作者：Steve Peterson

Fingerprint Digital是一家专门制作儿童教育类游戏的初创手机游戏公司，日前宣布获得Corus Entertainment这家媒介公司的投资，后者旗下拥有诸如《Nelvana Enterprises》、《Max and Ruby》、《Babar》、《Franklin and Friends》、《Scaredy Squirrel》和《Chester and CitizenKid》等品牌。Corus作为主要投资方，其《Nelvana Enterprises》总经理Colin Bohm将加入Fingerprint董事会。

于2011年11月启动的Fingerprint Play平台，主要面向iOS（游戏邦注：包括iPhone、iPod Touch和iPad）开放服务，提供了大量具有交互性的娱乐和教育类游戏，主要是为了吸引孩子和父母。该公司指出Fingerprint现已提供14款应用，玩家在其中投入时间已超过2000万分钟。有了Corus的投资，Fingerprint Play打算在2012年底，将平台扩展到Android设备，并增添8款全新的游戏应用。

Fingerprint联合创始人及首席执行官Nancy Macintyre最近接受采访，她阐述了移动平台上针对儿童的教育类游戏市场动向。

你是如何看待自己的产品；它们是教育软件还是教育类游戏呢？

我们的产品是教育与娱乐为一体的，所以它们是以娱乐为主的教育类游戏。我想，过去人们可能会称它为“寓教于乐”游戏。

教育软件曾是一个规模超过10亿美元的市场，但10年前这个市场就已经崩溃了是吗？

情况并非如此；我在Broderbund从业7年多了。我亲历了这个市场发展的前期及中期。我在Fingerprint推广初期讲过这个真实的故事，这要追溯到寓教于乐软件时期，CD-ROM创收10亿美元，当时主导公司包括Broderbund、Learning Company、Davidson和Knowledge Adventure，不知为何，这个产业消失了。众人普遍认为，这个市场的蒸发归结于两个原因：其一，是由于Leapfrog和Vtech这类提供基于电脑的专门教育游戏公司涌现；其二，是由于人们快速接受互联网，孩子们可能会永久体验在线游戏。

现在，智能手机和平板电脑开始将目标群定位在年龄较小的孩童，它们不仅针对这一群体而设计，而且也是家长为孩子而购买的设备，这是否为教育类游戏创造了一大市场机遇？

这正是Fingerprint的由来。iPhone问世时，我正为Leapfrog效力，分管开发和营销业务。在涉入教育类玩具和游戏行业时，我们视任天堂为竞争对手。因为教育游戏的商机通常来自6岁以下的儿童，如果孩子们转向任天堂DS，我们就会永久失去这些用户。我第一次见到iPhone时，我就清楚它将引发一场竞争。你会在餐厅看到，当父母把iPhone交给2岁的孩子时，他就完全沉浸在这一设备中。我知道结果将是每位母亲都配备一部iPhone手机。而在这些设备上游戏的易用性和制作成本最终只会极大地影响掌机游戏和教育玩具产业。我们预计这种情况将在5年后发生。各种孩童游戏已随着移动平台快速转移，这大大超过人们的预期状况。在过去的两年间，位列圣诞节礼物前五名的都是iPad、iPhone和iPod Touch这类移动设备，而在以前，孩子们只想要Xbox和Wii这类游戏机。

你们所有的应用都是免费的，所以你是实行免费模式吗？然后通过虚拟道具和其它购买获取利益？

我们的第一手应用都是免费的，所以，你可以免费体验这些应用，然后我们会兜售游戏的一些附加关卡。典型事例是我们的应用《Whole Wide World》，这是一款地理游戏，你可以在游戏中环绕全球，选择一个地点，然后进入界面，你会体验到各个地方的特色。而游戏中，只有一些国家的关卡是免费的，其它需要付费。我们发现免费增值模式可以在成人世界中运用自如。我们也兜售应用；我们的《Do Re Mi》就以高价出售，我们也贩卖《Whole Wide World》的完全付费版。总之，我们的每款游戏都提供了免费及付费模式。

kid-game(from gamesindustry)

你的一些应用针对3-6岁的儿童，其它针对6-9岁的儿童。未来你的用户群定位在哪个阶段？

运营初期，我们确实着重3-8岁的儿童。其中4-7岁儿童为主要关注点。随着孩子年龄的增长，我们会开始发行不同的游戏，我们打算覆盖幼儿园到12年级的所有用户群，其中以1-4年级的学生为主。因为幼儿园市场已向孩子提供大量优秀的游戏，而年龄稍大的孩子因具备阅读能力，这类游戏对他们并无效果。相比较于寓教于乐时代，你就会发现《Carmen》、《Sandiego》和《Oregon Trail》这类游戏确实吸引8岁以上儿童，所以我们认为1-4年级的学生是我们最大的游戏商机。

那些游戏充满乐趣，同时向孩子们传播教育知识。

这就是我们制作游戏的重点，提供吸引所有儿童的精致的游戏体验。最终也可以将他们的父母和祖父母带入这个游戏世界。你将会看到，我们正在扩展游戏的年龄范畴和游戏体验，让游戏可以吸引全家人。

你是否认为平板电脑是与众不同的体验类型，你需为此做独特设计呢？

平板电脑可以是单人模式体验，也可以在分屏模式下享受多人体验。同一空间可以有两位玩家，类似棋盘游戏模式。或者也可以让聚集不同地方的玩家形成多人游戏体验。我们尤其看重平板电脑的惊人商机。目前我们正在研究一组游戏，它们既适用同个地方的多位玩家，也适用不同地方的玩家进行联机游戏。这种复杂的游戏设计也适用不同年龄层的孩子。这样，一个5岁的孩子就能同他的外祖母一起玩游戏了。

Fingerprint也是一个平台，能具体介绍下它的情况吗？

本质上，Fingerprint就是个平台。我们也喜欢将其当成一个网络，类似于电视网络，我们可以在自己的平台上编写所有应用。我们制作的SDK便于第三方同我们的平台绑定，也便于他们访问平台提供的各项功能，对孩子而言，我们平台的特色是优质的游戏，父母同孩子的对话系统（游戏邦注：名为“Mom-Com”），产品推荐引擎（用来推荐孩子喜欢且父母信任的应用），而且我们还能记录父母的游戏进程。我们这个SDK是为具有应用开发资格的公司而服务。每周，我们都会从开发者那收到想要继续在此平台发行游戏的请求。我们通过评估决定它们是否对平台有益。目前，我们拥有6家开发商，我们尝试、研究并运行了9项应用，预计今年年底我们的平台将再引进另外6家开发商。

今年年底之前，你们将进驻Android平台，是吗？

Fingerprint平台已在Android上进行测试，年底前我们会发行一系列全新品牌的应用。我们感到很兴奋，这基于多种原因。我们在Kindle Fire取得不错的成果，我们很高兴地看到母亲和外祖母都配备平板电脑，这在美国是一款可行的设备。进军全球所有的Android平台对我们来说极其关键。你将会看到我们开发出跨平台的游戏。

感觉我们在今年圣诞节将会拥有许多物美价廉的平板电脑，比如新型平板电脑Nexus7以及传说中的iPad Mini。你认为这对你们的业务有什么积极影响？

从针对孩子的商业角度上看，我们希望更多的孩子拥有更多的平板电脑。年初的时候我听CES说今年圣诞节将会有五款针对孩子，且价格在100美元的平板电脑在Toys R Us等地方促销。所以这对我们来说是个好消息，因为孩子们拥有越多的平板设备，对我们更有利。对游戏开发者而言，尝试制作各种屏幕面积的游戏存在一些挑战，但我们仍认为这值得一试。

Q：现在你们得到Corus Entertainment的投资，它是一家聚集着许多孩童游戏品牌的媒介公司。这是否意味着，未来你们可能会利用它们的品牌发行游戏呢？

会的。虽然我们还未发布任何消息，但是很明显，Corus Entertainment有一些热门的孩童游戏品牌，包括《Babar》、《Max and Ruby》、《Franklin the turtle》及《Beyblades》等。我们敢说你将会看到Corus会在Fingerprint平台上授权发行一些游戏。我们对此表示兴奋；因为到目前为止，我们还未发行过任何授权游戏。Corus为Fingerprint带来了比金钱更有价值的东西，因为它们有一套在世界各地最棒的儿童电视频道推广的精彩节目。它们还成立了儿童发行业务，叫做Kids Can Press，里面有上百册的有趣的图书可以运用于应用领域。能与Corus合作，我感到无比激动。

你认为会有更多公司向教育类游戏发展吗？随着时间的推移，这一领域的竞争会越发激烈吗？

这是个好问题。过去两年来，我发现在这一领域崛起了不少新面孔，因为廉价平板电脑的增多，从游戏系统转向移动平台和其它专属系统（比如Leapfrog进军移动领域）给他们带来了商机。我想大家都看到了商机，起初是廉价的交互式书籍。接着，许多早期涉及iPhone和iPad平台的公司进军教育领域，去年，我们看到Reading Rainbow和其它图书平台主要关注书籍。

接着，你就清楚大多数玩家都喜欢像迪斯尼、Nickolodeon和芝麻街这类的大型媒介公司。我想，人们会继续在这领域投入精力，他们也会试着从传统游戏平台转向移动领域。我想竞争是激烈的，这里没有已形成霸权的领军公司，只有巨大的商机。我想接下来两年，情况将演变地越发激烈。

在教育界的几十年来，我们听到每个孩子都需配备一台电脑，虽然这一想法获得些许进展，但是它们从来没有真正地进入教育领域。现在，随着智能手机和平板电脑的普遍化，你认为它们对学校来说会更重要吗？

当然了。我想，推动平板电脑在学校的普及能促进数字教科书的出现。大多数大型教科书公司已进行数字创新，我们将不会看到厚重的课本，而会看到通过iPad和平板电脑直接传送的知识。一旦发生这种变革，所有学生都会购买这些设备，他们用iPad上课，老师通过iPad监视学生的行为，教育领域将会出现许多评估学生这类学习活动的现象。我坚信这种变革将会发生，而且会继续发生；我们会看到平板电脑在学校的覆盖率将遥遥领先计算机的使用量。

对游戏行业而言，这意味着iPad会成为孩子所使用的另一家用游戏设备，iPad同电视和DVD播放机一样具有分享性。我想，这不仅是孩子可以选择体验的游戏系统，也将被作为学校的办公设备。

我总在想，如果孩子们在学习产品上花的时间同玩游戏的时间一样多，那样他们就会得到深刻的教育。

我完全赞同你的看法。我想，我们会看到越发精良的教育类游戏，而且它们会不断更新。总之，游戏会一直存在，现在，而正在成长中的年轻孩子很小就开始玩游戏了，从他们接触iPad那刻起。可能。这一领域的创新将会无穷无尽。

有了Corus的额外投资，你有打算加速扩大规模吗？

我们正在积极聘请更多的人员。年底的时候，我们打算将现有的9人团队扩增到15-20人，而且主要是程序员方面的扩增。我们打算在Android平台上发行更多的游戏，同时，你也会看到我们在一些国际市场的进展。

我觉得自己很幸运，我们在这一市场的正确时间成立了团队，并且还有Corus这样棒的合作伙伴。我觉得是我们的良好定位才使得我们在儿童市场取得如此佳绩。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Fingerprint Digital CEO: “Huge opportunity” in kid’s games

by Steve Peterson

Investment from media giant Corus Entertainment boosts mobile learning games

Fingerprint Digital Inc., a mobile gaming startup creating educational games for kids, announced today an investment from Corus Entertainment, the media company that owns brands such as Nelvana Enterprises, Max and Ruby, Babar, Franklin and Friends, Scaredy Squirrel, Chester and CitizenKid. Corus will be lead investor, and its managing director Colin Bohm of Nelvana Enterprises was named to Fingerprint’s board.

The Fingerprint Play platform, which launched in December of 2011, is available on iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) and offers a range of entertaining and educational content with compelling interactive features designed to engage children and parents in a gaming environment. Fingerprint offers 14 apps today, which have been played over 20 million minutes according to the company. With this investment from Corus, Fingerprint Play plans to expand to Android devices and add eight new gaming apps by the end of 2012.

GamesIndustry International caught up co-founder and CEO Nancy Macintyre to talk about educational games for kids on mobile platforms and where that market is headed.

Q: What do you call your products; are they educational software or games?

Nancy Macintyre: Our products straddle between education and fun, so they’re really learning games that are fun first. I think in the past they would have been called edutainment.

Q: Educational software was once over a billion dollar market, and then it collapsed over a decade ago, didn’t it?

Nancy Macintyre: You’re preaching to the choir here; I worked at Broderbund for over 7 years. I was living that front and center. In my original pitch deck for Fingerprint I was telling that exact story, that back in the day the edutainment software category on CD-ROM was a billion dollars, lead by Broderbund, Learning Company, Davidson, and Knowledge Adventure, and somehow that business just evaporated. The conventional wisdom was that it evaporated for two reasons: One was the advent of companies like Leapfrog and Vtech which were providing proprietary educational gaming experiences that were off of the computer, and the second was the rapid adoption of the internet and kids could play online games forever.

Q: Now that smartphones and tablets are beginning to make their way to a younger and younger audience, not just being lent to kids but being purchased for them, does this create a large market opportunity for educational games?

Nancy Macintyre: That’s exactly the genesis of Fingerprint. I was working at Leapfrog, running product development and marketing, when the iPhone came out. When you’re in the educational toy and game business, we really focused on Nintendo as the enemy. For the educational business the opportunity ended at 6, because kids want to get the Nintendo DS and once you’ve lost them they’re off into the real gaming world forever. The first time I saw the iPhone it was really clear that that was going to be the competition. The first time you saw a parent hand an iPhone to a two-year-old in a restaurant and the child just be completely fixated on the device, I realized that the competition was going to be every mom with an iPhone in her purse. The accessibility and the cost of content on these devices is just eventually going to have a big impact on the gaming handheld business and the educational toy business. Fast-forward five years, that’s really what we’ve seen happen. All kinds of kid’s content has migrated over to mobile faster than anybody really expected. For the last two years, the top five items on Christmas lists for kids have all been mobile devices like iPads, iPhone, iPod Touch as opposed to the old days when it was always ‘I want an Xbox, I want a Wii’ etc.

Q: All your apps are free, so is your business model all freemium with virtual items or other purchases to generate revenue?

Nancy Macintyre: Our first-party apps are all freemium, so you can experience the app for free and then we sell additional levels of content. The best example is our app Whole Wide World, which is a geography game where you spin the globe, choose a location and you go to that location, and you play apps based on whatever the country is. You get a certain amount of countries for free and the rest you purchase. We’ve discovered that that freemium model, just like in the adult world seems to work the best for us. We are also selling apps; we have an app Do Re Mi that we sell at a premium price, and we also sell a fully paid version of Whole Wide World. In general we offer freemium and premium versions of everything.

Q: Some of your apps are for kids 3-6, others for kids 6-9. What demographics will you target in the future?

Nancy Macintyre: When we started initially, we were really focused on 3-8. I would say our sweet spot from is between 4 and 7. You’re going to see us start to release content that ages up, and we’re going to cover grade school from k-12 with a real focus from first to fourth grade. We feel like the preschool market is very well served and there’s quite a lot of content out there, but once you get into slightly older kids, kids that can read, there’s really slightly less available. If you were to compare this back to the edutainment era you think about things like Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, those are games that were certainly appealing for 8 and up, and that’s where we think there is a tremendous opportunity.

Q: Those games were a lot of fun as well as providing information and education.

Nancy Macintyre: That’s what we’re focused on, providing great game experiences that could be appealing to all kids. Ultimately, bringing their parents or grandparents into the equation as well. You’ll see us begin to expand our age range and expand play experiences that could be fun for the whole family.

Q: Do you see tablets as being a different type of experience that you have to design differently for?

Nancy Macintyre: We see tablets as they can be a single-player experience, they can be a multi-player experience with a split-screen. You can have two players in the same room, sort of a board game dynamic. Or they can be multi-player experience where people are in different locations. We see amazing opportunities with that device in particular. We’re working on a couple of games right now that will go down that route of both multi-player in the same location as well as multiplayer in different locations. It is tricky designing for games that could be played by kids of multiple ages as well. We’re excited about an approach that would let a five-year-old play with their grandmother.

Q: Fingerprint also acts as a platform; tell me about that.

Nancy Macintyre: We are essentially a platform. We like to look at ourselves as a network, like a TV network, where we are programming all of the apps on our platform. We’ve created an SDK that makes it easy for third parties to integrate on our platform and give them access to all of the features that we offer, and the features for kids are great games, a parent-child communication system that we call Mom-Com, a product recommendation engine that recommends apps that kids would like and parents can trust, and then we also have progress tracking for the parents. We’ve created this SDK for third parties that we have distributed to qualifying app development companies. We’re getting several requests every week from developers that want to go on the platform. We run those through an evaluation process to see if it makes sense to bring them onto our platform. We’ve had six developers so far that we’ve taken on, up and running with 9 apps today, and we’ve got a group of six additional developers that we’ll bring onto the platform by the end of the year.

Q: You’re moving onto the Android platform before the end of the year, right?

Nancy Macintyre: We have the Fingerprint platform running here in test on Android, and we will launch it along with a group of brand new apps before the end of the year. We’re excited about that for a number of reasons. We’re really high on the Kindle Fire, we like the fact that it’s in the hands of a lot of moms and grandmoms, and we think that’s a really viable device here in the US. On a global basis, getting to Android is really critical to us. You’ll see us develop all of our games cross-platform.

Q: It looks like we’ll have a lot of lower-priced, high performing tablets out there this Christmas, with the Nexus 7, a new Kindle Fire, and Apple’s iPad Mini rumored. Do you think this will have an impact on your business?

Nancy Macintyre: I think from a kid’s business perspective it’s great for us to get more tablets in the hands of more kids. I had heard earlier this year, coming out of CES, that there were going to be at least five $100 tablets targeted at kids for sale this Christmas at places like Toys R Us, etc. So that’s great news for us because the more new tablets and the more hand-me-down tablets in the hands of kids, the better for us. There are some challenges as a game developer trying to make content work on multiple screen sizes, but we think the opportunity is worth it.

Q: You have an investment now from Corus Entertainment, a huge media company with many kid’s brands. Does this mean you’ll be doing titles based on their brands in the future?

Nancy Macintyre: Yes. We haven’t announced anything, but clearly they have some really winning kids brands like Babar, Max and Ruby, Franklin the turtle, Beyblades, etc. It’s very safe to say that you will see some Corus license on the Fingerprint platform at some time. We’re super excited about that; up to this point we have not done any licensed games. They bring so much more than money to the relationship with Fingerprint, because they’ve got a family of absolutely wonderful brands that are distributed on the best kid’s television channels around the world. They’ve also got a kid’s publishing business called Kids Can Press that has hundreds of fantastic books that could be adopted in the app world. We couldn’t be more thrilled with them as a partner.

Q: Do you think more companies are going to jump into learning games, and the category will get more competitive over time?

Nancy Macintyre: That is a great question. What I’ve seen over the past two years is that there have been many entrants into the category because everybody sees the opportunity with the proliferation of low-cost tablets, transition from gaming systems into mobile and other proprietary systems like Leapfrog leading into mobile. I think everybody sees the opportunity, and the lowest-hanging fruit initially was interactive books. Then you saw a bunch of companies in the early days of the iPhone and the iPad that entered the education space, and in the last year we’ve seen Reading Rainbow and a bunch of other book platforms. They’re all largely focused on books instead of games.

Then you’ve got Disney, Nickolodeon and Sesame Street, lots of players from big media companies. I think you’re going to continue to see investment in this area and you’re going to continue to see people try to make the transition from the more traditional gaming space into mobile. I think the competition is great, there’s no clear leader and lots of players, and it’s just a huge opportunity for everybody. I think it’s going to be a pretty exciting time over the next two years.

Q: For decades in education we’ve heard we need to get computers into kid’s hands, and there have been some stride but they’ve never been really integrated into education. Now with smartphones and tablets becoming ubiquitous, do you see them becoming more important in the schools?

Nancy Macintyre: Absolutely. I don’t think there’s any question that the thing that will drive tablets in schools is the digitization of textbooks in schools. Most of the big textbook companies all have digital initiatives and I think we’re already seeing this major transition from hardcover books to products that are delivered directly to the iPad or other tablet. Once that happens, all bets are going to be off, because kids are going to have these devices, lessons are going to be taught on the iPad, teachers are going to be monitoring kid’s behavior on the iPad, there’s a lot of activity in the education space to actually do assessment learning and that kind of stuff. That is definitely happening and will continue to happen; we’ll see a faster adoption of tablets than we saw of computers in schools because of the cost and the accessibility of content.

What that means to the gaming business is that the iPad is another screen available to kids in the household, the iPad is shareable just like the TV is or a DVD player within the family. I think this is going to be not only the gaming system of choice in the household for kids but also used as a productivity device for all those school projects.

Q: I keep thinking that if only we could see kids spending the amount of time with learning products that they spend with games, we’d see some impressive educational gains.

Nancy Macintyre: I completely agree with you. I think we are seeing better and better learning games out there, and I think you’ll continue to see that. Gaming in general is here to stay, and young kids today are growing up playing learning games almost from the very beginning, from the time they can touch the iPad. The possibilities around innovation in this category are endless.

Q: With this additional investment from Corus, are you planning to expand more rapidly?

Nancy Macintyre: We’re actively hiring more people. We’re going to scale our team from around 9 people to the 15-20 range by the end of this year, primarily engineers. We’re getting to Android faster with more content than we expected, and you’re also going to see us make some strides with products in some international markets as well.

I feel lucky that we’ve created a business that is really at the right time for the market and that we’ve found a fantastic partner in Corus. I feel really well-positioned to make something awesome happen here in the kid’s space.(source:gamesindustry)