24 November 2011
PORTLAND: Where's My Water?," the new mobile game from Walt Disney, stars Swampy, an alligator who lives in an underground sewer.
The googly eyed reptile likes to lounge around in his subterranean bathtub while he scrubs his back with a brush. Players swipe their fingers across an Apple iPhone screen to guide water into his tub while dodging toxic sludge and collecting rubber duckies as prizes.
With the 99-cent application, also available for Apple's iPad tablet, the House of Mickey is attempting to do something it has never done before: spin a multimillion-dollar franchise out of a character that made his debut on a 3.5-inch screen.
So far the Swampy experiment is going swimmingly. Following its Sept. 22 release, "Where's My Water?" quickly jumped to the top of the Apple App Store's paid applications chart, displacing the record-setting "Angry Birds" game from the No. 1 spot for three weeks.
The logic behind Disney's new release is simple. A movie takes three to five years and hundreds of millions of dollars to make, and as with "Mars Needs Moms," Disney's big theatrical release this past spring, success is hardly guaranteed.
The cost of a mobile game runs in the hundreds of thousands. It took a crew of seven people seven-and-a-half months to produce "Where's My Water?" If Swampy becomes a hit with kids, a follow-up movie could have a ready base of fans eager to buy tickets.
"This is a very, very cost-effective way to develop characters," said Tim Nollen, an analyst at Macquarie Capital USA Inc. in New York. "It's a new way of doing things."
About 52% of kids 8 and younger have used a mobile device for games and other activities, according to a recent survey of 1,384 parents by Common Sense Media Inc.
A new generation of Disney fans "is growing up, and this is their main platform," said Bart Decrem, senior vice president and general manager of Disney Mobile, a 150-person unit. "My gut feeling is, over the next few years, someone will create a game with a billion gamers on it. We want to be that company."
Disney already has Swampy's career plotted out. A 12- episode animated series will air on Disney.com and on Google Inc. (GOOG)'s Youtube sometime in the first quarter of 2012, part of a deal that will have the two companies spend as much as $15 million on co-branded content.
A book and a movie featuring the cute green gator could follow, Decrem says.
(I love this game! - Jenn)
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