The future of fun
Game makers are using social media to turn customers into pitchmen
When K.C. Miller got her seven grandchildren together for the holidays, things got a little messy in the kitchen.
They weren’t cooking some elaborate recipe: they were playing Pie Face, a game in which a dollop of whipped cream is served up from a plastic “throwing arm” to someone who has positioned his face in its path.
As everyone tried to remain stoic while getting bopped with a white blob, Miller took photos and videos on her iPhone.
“We’d play these videos and we’d just howl at how funny they were,” said Miller, a 62year-old resident of Gilbert, Ariz.
And then she posted some of them on Facebook, wanting to share the hijinks with others.
Pie Face, made by Hasbro, was the single bestselling item in the games category in 2016 and the fourth bestselling toy overall, according to market research firm NPD Group. And Miller was hardly alone in sharing her family’s laughs online: Hasbro’s customer research found that more than 50 per cent of people who buy Pie Face make and share a video of themselves playing it.
Pie Face is a symbol of a new era in toymaking, one in which social media is allowing the industry to marshal you, the everyday shopper, to become a product’s most powerful advertiser. And its mega-popularity has helped fuel a flurry of action from toymakers to create games that offer a “shareable moment” — a brief visual morsel that parents and grandparents will post on Instagram or Facebook and that teens will put on Snapchat or YouTube.
It’s a new breed of toy that can’t just be fun for players in real time. It has to be demonstrative. Performative, even.
The desire to strike social gold is shaping the game business in a variety of ways. Toymakers are mining viral social clips for inspiration for new products.
They are scrambling to crank out new games faster than ever to ride digital waves before they crest. And they are approaching their marketing campaigns differently, knowing that your shared clips might do a fair amount of the lifting.
Pie Face, in fact, first came on Hasbro’s radar thanks to social sharing. In 2015, the team there spotted a viral clip of a grandfather and grandson playing the game, which was originally produced in limited numbers by a small company in Britain. Hasbro moved aggressively to buy the rights to manufacture and distribute the game.
Other companies, too, are looking to social phenomena for cues. This summer, Buffalo Games & Puzzles is set to release a game called Flip Tricks, a riff on the cadre of “bottle flip challenge” videos that have sprung up on YouTube.
In the clips, people toss plastic bottles in the air, trying to make them somersault midflight but land right side up. Flip Tricks attempts to codify the phenomenon a bit, providing more durable bottles and spelling out head-to-head or solo challenges.
“If something’s already gone viral, and you’re building a product around that, then you already have this built-in marketing that is stronger than any traditional advertising,” said Ben Jamesson, a vice-president at Buffalo Games.
Social trends go boom and bust at warp speed, and so toymakers say that they have to move at a breakneck pace to capitalize on them. Such was the case with Speak Out, another Hasbro creation.
In this game, players wear a mouthguardlike plastic mould that stretches their faces to look cartoonish and makes it hard to talk. Players must say a phrase to a partner and get them to guess their garbled words.
Hasbro typically takes 12 to 18 months to conceptualize and manufacture a game from scratch. With Speak Out, the process was compressed to 11 weeks. The idea for it was sparked by videos of people putting in dental mouthpieces and getting the giggles when they tried to speak clearly, and Hasbro didn’t want to be late to the social-sharing party.
“Everything has changed. The mindset is the biggest thing — we have to act like entrepreneurs,” said Jonathan Berkowitz, senior vice-president of Hasbro Gaming. “We just have to run when we see an opportunity.”
Making a game into an Instagram or Facebook lodestone doesn’t necessarily mean the idea for it starts on social media.
Josh Loerzel, vice-president of sales and marketing at Zing Toys, says there’s a particular esthetic that lends itself to a grabby, share-worthy bit: there’s got to be some “visual eye candy,” Loerzel said, and a goofy sense of humour.
A Zing product called Wet Head is an example of this: in the game, one player wears
Everything has changed. The mindset is the biggest thing. JONATHAN BERKOWITZ, HABRO GAMING
a yellow helmet equipped with a water chamber. Others take turns pulling pegs out of the helmet, and eventually, one of those pulls ends up soaking the wearer with water. A version of the game was released about a decade ago, but was sent to the dustbin because it didn’t catch on.
But when Zing acquired the company that originally made it, executives decided to revive it, betting it would take off this time thanks to social media sharing. They’ve now sold over a million of them in North America.
Hasbro is counting on similar, social-friendly laughs with Egged On, a game to be released later this year in which players take a set of rubberized eggs and fill some of them with water.
You take turns breaking them on your head, and eventually, someone gets soaked.
Juli Lennett, toy industry analyst at NPD Group, says toymakers are smart to capitalize on a shopper mindset that her firm is seeing apply to a variety of consumer goods.
“The way we look at it is that, enabled by social media, today’s consumer doesn’t want to follow the stars — she wants to be a star,” Lennett said in an email.
“He doesn’t covet status brands — he wants to build his own brand.”