Toys and Apps Are Yet to Play Nice Together
Efforts to Link Tablets to Dolls and Board Games Falls Short So Far, but Industry Continues to Try — Last year, trying to show how the toy industry could remain relevant in the tablet age, Hasbro Inc. unveiled an iPad-enhanced version of its classic Game of Life.
Context & Ripple Effects
Hasbro's iPad-enhanced Game of Life is the latest attempt to answer the question hanging over the toy aisle since Apple's slate took over kids' screen time: what does a doll or board game still offer when the tablet does everything? The company has already collided with the category once, losing its bid to block sales of Asus's Transformer Prime over the Transformers name in 2012 (the Transformer Prime trademark fight), so the brand-tablet boundary cuts both ways.
Retailers are hedging the same way. Toys 'R' Us put its own kids' tablet on shelves in late 2012, treating the device as a toy rather than a threat — which makes the WSJ's finding that toy-app mashups keep falling short a problem for the whole shelf strategy, not just one game.
First-order effects
- Hasbro's hybrid games must now win twice — as a toy and as an app — and the WSJ reports they are doing neither well, leaving the company paying for electronics and licensing inside a product priced against $10 board games.
Second-order effects
- If branded app-toys underperform, toy makers' fallback is licensing their characters onto generic tablets — the route Toys 'R' Us's own device already opened at retail — shifting value from the physical product to whoever controls the app store.
Third-order effects
- A sustained failure of bolt-on hybrids would push the industry toward one of two structures: toy brands as content licensors on general-purpose screens, or dedicated connected hardware built around the toy rather than the tablet — which path wins is genuinely unresolved as of early 2013.
The trend: Toy makers are converging with consumer electronics, and the unresolved question is whether their brands ride on general-purpose tablets or justify dedicated connected toys.