Activision dives into freemium mobile games with Skylanders Cloud Patrol for ... - VentureBeat

Activision Blizzard is diving into freemium iPhone games in a big way with the worldwide launch of its Skylanders Cloud Patrol game for the iPhone today.

The new app signals a big departure for Activision Blizzard, which has always focused on selling paid games rather than giving them away for free. It shows that the world’s largest video game publisher is embracing change when it comes to new business models in the era mobile games. It is now taking the No. 1 new kids game of 2011 and moving it into a platform where it can be given away for free to succeed.

“It is Activision’s first ever freemium, micro-transaction game,” said Greg Canessa, vice president of mobile at Activision Publishing. “It is a part of a larger strategy and a significant move. You’ll see more of this to come. Activision as a company is looking at this space very carefully.”

The game costs 99 cents, with no free version, but it features the ability to purchase additional goods during the course of gameplay. Other free-to-play vendors usually make a free version to entire players to buy the full version. So for now, this is free-to-play without the free part.

The arcade-like shooting game is based on the Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure franchise that Activision Publishing launched with great success in the fall, with more than 25 million toys sold. In console or computer games, the Skylanders games integrated a line of action toys with interactive entertainment. Kids could plug a Skylanders portal into a game console. Then they set their toy character on top of the portal and it would magically appear inside the video game. After you finish playing, the child could take the character off the portal and saved game and character with it.

The great promise of the family-oriented Skylanders was that you could take the same toy and game across a bunch of different game platforms. That now includes the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices too. More than 30 characters from Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure will work in the Skylanders Cloud Patrol game. If you bought one of the toy characters, you can type the serial number of the toy and unlock that character in the iPhone game. Otherwise, you would have to use some  of you virtual currency â€" gems â€" to unlock the character. And gems cost real money. You can earn coins in the game and those can be used for power-ups.

While iOS may not generate as much revenue as the console or PC game, it is an important touch point that will enable players to become familiar with the brand for a much lower price. The game itself was designed to be a brand new experience, Canessa said. It is set in a new region of Skylands that has been overrun by the evil minions of Portal Master, known as Kaos. You take command of a sky-ship and use your favorite Skylander character to fight the bad guys. You control the game with touch gestures such as tap-and-shoot or swipe.

“It’s a very casual game and conducive to the iOS audience,” Canessa said. “You’re either touching or swiping as you try to defeat the trolls.”

Activision created incentives for you to swap out Skylanders and use them all in the course of the game. There’s a daily challenge where you can use a certain Skylander to get double experience points. The point is to get users to re-engage with the game frequently.

The game has social features such as Game Center leaderboards and achievements, as well as a 3D character view that allows players to browse through their entire collection of characters. The game has randomized levels for virtually endless gameplay.

The game was developed by Vicarious Visions, a 20-year-old Activision studio based in Menands, N.Y. More improvements will come in the future, including ways to make the interaction between toy and mobile device more “magical,” Canessa said. The team supporting the game is doing so as a live operation, meaning they will continuously update the app over time. The game is instrumented for metrics so Activision can learn how to improve it.

While the company is entering a crowded mobile market with more than 500,000 active apps on the App Store, it is banking on getting noticed because of the well-known brand, its own marketing around the Skylanders property, the innovative integration with the toys, and the investment in gameplay, Canessa said.

Activision has had other games before such as its Call of Duty Zombies and World at War Zombies games. But those were paid apps, which are rapidly becoming a rare commodity on the App Store as free-to-play takes over.

“We are pretty excited about this,” Canessa said. “We are students of the very rapidly evolving mobile space.”