![]() ![]() A movie launches, it has nothing to do with a TV show. But if you look at everybody else outside of Disney, they’re definitely not doing that. Marvel and Disney, what they do is they’re creating universes that everything interacts with the TV shows, work with their movies, the movies work with their games, everything kind of feeds into individual aspects to it. Marvel’s a good example of doing a good job of that. And that’s really kind of a sweet spot for us, IPs that are doing large launches, that are existing in a lot of different places, but they really should be creating experiences that really unify everything. So typically, with an IP company, there’s a lot of business units, a lot of companies associated to it, and none of them are really interacting with one another. Naruto is kind of licensed out from Shoeisha and they take that and a bunch of other companies do the merchandise, and a bunch of other companies do the games. In Japan, let’s use Naruto as an example. The big customers are large toy companies that are trying to unify kind of a merchandising strategy. Are most customers taking existing IP and making toys, like Star Wars or Frozen or Angry Birds? Or are they companies that have like a popular game and want to add a layer of physical activity to it? Tim: Okay, so you’re swapping physical characters in the real world and that’s impacting the game in real-time, as you play it? Cool. Jia: As a player, you literally have your character in front of it when you’re walking through, and say there’s a specific enemy that you want to defeat that requires a specific characters, you immediately swap the character right on the pedestal, and that person immediately appears out of the game. Tim: So what is the physical tie-in there? Other ones require you to have big hands to be able to crawl up walls. ![]() For instance, certain ones require you to be able to have wheels as feet, to be able to run faster. So imagine a Super Mario game but different levels have different mechanics. They really accentuate the collection of individual characters. Jia: Skylanders, I think, is the best game design. ![]() Tim: For example, there would be a figurine, or a trophy, or a sticker of some kind that would activate a character in the game or would activate new levels in the game? So the guys that do it on a large scale, they usually have console games, and you have different characters, which you can stick into the game, they have different power-ups, they have different game mechanics. And specifically it’s toys that are collectible, that have a strong interaction with video games. Nintendo, LEGO, they all have some forays into this. So we point to, in the US, Skylanders from Activision, Disney had a big one called Infinity, featuring a lot of the great Disney characters. The toys to life is a model, that from our perspective, Japan has done a lot of pioneering, but the United States, in maybe the last 5 or 6 years, have made a very large business out of it. Now, PowerCore does toys to life or sometimes it’s called offline-online business, but why don’t you explain basically what it is and who uses it. Tim: I’m sitting here with Jia Shen of PowerCore. It’s a simple idea in principle but there are surprising reasons why some of the most influential companies in the industry have trouble following it.īut Jia tells that story much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. It seems that, as is so often the case, the secret to introducing innovative technology, is to do only as much as you absolutely have to, and then watch how your users react. Of course, as with all technologies, adoption is never smooth, and Jia explains some of the mistakes that burned Disney, and some of the major market players. It’s a simple interaction that radically changes the way we view the digital-analog divide. For example, if you owned a figurine of a superhero, that hero could appear in the game. Powercore enables video games to react to the presence of physical object. Jia Shen, of PowerCore, is blurring the distinction between the online and offline interaction. You know, gaming has always pushed the limits of both computer hardware and the interfaces we use to interact with computers. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. ![]()
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