Archives

Itв s playtime: Toca Boca heads for America

2012-02-02 10:00
Mention the name Toca Boca to any parent with an iPad or iPhone, and you 8217;re likely to hear them start raving with delight. Since launching last year, the Swedish games studio has become a big hit with families thanks to its sequence of simple, open games 8212; including best-selling titles like Toca Hair Salon and Toca Kitchen. The company 8217;s apps have been downloaded millions of times, grabbing attention by combining different elements of play into small, self-contained games that are simple, colorful and fun to mess around with. Now the Stockholm company, a subsidiary of Swedish media group Bonnier, is targeting bigger things 8212; and planning to open an office in San Francisco next month. After the past year we started thinking about what we were lacking 8212; and what we could improve, says BjГ rn Jeffrey, Toca Boca 8217;s CEO. Generally speaking we don 8217;t think there 8217;s anything wrong with the product. We think it 8217;s about visibility, he adds. The product will still be developed in Stockholm, but opening a San Francisco office will give us proximity to Apple, the iOS marketing system and the U.S. market. So far getting traction in America has been slower than elsewhere, but breaking in could be a big deal. Toca Boca has already developed a significant following in a range of international territories, from its home base in Sweden (where it has had eight of the top 10 paid apps in iTunes) to unlikelier climes such as Kuwait, where it boasts that it has 40 percent of the top 10 paid apps. While the reasons for some of those successes remain elusive, the team thinks it can ramp up success by concentrating on expanding in particular areas. We don 8217;t quite know why Kuwait loves us so much, chuckles Emil Overmar, the lead producer. But it 8217;s testament to our growing fan base: each product does better than the last one, and Toca Kitchen has had 90,000 sales 8212; none of them are free downloads 8212; since we launched it on December 15. With its 14 staff working on short, self-contained cycles, Toca Boca has released 10 apps in the past year. But describing its products manages to be both incredibly easy and yet strangely complex. The company doesn 8217;t like to call the things it makes games, but prefers to label them toys : environments that children can explore either on their own, or as part of a wider playtime. They 8217;re more like building bricks or playsets than rules-based games. Overmar says this idea came out of research the duo did once they had finished up working in Bonnier 8217;s R D department 8212; which was responsible for developing and building things like Mag+, the company 8217;s system for producing tablet-friendly magazines (featured here in point 8 of our article 8217;10 Features That Would Make iPad aВ Hit 8217;.) Mag+ went into the production phase, which is whole different machinery, and we were wondering what to do, says Jeffrey. So we started thinking about what happens when a tablet l...
Read More...