Games for children: point of view
According to the latest NPD Group study, 91% of children aged 2 to 17 years in the United States play computer games – this is 9% more than in 2009. In absolute numbers, this is about 64 million people. At the same time, more and more children are playing games on mobile devices. Does this mean that educational apps for children are a promising direction?
The percentage of children playing has grown, mainly due to the age group from 2 to 5 years – there has been an increase of 17% over the past two years. At the same time, according to the study, in 2009 only 8% of children played on mobile devices – in 2011 this figure increased to 38%.
The trend is quite predictable: there are more and more mobile devices, people are starting to treat them “easier”, using them more and more often in everyday life. Therefore, developers are tempted to make apps for children, focusing on their parents. But is it so or is it profitable?
According to Ekaterina Zholobova, Head of Mobile Application Marketing at Nevosoft, there are several pitfalls that need to be taken into account:
1) On the App Store, the Kids subcategory, to which such applications belong, is one of the most competitive subcategories. The higher the competitiveness of the subcategory, the less likely the application is to be noticed, the more difficult it is for it to get into the top.
2. The target audience may vary greatly by geography. It’s not about the inability to localize the application into other languages and not the quality of these localizations, but about the peculiarities of parenting/teaching children in different countries. In most cases, the techniques and examples that are used, for example, in Russia, are not used in the USA/Europe. Therefore, if the application is developed under the guidance of Russian teachers, it is likely that its sales will be limited to the Russian market.
3. The limitation of CA on the “family” basis. If you take the audience of games for iOS, then choose from it those who have children, then choose from them those who have children of the right age for you, and then choose from the remaining ones who believe that the iPhone/ iPad is a suitable toy for a child and is not afraid to give a child an expensive device to be torn to pieces, “there won’t be many people left.
4. Difficulties with the promotion of such applications. There are not as many resources that write about them as it might seem – everyone is interested in maximizing audience coverage. In different countries, of course, there are specialized resources for moms and dads with smartphones, but there each such application is sorted out “by the bones”, and then see point 2 – geographical features of the upbringing and education of children.
Do not forget that not all parents consider the hobby of games useful.
