Child’s Play - Internet Gaming for Kids
Children and tweens have become an increasingly attractive audience to marketers as their purchase potential has increased (it seems exponentially) over the past decades. Yes it is true, I will admit to owning more Barbies than any one girl could possible need but I don’t think that the sum of their cost would come anywhere near the price of the iPod hanging out of the pocket of the kid next to me on the subway. Kids can get there parents to shell out dough at an amazing rate (and yes, there are a few teens who actually make the cash they spend). An article in Sunday’s New York Times discussed the increasing popularity of internet based games for children. Most of these games are community based and let kids interact with children their own age virtually chatting, playing, working, shopping, taking care of pets (all the things kids in the past were forced to do in the boring real world. Some of the more popular sites are Club Penguin (a money minded protagonist of this online community of cutesy characters is featured in this article) and Webkinz which can be accessed by kids who buy the real life stuffed animal for one year (at which point the need to buy a new virtual pet). Both of these services charge a fee in different ways, Club Penguin monthly and Webkinz yearly. There is no problem with this sort of membership fee in my eyes. However, when a kid is asking his parent to shell out $19.95 so he can buy a virtual amulet for the game Dragon Amulet, I think things have gone to far.
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