:10:12
Speaker
Well, what happens if that's not allowed? And it's not allowed in places like Belgium or Korea or it's regulated in certain ways. So do you choose not to go into those markets? you choose not to expand into that demographic? If you do, what do you replace it with?
00:10:25
Speaker
that That is the challenge that we say we get excited about. We get excited about because we can solve it um and because it's it's something that we we we can help publishers navigate.
00:10:39
Speaker
I think it's something also, and at least I'm talking from my state's perspective, where, you know, you kind of ignore all this stuff and then you start seeing this all happen in the States where certain, certain States don't allow for social media under certain age, right. And pornography being blocked unless you have identification and like all this stuff is,
00:10:58
Speaker
from our perspective, right, starting to hit home. And I think it's all becoming more of a, oh, we need to start planning for this at an earlier stage than later. And my question to Karen is, when did you start thinking about, hey, we need a solution for
Creating Compliance from the Start
00:11:13
Speaker
this? And you, I'm pretty sure Trust and Safety was born from Club Penguin, but you may have already gotten in knowing we need this. But but how do you even start to research solutions like this?
00:11:22
Speaker
Oh, man, a good question. So we we feel like a lot of companies, they avoid the kid space because it's hard, right? But it's hard for a good reason. It needs to be hard. Like all of these regulations are are really, really important to keep our kids safe, right?
00:11:37
Speaker
So most people are like, oh, that's a pain in the butt. It's too expensive. well just We'll just say we're for teens and like forget about that. But yeah, we we like wrote the book on a lot of stuff at Club Penguin, right? So a lot of the stuff was really early. We had to build all this stuff from scratch. We had to learn. It was really hard at the time. Like, okay, Copa is here. Here's how this works. Let's build all these different like funnels and tools. And you know when new regulations came out, we'd have to stop engineers from what they're doing to go and build you know those new kind of logic layers in and stuff like that. So...
00:12:06
Speaker
Um, when we said, Hey, we want to go do this thing. We're like, we know what it takes. We know how to do it. It's totally possible. And we're not going shy away from it. We're going to do it from square one. So the first week I started on the, I started officially at magic potion games. I was done with Epic. I started wireframing our, um,
00:12:24
Speaker
um create account flows. And when I was at Club Penguin, I ran the web team. So I ran a lot of the, for the first half of my career, I was like running all of the key funnels. So creating accounts, you know, membership purchasing, a lot of the stuff that was really key in that stuff.
00:12:37
Speaker
So um yeah, i just kind of started wireframing it. And ah the KID team introduced me to the ESRB privacy certified team. And we're like, great, we definitely want to work with you guys. um We want to be, you know, Copa compliant the day we launch. So, and I said, here's my wireframes, like give me feedback. Am I compliant? And they were like,
00:12:54
Speaker
oh my gosh, we've never we've never been sent wireframes before. We don't even know how to work with this. This is crazy, but what a breath of fresh air. um They're like, we always have companies come to us after they've been live to it for a while.
00:13:07
Speaker
They got some heat, they got a slap on the wrist, and it's like, hey, what changes do I need to make now ah to fix to fix my my you know funnels and things like that? So We were like, okay, well, it's better. It's a lot easier and cheaper to do it right the first time than to build it, get a slap on the wrist and rebuild it when you're trying to you know manage a live product and stuff. So I was like, cool. We didn't even have engineers working on it yet.
00:13:30
Speaker
And I'm sitting there wireframing and they're giving me feedback. And until I know what we're going to build is checked all the boxes, we built it, it was done in a few days and we launched and we were compliant. So you know, it's ah it's a lot easier to do if you think of it from square one. It really is.
00:13:46
Speaker
And then with people like KID and Microsoft Community Sift and things like that, you know, there's all these great companies who have made their products, you know, owning that for you. and we're like, how amazing is that? Now we get to like plug in KID, trust that they're going to, you know, keep us up to date. They're going to let us know of all the changes. They're going to work with us to make you know, the right decisions for our product and our players.
00:14:09
Speaker
And um we get to keep working on like really magical, wholesome, fun experiences for the kids and trust that they're keeping us like, you know, our parental verification flows all up to snuff. So it's a really great time to be able to like use awesome partners to elevate all those, all those places. So everyone can kind of like focus on their bread and butter.
00:14:30
Speaker
You said a lot there. I'm taking notes. Sorry. No, i I can't remember that much as I'm getting older. as things coming now but The few things that you said, I took note that I remember you love is cheaper to do it right from the beginning. And so many people will question that and argue that, right? But when you pour the foundation of your house, you want to make sure that it's ready to scale, right? It's easier to do it now and come back to it and just put that addition on than having to report that whole foundation. and I think when you find that right partner in your case, KID, right, that but knows these best practices, I think it's fantastic because they can take what you took it and kind of put it on steroids and take it to the moon and really
00:15:10
Speaker
be that great partner that you need. um My question to Kieran is when you hear Karen's story of how she got started, right? Other studios are also looking how do I get started? Maybe I want to start with a a less expensive option and then scale to being to a better solution. But what would you do different from what Karen did? Because it sounds like she was really on her game. So maybe she's not the best example to start with.
00:15:36
Speaker
Well, I think what was amazing, so this was something that was unexpected for me when we started the company. And coming at this as an attorney where I'd been advising big studios like Tencent on go-to-market for PUBG Mobile.
00:15:49
Speaker
And so in that case, you're dealing with massive communities, retrofitting games, trying to manage all this sort of thing. And that was probably 90% of the sort of game advisory work I was doing, retrofitting existing games to manage all of this.
00:16:05
Speaker
What I hadn't expected when I started the company was that there was going to be this spiritual, philosophical change in the way that game developers want to build games.
00:16:15
Speaker
And I think for, you know, for, for Karen, for me, you know, as young parents and as folks who've grown up with the internet in the way that, that it sort of exists today, it's so different from our parents.
00:16:30
Speaker
and the way that they saw the internet and then whatever they necessarily knew what we were doing on the internet. And I think that's a, that's a community shift in how the game developers today think about how they want to build for, for young audiences.
00:16:48
Speaker
And so putting aside all of the regulation, i just think there's a change. I think there's a change in how in in attitudes around how game developers today want to build and thinking about this as part of a component of what you should be thinking about from day one and having that strong foundation. And so I would say actually today, you know what what Karen and Steven have done with Magic Potion is becoming more of the norm where developers are reaching out to us earlier and earlier in that development cycle.
00:17:20
Speaker
In some cases when it's just an idea and building around, okay, if we want to go global, we want to have an an inclusive environment for kids and teens
Community Involvement in Game Development
00:17:31
Speaker
globally.
00:17:31
Speaker
How do we do that? How do we make sure when we're even thinking about Do we do in-app purchase? Do we do subscriptions? All of those sorts of things. And so I think that's why i had so much fun working with with Karen because we that they're the conversations we have as as different things are being thought about or tested or rolled out. Hey, we're thinking about this. We're thinking about that.
00:17:54
Speaker
Karen and I connect all the time on Slack to chat about those sorts of things. And they were the conversations we were having when I was building out the account flows. I remember but reviewing all the all all of the figmas and everything that was coming through.
00:18:06
Speaker
And then um even now, when we think about, you know, the the future of the game and the future of the industry. So think that's what gets me excited is so much of this is moving upstream, um which makes us more valuable. And as Karen said,
00:18:21
Speaker
it's much cheaper it's cheap cheaper and more cost efficient to think about it at the beginning, rather than discovering later on um that you need to change your monetization strategy because you now can't engage with a younger audience.
00:18:34
Speaker
I would add on to that and say that in my day to day, and maybe it's just because I'm living in it more now, is that other verticals are also embracing community on an earlier stage, right? Whether it be in my town, a local group of moms trying to figure out what to do with this, or whether it be in ah A fintech app, people are talking online about different trades that they can make. I think other verticals are starting to see that there's an importance to working with your community, to building from within your community. And I think it's kind of a shift. and And I don't know why I thought about this the other day, but it's almost like the...
00:19:08
Speaker
anti-COVID in a way where, hey, now we're all coming back together and we're trying to make these community events, whether they be virtual or in-person. But I think community is on the rise and all over the place. And I think people are want to be working together. They want to find like minds so they can share ideas, they can grow. And I think people are starting to see the value in things like that.
00:19:28
Speaker
So i wanted to do my fireball round, but I wanted to change it up to make it a little bit more community clubhouse focused. So do you remember your first community clubhouse?
00:19:39
Speaker
And was there a moment that you remember the most about it? Kieran, we'll start with you. Yeah, I mean, for me, GDC last year was when all this took off. And I think What was exciting about that for me was a lot of the questions that were coming about from the community and and everyone was there was all around, hey how how do we do this?
00:20:03
Speaker
How do we make this work? How do we we incorporate in this into the the games that we're thinking of building today, the games we want to build, um and how can we actually make that more valuable for our user community, but how can we be creative about it?
00:20:18
Speaker
ah And so actually some of the things we've introduced in some games since have come about directly from conversations we had. And I'll give you a specific example, which was, hey, you know how in some markets, some states, some countries, chat needs to be off.
00:20:35
Speaker
But what could we replace chat with? And so we've since seen creatively developers that have have taken some of our technology say, hey, what you know what are the ideas that we could use to replace chat with, um to make it more fun for for kids. And so some of those are now starting to to come to market. And so you can, you can read about some of those things, but that directly came from conversations that we were having at a community clubhouse. So it definitely holds a ah ah sweet place in my heart.
00:21:03
Speaker
That's awesome. Just to hear an actual thing came out of that conversation that happened at the community clubhouse. So awesome. And thank you for sharing that. Karen. Yeah, my first comm community clubhouse was Stephen and my talk about ah Magic Potion Games, the next club penguin for the new generation. So that was incredibly fun. It was such a fun chat. And we had a bunch of old Club Penguin employees fly in that we didn't even know were coming. Lane Merrifield, the creator of Club Penguin, flew in for the chat chat. So that was pretty funny talking all about just, yeah, a lot of similar things, how we're kind of approaching Imagine Island and and how it's kind of you know manifesting that magic of Club Penguin in a new way. And it was funny at the end, all these you know young adults were standing up to ask questions and they all started with like,
00:21:54
Speaker
these really heartfelt thank yous about k Club Penguin and how impactful it was in their life, which was just another reminder of how deep that really did go and how how widespread that that effect was um from the Club Penguin days. But It was so funny hearing someone say, just want to thank you so much you know for Club Penguin. It really changed my life. And they didn't know that Lane Merrifield was sitting right beside them. And I'm like, I don't feel right saying you're welcome because the actual creator is right beside you. And of course, like you know Stephen and I were one of hundreds of people that made the magic of of Club Penguin what it was. so But it was it was really sweet and just a good reminder that
00:22:33
Speaker
Those are really, really long tail effects that like a good wholesome product can have on a generation of kids. And here they all are now wanting to create games themselves. So was really cool. It's awesome that you're building a kid kid-friendly game, right? Or a kid-based game because it will have that same impact in 10 or so years, right? It's so cool to be able to go to these conferences. And when you have younger people in gaming, like these are the games that they grew up with and they get to meet their heroes for lack of better words, or maybe just not even know that their hero is sitting right next to you or behind you, right? Like it's, it's so cool to be able to hear that. And I love that you can share that with those, with these other gamers, right? Because again, this is, this was probably their first introduction to gaming for a lot of them.
00:23:15
Speaker
Yeah. And especially as like, as a young parent, a parent of young kids, you know, like if we, if we do get to provide that next wholesome, impactful, meaningful thing to like the next generation of kids that include our own kids, that's just, that's like legacy level stuff right
Legacy of Children's Games
00:23:31
Speaker
there. Like that just makes my heart skip a beat. You know, if we can do that, what an incredible thing to leave behind for our kids and their whole generation of kids. That's, that's the goal. That's like the North star here. So.
00:23:43
Speaker
So Kieran, last year when we spoke, ah you were doing a GoldenEye speedrun. So the new question is what game are you currently playing?
00:23:53
Speaker
I've actually been playing Crash 4 with my nine year old. um they have ah like a pass and play function built into that title. And so you you trade every time you, and every time Crash dies or falls off something.
00:24:08
Speaker
ah And so we've been working our way through that. And when we started, I would get handed the controller because he would say, dad, this part is too difficult. You need to do it.
00:24:18
Speaker
Now it's the opposite. So I will hand it back to him and he's the one that that's doing the hard bits. That is awesome. Is that Crash Bandicoot? Yeah. One of my all time faves.
00:24:29
Speaker
Yep. I think Crash is one of those first games that makes you feel old because when you go back to it, you have to be so twitchy in your fingers that like, I think you have to be under a certain age to be able to do certain parts of it.
00:24:41
Speaker
and And brutal, right? This was back in the days where you didn't just have infinite lives and and you'd bounce back immediately. So, you know, you get, you're back at the beginning of the level if you don't, don't get through that challenge, you know, the first or second time.
00:24:56
Speaker
Karen, what game are you playing? ah My husband and I are actually replaying the Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze. I don't know if you guys ever played that. We played it together when we kind of first met.
00:25:07
Speaker
And it's hard. It is so challenging. So it's a good you know test of relationship and you know teamwork for sure and staying on the same team with each other. So yeah, when we have enough ah energy after we put both kids down to bed, we'll we'll jump on the couch and and have a good laugh trying to struggle our way through that one right now. It's fun.
00:25:27
Speaker
Perfect. Last question is, and we have someone from Community Clubhouse listening right now, is what would be a dream panel, whether it be a topic or someone on there that you would love to see at at Community Clubhouse one day?
00:25:40
Speaker
i think I think it would be cool to have some kids be part of a panel and talk about what they want and the games they're playing, what they're enjoying, how they're interacting with their friends, what their friends are talking about at school.
00:25:54
Speaker
what they're buzzing out on, that'd be, I think that'd be a fun twist. That is such a good idea. I want his answer. Same. I vote for that one. That's such a good idea.
00:26:06
Speaker
you'd have You'd need to have a really good moderator for that one, but that would be a blast. You heard him, Ed, loud and clear. All right, this isn't really a part of the fireball question, but let's roll this back into our our normal questions. is Karen, you are now a advisor for Community Clubhouse, I believe.
00:26:23
Speaker
Um, congratulations. Thank you so much. What's that mean? Great question. I'm really freshly really freshly on the board. I'm so excited to be. I know that I get to like vote and give input on a lot of the community clubhouse you know panels that are coming up to exciting events, um you know contribute to ideas of what could be good speaking ah you know topics and and people, maybe even do a few more myself, which I would love to do. um Yeah, so I'm just excited to give input where I'll be helpful and learn from all the other incredible people on this board. I'm super thrilled to be on it.
00:26:58
Speaker
Cool. Congratulations again. Excited to kind of see which panels you create to bring your kid to community clubhouse. There you go. Bring your kid here. And my I think my kids are a little too young still, but maybe in a few years. Yeah.
Kid-First Design and Development
00:27:08
Speaker
yeah So let's talk about Imagine Island a little more, right? you're You're focused on building a kid first game, right? Not in the kid appropriate game, because so there's a big difference there, right? um What factors have to go into that for building for that right audience? Do you talk to people about the different features you want to include? Like, how do you stress test some of this?
00:27:29
Speaker
Yeah, good question. I mean, we, so yeah, first we design everything to try and be kid appropriate, whether it comes to, you know, visuals, to characters, to storylines, to gameplay mechanics, to, you know, text and how much text and how we communicate, um you know, and and give feedback to the kids to, you know, teach them what to do next.
00:27:48
Speaker
it's it's always interesting with kids because we're really passionate about not pandering to kids either and not talking to them like they're, you know, like they're babies or like they don't understand and really letting them control their own experience and and learn things through exploration and learn things through asking each other like, hey, how did you do that? Hey, where did you get that? Instead of like a million kind of hand-holding pop-ups.
00:28:11
Speaker
But it's always, ah you know, it's ah it's a balance, especially when you have a six-year-old and you have a 13-year-old, they kind of need, you know, different things. um But in terms of Talking to the kids, we started ah doing user groups before we even had a playable product. And we used to do these kind of Zoom calls with five kids. And just like Karen's saying, we would talk to them about like, what games are you playing?
00:28:34
Speaker
What do you like about those games? What do wish you could do in games? What frustrates you about those games? What are your favorite characters? Why are they your favorite characters? Things like that. we We did that all through the development of Imagine Island.
00:28:45
Speaker
And when we had a playable version, we would also send out builds and the kids would get into these dev builds and we'd watch them run around and we'd watch where they got a little hung up. Oh, they didn't understand that. Oh, they that didn't make sense to them. Okay, we take it back to the team. This needs to be more clear.
00:29:00
Speaker
This one looked a little hard. This one looked a little too easy, you know? So... those were are always like so so so impactful and sometimes the thing that you worked on so much they're like oh that's cool but what is this silly garbage can and they like zoned in on this garbage can and thought this like one of the kids went through a portal that was really just a ah like a dev room where we were um experimenting with the size and spacing of things like how far should they be apart so you can jump to them and Stuff like that. And that was the coolest room they found. They were like, I found a parkour room and there's a garbage can in here. This is hilarious. And we were like, this isn't even a room. It doesn't even have like colors. Why is this so fun?
00:29:40
Speaker
But you know, it's just interesting to see what the kids get excited about and what they're calling each other over to. Like, hey, get over here. Look at this thing. Like you learn so much from just kind of watching them, asking them questions. If you can get a word in edgewise, that was always a challenge.
00:29:55
Speaker
um But yeah. And then we also did that with a, um there's an e-sports Academy here in North Carolina, ah the North Carolina e-sports Academy. And I went in there one day and I was like, Hey, you know, I want to chat with kids about like this new game. And their owner, Caleb has been this amazing partner and He'll call me up and say, hey, I have got a there's a teacher work day coming up. So I've got 30 kids between eight and 10 coming in for the day. You want to come and show them Imagine Island and get some feedback? I'm like yes, I will be there.
00:30:23
Speaker
So we kind of find these different ways to just get hands on with a group of kids and just really watch like what they get excited about, you know, and what they can and can't do in terms of skills yet. I think that's awesome. I think we've we've talked to a number of studios that, you know, people build the game thinking that this is how people are going to play the game. And then they find a parkour room and then it's not part of the game, but maybe we got to build a room like this now, right? you're you're You're looking at this feedback that they're not even...
00:30:50
Speaker
saying it, right? You're just seeing where they're all going and saying, Hey, we got to do something like this. And I love that you're talking with the kids and getting their understanding. You already went into one early access. And I know the second early access comes out soon.
00:31:03
Speaker
What type of feedback did you receive from that first one? And that are there going to be any changes from what you've heard? Yeah, I mean we had, so we just wanted to kind of like get out early. So we had the game built and launched within seven months, which is pretty insane for like the quality and, ah you know, a functioning MMO. And then three weeks later, we launched our first Halloween party. So we really wanted to see like, okay, can we be a live product? Can we like update and get new content in every week? Redo the whole world in ah in a, you know, Halloween state three weeks later. So it was it was really impressive. And we just wanted to make sure like,
00:31:36
Speaker
okay, is this world fun? Is this overall concept fun? And the kids that were in there, you know, the answer was, was yes. Like they're loving it. It's, it's fun. People are coming back. They want to have a great time.
00:31:47
Speaker
And now the next phase is, okay, we need to meet scale. Now we just need like as many eyeballs as we possibly can. um so that's kind of our next step here and that's, what's going to take us to web. So we're super excited to go out on web.
Resurgence of Web Gaming Platforms
00:32:03
Speaker
We think like, i mean, we're seeing web just make this massive comeback.
00:32:06
Speaker
It's funny, again, with the Club Penguin, you know, whole story behind us, Club Penguin really found its audience on Miniclip, you know, so we were kind of like, hmm, what's our Miniclip?
00:32:18
Speaker
Like, what's today's Miniclip? So if you look into it, there's these awesome... web online gaming portals that are just like really low barrier to entry, quick games that kids can just jump in and play, right?
00:32:30
Speaker
And you know, on something like Steam or Epic Games where we went out for our first early access, like there's a lot of hoops you need to jump through, you need to download. Some kids can't download, they don't even have download abilities on their computers. So we're like, cool, let's get in front of these kids that are just like jumping in low barrier and there's millions of them. yeah um So yeah, next step for us is just like getting onto web, getting a bazillion kids in there playing and the game is so much more fun when it's like busy and active. So this is going to be a really awesome chapter for Imagine Island.
00:33:02
Speaker
When you make the change from, well, maybe it's not a change, maybe it's supporting web along with Steam, right? There's been this huge resurgence in my mind of WebGL, WebGPU, the capabilities it has and how it's going to continue to grow, as well as kind of with Steam Discovery being finding a needle in a haystack, right? So so yeah I love the emergence of these other platforms. I go back to theaddictinggames.com.
00:33:25
Speaker
Exactly. my child can writer it And doing stuff like that. um Are there different hoops, different barriers? Like what are the concerns when so time to move to web versus Steam? Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest one is just like the size of the game, right? So that's the biggest constraint. needs to be small. small It needs to be like under, you know, 100 megs or whatever. and And they need to jump in it really quick. They want to make sure it loads within a few seconds. um But yeah, with the latest Unity and WebGL, like our team...
00:33:53
Speaker
the The version of this game built to run on web is like it came together so quickly and it feels so good. um The movements are all kind of fresh and fun. They're bouncy. And um we're just having an absolute blast in this in this kind of latest build.
00:34:09
Speaker
um So it's really let us move really quite quickly. um And so far, our team has done an incredible job keeping ah the game working. wildly small for how big it is and the fact that it's this big, you know, living kind of MMO. So that's the biggest challenge, but the latest tech is just making it easier. So.
00:34:26
Speaker
So Kieran, Karen's game, Imagine Island's about to have a bazillion kids in there, hanging around and jumping around it. And The global regulatory landscape has been changing, I feel like drastically over the past few weeks and months with different changes coming out ah on just who can access what.
Staying Ahead of Compliance Changes
00:34:43
Speaker
How does any, I'm just focusing on KID, right? How do you stay on top of the global compliance changes that are happening? Because there's so many different rules out there that are always changing. how does one stay on top of what's going on?
00:34:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's it's a good question. And when we started the company, i had one vision for how we would do that. And It's fair to say that the pace of regulatory change is just, it's extraordinary now.
00:35:08
Speaker
And I'll give you an example. Two weeks ago, Indonesia, like one of the most populous countries in the world, huge gaming market. And in fact, massive, massive web gaming community ah introduced a new regulation that requires any online platform to age band between two to three years, all the way up to 18.
00:35:27
Speaker
You need to have different experiences and different configurations all the way up. That's crazy. And so the idea of building that, and that's 200 million plus people, right? So it's a big market.
00:35:39
Speaker
um And so it's something worth worth building for. That's one tiny example. So we're very, very close with a lot of the regulatory agencies. In fact, we ah get in and get involved in writing um a lot of the regulation, a lot of the guidance um as well, which is sort of a little bit the cheat code to it, because if you're involved a year before the regulation comes out,
00:36:00
Speaker
By the time it comes out, you know what to expect. We've already updated our system. We know you know how the config is going to impact the user community. We usually drive some of the direction of travel of a lot of that.
00:36:11
Speaker
um And then there's there's there's a multitude of other ways that that we do that through certifications and safe harbors and partnerships. And obviously, at the end of the day, our team are a bit unique in the sense that we're 50% lawyers and 50% engineers. So we're 100% paranoid. like A lot of lawyers in a room.
00:36:31
Speaker
How do you work with these studios to make sure that they're setting things up properly? know it's kind of a weird question, but in my mind, I imagine most indie studios don't know the first thing about compliance or law or anything like that. so So is it just set up the platform? The platform does it all for you? How to you help educate your customers?
00:36:50
Speaker
yeah That's really it. And so we take as much of the pain out and have developed a platform where you go in and you tick boxes. It really is as simple as that. These are the features within my title.
00:37:02
Speaker
And then we typically have conversations with them about maybe how creatively they'd like to react to some of those things. um But also just letting us know what markets they're moving into, because often we can give them a bit of a like a bit of a heat map around, oh, hey, we're expanding into these 12 markets.
00:37:18
Speaker
And we can say, sweet, you're good. ah there' There's nothing that you need to worry about um in in those particular markets as you expand. Or we can just provide learnings based on our experience um ahs as other titles have expanded into to new territories. And now we're getting devs coming to us asking, okay, what else?
00:37:39
Speaker
What else can can we help with outside of compliance? And so part of that is um creatively supporting a lot of the vision. Part of it's discovery, which you mentioned.
00:37:50
Speaker
um And how can we actually contribute to getting cool games? And Imagine Island is awesome. And we we've been part of the play test, so I've seen it evolve over all that time. um It's fun for me as much as my nine-year-old. So it's it's it's so much fun to play. Like, how do we help?
00:38:07
Speaker
amazing devs like Karen get this in front of that audience. um And so I think our unique position is because we're the infrastructure behind quite a lot of um titles and a lot of big IPs.
00:38:19
Speaker
how do we How do we take that and seize that momentum and and contribute to the developer community? I think... The stuff you said about Indonesia is kind of mind boggling. I think there's so many weird rules out there that we probably don't know. you probably do. Like, are there any other you can share with us? Because I don't think people realize how big the Southeast Asia Sea area is when it comes to gaming. Indonesia is probably one of the number ones in that area. Right.
00:38:47
Speaker
Are there any other weird laws that people wouldn't even like believe are real that you're aware of? Oh, so we actually have a tracker internally. So as we do a lot of the regulatory review, if anything is super quirky, we actually have a Slack channel where it's, oh my gosh, this is, and sometimes it's archaic, right? This is something that hasn't been changed in a one hundred years and in the age of the internet is weird.
00:39:07
Speaker
um But, you know, some of the examples that can trip developers up are like, for example, in Korea, if you're an indie dev and you're making less than, think it's 18 million Korean won, then, and I probably got that number wrong, but if you're below a certain threshold, then effectively a lot of the rules around monetization in your game, like cosmetical loot boxes, subscriptions, time limits, spend limits, all those things don't apply to you.
00:39:32
Speaker
And as soon as you cross that revenue threshold, everything lights up like a Christmas tree. And um the Korean regulatory agency, of which there are four, um one of them actually engages a service provider to go and scour the internet every single year. And they usually get a list of somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 games and apps.
00:39:52
Speaker
And they they just audit everything um in an automated way. And so you can get you can get picked up in one of those scrapes. They look at the revenue. They're like, oh, you've crossed the revenue threshold. the next thing you know, you're an indie dev and you've got this sort of, um you know, letter from from the Korean government and you're sort of freaking out about what that means.
00:40:09
Speaker
So it's those sorts of things that can trip folks up. And that's a lot of what we take this thing out of. That's crazy. Yeah. I feel like it's fun to pay attention to that stuff until you have to comply with it. Then you're just like, oh crap, I got to all this stuff now. That's you just sign with KID. They do it all for you.
Compliance's Role in Monetization
00:40:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly I mean, you you do, it's the type of thing where if you're thinking about retrofitting a game for time, spend limits, the way that maybe randomized rewards work, your subscriptions work. Like auto renewing subscriptions, big no, no in a number of countries.
00:40:41
Speaker
Um, if you're dealing with kids, those sorts things, you don't want to think about that. You just, you're so worried about, is my game working? Uh, players loving the game. How do I make it more fun?
00:40:52
Speaker
Um, that's the stuff you just, you know, as a, as a game dev we hear all the time. oh gosh, this is a pain point. I don't want to have to think about. Yeah, I remember GDC this year at the mini golf place, you guys had the video running. I forgot if it was, it wasn't YouTube, but it was some video platform and it was age-based viewing. So you had it like logged into someone over 18 and they saw all the videos and you had someone else that was under 18. And like the videos, like it just scaled seamlessly, updated seamlessly. I was like, this is just like, it's seamless. It's beautiful. Like this is what's needed. No one knows what's missing. No one cares what's missing. It's just, it works for everyone.
00:41:29
Speaker
It works how it should work for who it's working for. And I think, i don't know, some of these technologies that are coming in out are just so cool to help protect younger audiences, older audiences from seeing things, right? I mean, it just makes so much sense. and I think it's so cool to be able to see all this stuff working in progress. So congrats to all that.
00:41:47
Speaker
Some studios aren't prepared to make an investment of that size, especially in these studios, right? So what are some suggestions you'd make on on starting on ah a budget and then being able to scale up to afford a tool like KID?
00:42:02
Speaker
Yeah, so I'd say three things. One is when we started the company, it was very much focused on compliance and how do we solve all of these issues? So it's really, really easy to um go to market and not have to worry about it.
00:42:17
Speaker
Here are three things we've discovered and where I see a lot of the publishers we work with today, particularly if they have an existing title and they're looking to add this in where they see value. One is we expand the audience overnight.
00:42:30
Speaker
So the second you integrate our platform in, You may have been either ignoring, um choosing to ignore, or because you you don't want to acknowledge the sub 13 or the sub 16 market that immediately unlocks overnight.
00:42:43
Speaker
The second one is that we bring the parents into that community. um So the parents are aware of what's happening. They're digitally engaged. in what their kids are up to online.
00:42:55
Speaker
And so that means that ah you do two things. One is parents are more willing to spend um because they can see that their kids are having fun. they They're aware of where their kids are, what they're doing, who they're talking to.
00:43:07
Speaker
They're willing willinging to spend. And the flip side of that is that it reduces chargebacks. And so the, oh my gosh, my kids run up all these credit card charges. What are they doing? All this sort of thing. which is a really reactive thing.
00:43:19
Speaker
And it's really, really hard to want once that, um, trainers left the station, it's really, really difficult um to pull that back. And so, um, that's, that's a big part of it. The third one is, and we discovered this by complete accident.
00:43:32
Speaker
Um, and we actually, it was developers who were asking us about it is, you know, we were, our infrastructure is integrated into, a suite of amazing titles today, a lot of really, really big titles with um tens of millions of users.
00:43:45
Speaker
And in fact, we now have social platforms that have integrated a lot of our technology. We are the central hub to all of those folks. And so we had our biggest day yesterday. i think our web traffic yesterday grew like 9,000%. It's extraordinary how many parents are coming and visiting our site and their kids who are coming to visit and understand, oh, what's this new thing that's now in in the game that I'm playing?
00:44:13
Speaker
um Because it's super popular. The kids are talking about it at school. There's a lot of like YouTube videos about this sort of thing now. And so we're actually...
Benefits of KID's Platform for Developers
00:44:21
Speaker
I don't want we've solved discovery, but we are tinkering in in the fact that we we do exist in this space where we can support developers with discovery. And so I think those three things are where developers are seeing value in in KID today.
00:44:37
Speaker
Compliance is almost just the the side effect of all of that. I think the whole monetary side of it, right preventing chargebacks, authorizing charges. right i mean I didn't even think about that, but it makes perfect sense. right If I could see what my child's doing in game, i I'm happy to spend a few bucks if I know they're not screwing around in that game. It's money easily spent knowing they're keeping them men entertained. so I think that's an awesome point that didn't even cross my mind.
00:45:06
Speaker
Karen, for Imagine Island, where what what are the next few steps? like How do people start learning more about Imagine Island? How can they play? How can they follow up Yeah, um so we're targeting to go out on Poki Games in July, so very excited. We kind of do an early test with them, then we do a soft launch, then we'll go wide.
00:45:25
Speaker
um So hopefully we'll be wide by you know August. And then after that, like we're we're kind of head heads down focused on web right now and and making sure that we kind of get out there, get that audience in, see how they're playing, you know do any kind of tuning we need to and just really kind of dive in head first and then We're planning to go out on Crazy Games as well, another amazing um web platform.
00:45:49
Speaker
And then we'll you know we'll look into mobile and really just go like where the kids where the kids are asking us to go, right? It's like where they are and where their friends are and where they want to play Imagine Island is where we will go next.
00:46:00
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah, that sounds super cool. And again, as a parent to a seven-year-old, they play everywhere. So get ready to support everything. Exactly. Kieran, Karen, thank you so much. This has been such Fun episode to be able to hear about a kid's first game, how kids are protected, how they can play, how they can do it on Steam, how you're building onto the web, how there's been regulatory compliance rules that are out there, monetary
Wrap-up and Contact Information
00:46:25
Speaker
stuff. There's so much great stuff that came out of this episode.
00:46:28
Speaker
ah Before we do end for the day, can you let us know where we can find you or your respective studios, Karen? Yeah, absolutely. um You can email me with any follow-up questions, karen, K-A-R-I-N, at magicpotiongames.com. Or, yeah, we're on LinkedIn. You can hit up our website.
00:46:46
Speaker
There's contact forms anywhere. we would love to hear from you. And they have a Steam page. Go check out their Steam page. We'll have a link to it. hear Yeah, I mean, Google K-ID and you'll you'll track us down.
00:47:00
Speaker
We're super proud of our website. Yeah. We actually took a bit of creative energy um that that our publishers are really inspiring us with. And we we played that back in our website. So we're super, super proud of our website. Go check it out.
00:47:12
Speaker
You can reach out to us through there. And then, um you know, we we have this extraordinary family community that we're building. And so you can go and see everything that we're integrated into there. And there's hundreds more titles coming.
00:47:25
Speaker
Super cool. We will have links to KID's website. We'll have links to magic potions stuff. We'll have links to everything. And a big thanks again to Community Clubhouse for sponsoring this episode.
00:47:36
Speaker
They are a wealth of knowledge, whether it be a GDC or a Gamescom, whether you be a community manager, trust and safety, just monetization in game. They have best practices for all that. So big thanks to Community Clubhouse again.
00:47:47
Speaker
And again, Kieran, Karen, thank you so much for joining me today. And I hope you guys have a great rest of your day. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much. Cheers. Bye.