|
RedMushroom Studios CEO Bill Bishop on BaoBao BengBeng
Disney's $350 million acquisition of Club Penguin in the US threw a spotlight onto virtual worlds for kids. Now Beijing's Red Mushroom Studios has launched an open beta version of its in-house developed 3D online kids world BaoBao BengBeng [http://www.bb-bb.cn].
JLM Pacific Epoch recently spoke with Red Mushroom CEO Bill Bishop about the company's plans and the world that he and partner Nathan Chow have created. Nathan Chow was the founding CEO of Beijing Wayi and operated Stone Age 1, one of the first blockbuster online games in China.
JLM Pacific Epoch: Whom do you sell your product to, parents or kids?
Bill: Both. We obviously have to make the kids think our game world is fun. It's a place they want to spend time, bring friends and make friends in. But in a lot of cases, when they come to spend money, they turn to their parents. Of course parents want to feel this is safe and clean online experience for their kids. The market messages are different. Kids don't want to have something that is just safe and clean. They want fun and cool. And parents want safe and clean instead of fun and cool. How to thread that needle is definitely one of our challenges. One of our partnerships is with a large education company that focuses on kids’ education. One of our characters kids can adopt is actually a character from the education company's TV show. We'll integrate it into our marketing. It's a program that is very well established and has parents' trust.
PE: Parents care about safety first, how do you ensure BaoBao BengBeng is safe?
Bill: You cannot guarantee this is totally safe. Users are required to input their real ID numbers as part of the registration. But that still cannot guarantee you are who you say you are. Everyone in the world faces this problem. We have filters but we don't have people sitting there looking at every chat log. We do have staff in our world that players can go to with any issues.
PE: You have someone focusing on marketing to parents. Do you have anyone on marketing to kids?
Bill: Not yet. We wanted to get the world out and bring users in. We don’t expect or want huge user numbers in the first weeks as we are still working out some bugs. I think our goal right now is to build a product that kids want to use and then we'll focus more on parents..
PE: At this stage, have you launched any of your payment methods like payment cards, bank debit cards, phone bill, stuffed animals with feature code?
Bill: No. Currently we are still in beta, so we are not charging. Like many online game companies, our initial goal is to attract a critical mass of users. Payment methods are not a big issue anymore in terms of infrastructure.
PE: So you have it all set up?
Bill: Yes.
PE: What's your expectation for online game revenue?
Bill: According to that (July 2007 ed.) CNNIC Report, there are 20 million elementary and middle school age kids online. And if you look at the amount of money spent in media trying to advertise to this age group, it's probably far bigger than the online game market. We are obviously pursuing the pay-for-items-in-the-game model, but we'll certainly be open to advertising after we have a good user base. Many companies pay for TV stations to broadcast TV advertisements targeting Chinese audience. They have spent a huge amount of money without realizing any success. So online advertising may be more attractive.
PE: Any chance you will work with Ministry of Education?
Bill: We designed the game with no sex or violent content. It's clean, safe and fun. It's a healthy game, so to speak. We have, and will add educational content. It may make sense. But at this point, we just want to launch.
PE: What's your role in the company?
Bill: I'm pretty good at product design and working with advertising guys and making them happy. I'll work on some of the deals, trying to get traffic here. We are also hiring in marketing. I am the only Laowai in the company, and the operations will be mostly handled locally.
PE: You and Nathan designed most of the platform, how did you come up with the world?
Bill: We have a good game design team. We also added our own personal experience in games. We both have young kids and we thought it would be nice to build a product we wanted our kids to play
PE: If you had to compare BaoBao BengBeng with western worlds, what's the closest?
Bill: There are certain elements in our world similar to Club Penguin and Webkinz [Like Webkinz, Baobao Bengbeng plans to sell stuffed animal items in targeted retail stores. ed.], but we are a much more immersive world because we have more multiplayer activities in terms of entertainment, and we are not a flash-based world.
PE: When you launch commercially, what sort of user numbers do you expect?
Bill: It depends on how the beta goes. We are likely to start charging by Chinese New Year. It's a good time as kids are at home with hongbao and have money to spend. The operation costs of this world are much lower than that of traditional MMORPGs, so you can be profitable with a much lower user number. We'd be happy if we have forty thousand users by the time we launch.
PE: Let's look at your capital raising. You have already raised money?
Bill Bishop: We did a round in 2004, early 2005 and last summer respectively. We previously raised money for our first project, an MMORPG called Borderlands.
PE: Where was the money from?
Bill: Most money came from my partner Nathan Chow [former founding CEO of Beijing Wayi Software Development Co., the operator of MMORPG Stone Age] and me, as well as our family friends. Last round is invested from Nathan and I and one of our angels.
PE: So this time, are you looking for VC money?
Bill: Our goal is to build a good product. If the right conversation happens or we find the right person who can help us more than just giving money, we’ll consider the investment. We can keep funding this for a while. So we are not going to be actively fundraising until we are stable.
PE: Is it a chicken and egg thing that you need to spend some money on marketing to get users?
Bill: Yes and no. There are some marketing expenses. But because we are not a traditional game company, we don't have to spend a lot on marking like traditional online game operators. We are working on a couple of partnerships with kid-focused sites that should drive very qualified users. We won't start spending money until we are confident for our product and start to get good user feedback.
PE: Who will you use?
Bill: Baidu just launched a kids portal, Baidu Shao'er (http://shaoer.baidu.com/). Clearly Baidu wants to go after this growing market. We'll work with Baidu. We have run some Google Ad words for couple of days and got decent response rates.
|
