Creating A Monster

Moshi Monsters is not your average free to play MMO, but then creator Michael Acton Smith is not your average game developer. Founder of Mind Candy, Acton Smith's history includes the birth of online gadget retailer Firebox, and the ambitious but ultimately disastrous ARG Perplex City, which combined a real life prize of buried treasures with clues on trading cards and websites.

Then there was Moshi Monsters, an online MMO that Acton Smith describes as "Tamagotchi meets Facebook". After a shaky start and a near brush with bankruptcy, half the of all UK six to 12 year olds are now caring for their own Monster, and there are 50 million registered users. There's also the books and toys, with the the merchadise expected to earn the company £60 million this year, and live events and TV planned for the future. Acton Smith spoke exclusively to GamesIndustry.biz about his plans to turn the game into a global brand, and some of the challenges of building an online company.

Q: After your Develop presentation I have to ask, are you genetically incapable of thinking small?

Michael Acton Smith: I think life is more fun when you do things to the extreme. I read a great book called The Magic Of Thinking Big and it was just about how most people think ordinarily and small and there's no harm in shooting for the moon and trying to do things massively. Because even if you screw up you still have fun along the way. We've had some missteps along the way, and headaches and sleepless nights, dead ends, but so far it's going very well.

Q: Would you change anything? If you started Moshi Monsters again, would you do any of it differently?

Michael Acton Smith: I don't know if we would have got to this point without making some mistakes. That's the beauty of creating an online game, which is so different to the product based mentality from the old traditional school, where you spend years building something, putting it in a box, and then you cross your fingers when you ship it out.

So you can get it wrong, and we did when Moshi first launched, it was rubbish. It just didn't really spread, and we spent the best part of a year just tweaking all the dials and looking at the data and making hypothesis about what might work and little by little it started to come together, and then it really snapped into place in the summer of 2009. So yeah, I think you've got to make mistakes to try and find the winning formula.

Q: How big a part does metrics play in that process? Do you follow them as closely as Zynga, for example?

Michael Acton Smith: I'd say we're a bit more balanced. Zynga is an analytics company first, and a games company second, and I'd say I love making games and I want my games to be around for a long time so while the data is important, we don't want to that to crowd out the creative, innovative, quirky stuff that you just can't really know with data. Sometimes you have to make those great leaps, and most of them go wrong but every now and them you come up with something that changes the game.

We love all that silly stuff, and I think it helps to build a longer term product that works not just as an online game, but now we see ourselves much more as a brand. We hear so many examples of kids that play Moshi that don't even know there's a website, they've discovered it from their older brothers and sisters, or the magazine, or the Top Trumps.

Q: You must have had offers from companies like the BBC or the Cartoon Network, so is it a company rule to go it alone?

Michael Acton Smith: No, we partner where we think it makes sense, where there's a partner that can bring value and experience or distribution, but in other instances we think it makes more sense to go it alone. So on the TV side we're still trying to figure out the best way to do this, and we have had a lot of conversations but I just can't quite get my head around the traditional TV model where you create a show, and you spend millions of pounds doing that, and then you hope a broadcasters will show it at the right time slot, often you have to give away a lot of the back end, and we've got an audience already, and a great IP. We don't necessarily need to follow the traditional model. So we're being open minded about it.

And the same in the film industry as well, we wouldn't want to, or I don't think it makes as much sense for us to sell an option in Moshi and give away all creative control to someone else. I think it makes a bit more sense to do something maybe a bit more collaborative.

Q: So have you retained a lot of creative control with the DS game, Moshi Zoo?

Michael Acton Smith: Yes, pretty much. We thought long and hard about doing that, and we spoke to some major publishers, and in the end we decided it made sense just to publish ourselves. So we're working with Black Lantern, who are making the game, and then for our distribution partner we're working with Activision. I wasn't meant to announce that [at Develop] by the way, but the cats out of the bag now, and Activision look like they're going to be a great partner. They know a fair bit about the video game industry.

So that's an example where it's not just us giving away all control, it's kind of realising that we're good, we understand our IP, we can finance the game and creatively create it, but we do need help in some areas such as distribution and then a few other elements that I think Activision are going to be fantastic at.

Q: And what attracted you to Black Lantern as a developer?

Michael Acton Smith: So we spoke to tonnes of different partners, Black Lantern sent over a bunch of concepts that we really liked, they just seemed to be on the same wave length as us, they see this as potentially the first game in many. We just liked them. And they'd also created some good kid's games, which was very important. They'd had some success with other properties similar to Moshi, so we thought they'd be a good partner to work with.

Q: I also wanted to ask about what you called the "stealth education" in Moshi Monsters. Is that a tactical move to please parents, or do you feel a sense of responsibility to educate the children who play?

Michael Acton Smith: Education is one of my passions, and I think games are an incredibly powerful way to educate kids, if done in the right way. So I think a lot of educational games that try to be fun haven't really worked because kids can see through that. What I wanted to do was to create an entertaining game that had a little bit of education in it, so flipping it round on its head. And that seems to have worked much much better.

As I said, we call it stealth education. And kids are learning! Kids love to learn, of course they do, they love to show off these things they've discovered, they love to try and beat their friends, but a test where you sit down in a dark room and work away is very different to a 60 second puzzle with our monster cheering or crying and bright colours and noise and music and sparkles. And the content is the same, but kids are going to spend hours and hours on one and run away from the other. So we're very proud of that side of the game and we just have to get the balance right.

Q: Are there any other special considerations that come with creating an online game for children? Is the moderation particularly intensive?

Michael Acton Smith: Yes, it's a very very important part of the world, and we take our responsibility very seriously. We're looking after tens of millions of kids with an amazing moderation team, we use software with a company called Crisp that monitors every message on the site, we track and record every click. I think the interesting thing is a couple of years ago there was a nervousness about kids playing online and everybody assumed "this must be dangerous!"

And I think people are just calming down and realising kids love technology, this is going to be an extremely important part of their future, far better that they spend time on a social network with training wheels like Moshi, sort of a walled garden where they can experiment and learn in an environment that's deliberately designed for them, rather than just dropping them straight into Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube. And I think parents feel much more comfortable about it now and we spend a lot of time educating kids. It's just like the offline world, we don't let our kids wander off to school on their own, we teach them about not talking to strangers, we teach them about how to cross the road, and I think smart parents are realising that's no different to the online world.

Q: Have you been tempted to do anything for the hardcore market, say on consoles?

Michael Acton Smith: We are dipping our toe in the water with the DS, yes, and we think that's the perfect platform for our audience to try, and if that works well then I think we'll look at other areas as well. Maybe the Wii or the Kinect.

But with my commercial hat on, it's just not quite as exciting as building an online game. The development cycles are long, the upfront risk is high, the returns just don't seem that attractive, there's a lot of other partners that would be involved, so there's just more headache and more uncertainty involved than creating our own game where we're developer and publisher, where we have a direct relationship with the end audience, where we make 90 per cent less gross margins etcetera etcetera. So it's more kind of fun, incremental stuff that we splash around in at the edge.

But our objective is not just to build an online game, we want to build this massive new type of entertainment company, and so that does mean we need to everywhere that our audience wants us, and that does mean console, and magazines and books. I want our live show to sell out the O2 and have holograms and pyrotechnics and screaming fans.

Q: How do you decide what's next?

Michael Acton Smith: We have lots of meetings internally, we have an amazing management team at Mind Candy and I also just spend hours in coffee shops scribbling down ideas and notes and where we could take things. So we kind of have a plan for this ultimate vision, and then it sort of depends on people we meet who could head up various areas of the business, so we're desperately looking for a head of mobile, a head of music, we want an executive producer for our animation division. And when we find someone that's great, and we find a partner we can work with, then that's when we launch that part of the business. It's not like we say "these are all things we don't to do, and this is the order in which we're going to do them" it's a bit more agile, a bit more chaotic.

Q: How often do you log in, assuming you have a monster?

Michael Acton Smith: So I've got a monster called Snowcrash whose level 16, I've got about 12 Moshlings that I've collected, so shamefully not as often as I should or would like, things are insanely busy at the moment, but I think it's important to stay connected to the game, so I do try now and again.

I know I'm not going on enough when our customer service team start getting loads of emails from kids saying "Mr Moshi is neglecting his monster, it's sick, it's dying, what's he doing, it's so irresponsible!" So that's when I know I need to feed it and play a few games with it. I get thousands of visits everyday from kids making sure that Snowcrash is being looked after.