Seen as a “last throw of the dice” in 2008 by Michael Acton Smith’s Mind Candy, Moshi Monsters has grown into a phenomenal success. The educational social game for kids is said to be signing up a new player every second and when your online brand is shifting merchandise in the physical world too, you must be doing something right.
It’s no wonder then that a new UK startup would want to pitch itself on the back of Moshi Monsters’ success and Fight My Monster is doing just that, aiming to be a “Moshi Monsters for boys”.
That’s because Moshi Monsters’ demographic of kids aged around 7-11 is skewed towards girls after both younger boys and girls graduate from Club Penguin. The market for boys is more fragmented, split between the likes of Webkinz, Pokemon and Miniclip. Or so says Fight My Monster founder Dominic Williams who has four young sons and so has set out to fill what he sees as a void with big potential.
And if further validation is needed (beyond Williams’ own children), we’ve learned that the well-known online games entrepreneur Dylan Collins has joined Fight My Monster as an Angel investor. Collins has seen several exits, including DemonWare, which was acquired by Activision Blizzard, and Jolt Online Gaming, acquired by GameStop.
Responding to his sons’ complaints that “Moshi Monsters was too girly”, Williams, who is also the founder of System 7 and a major Cassandra contributor, put Fight My Monster in development over the last 12 months, while it launched in beta in January this year. Since then the game, which sees players pit their monsters against each other in trump-card like fashion, among other interactions, has seen over 3 million monsters created and 6 million battles fought, having garnered 110k players of which 80% are male and between 7-11 years of age. Notably, 20 thousand parents have registered too; Fight My Monster’s parent center lets parents monitor their children’s interactions and defriend or block other users if they wish. Additionally, growth is 40% month-on-month and players are spending 30 minutes per session on average.
It’s fair to say that those numbers are quite impressive and we understand that this was a main driver behind Collins’ decision to invest. To that end, Fight My Monster turned on its subscription just over three weeks ago and is said by Collins to be “monetizing ahead of where the team expected”. This is certainly one to watch.
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