How Moncton’s Itavio is Becoming the Housekeeper of Mobile Gaming
MONCTON – Cell phone and tablet games are great distraction for kids. In fact, most parents these days couldn’t live without them.
But it’s all fun and games until you open your bill to discover little Johnny spent $6000 on in-app purchases.
Moncton-based Itavio is solving that problem.
Itavio is an app that allows parents to set an allowance for their kids on games in-house app purchases, while at the same time giving gaming companies valuable insight to how to market in the new gaming climate.
Co-founder and CEO Melani Flanagan says she and her other co-founder and CTO Matt Pichette got the idea for the platform when they realized the world of mobile gaming was changing: People didn’t want to pay anymore.
To deal with this, studios started using tools and analytics to try and figure out when someone would spend money in a game or what to exactly charge for additional features. It wasn’t easy.
“Things started to effectively look a lot more like gambling, if you will. So that was a little disturbing,” Flanagan says. “Also for a company that’s made its business up until that point with one-time purchases, it just became and still is impossible for gaming studios to compete and sell a game that isn’t free to play because customers expect to get it for free.”
Combine that with kids overspending on the in-app purchases, that’s a huge problem.
“That’s basically when we started to think, there’s this social problem where kids are developing addictive behaviour patterns and over spending and at the same time gaming studio really don’t know if kids are playing their games,” Flanagan said. “But kids also have incredible purchasing power. So how do you market effectively to that audience without taking advantage?”
Itavio aims to solve both the social and the business problem when it comes to the new mobile gaming world.
“We’ve talked to gaming studios. We’ve talked to hundreds of parents and basically there’s this doom and gloom around mobile devices. Parents have little idea how long or how much a kid has spent until they get a bill. So we’ve built a platform that effectively lets parents to give their kids allowance and we’re currently working on visualizing time for them, so they can really have the tools they need to really manage gameplay,” Flanagan says.
“It’s not like when we were kids, and our parents could see us playing and shout at us after thirty minutes, kids are buried in their tablets now and it’s stressful for parents.”
Flanagan and Pichette have been spending quite a bit of time in San Francisco , where they have been accepted into the Matter Ventures accelerator. This is the ultimate place to be, since there’s around 400 potential customer in the area alone, whereas there are very few gaming studios left in New Brunswick.
“We used to have a lot more gaming studios than we do now. But with the tax credits having disappeared and competition being so intense internationally, as far as early adopters go there’s not that many to pick from anymore,” Flanagan says. “We’re really lucky to get the partners that we did in order to prototype it, but the San Francisco accelerator allows us to be kind of be in the sweet spot.”
But that’s not to say there aren’t gaming studios and developers doing great work in New Brunswick, It’s just that that have bigger hurdles to overcome.
“There are still people here in the province and they are definitely hustling hard and making things happen, it’s just hard to build an ecosystem that can compete internationally because most regions are subsidized through tax credits and can offer very competitive salaries at low risk and the cost of marketing this content is just so high,” Flanagan says.
Though the lack of a strong gaming ecosystem has made things a little hard for Flanagan and Pitchette to get Itavio off the ground, starting the company in New Brunswick has offered some pretty significant benefits.
“I think if you want to do anything global, geography is not destiny. Any place you choose to start your venture is going to come with some pros and cons. For us, we got an incredible amount of support from a handful of local angels and NBIF and NRC,” Flanagan says.
“When I tell people in San Francisco what we have, they would have had to raise more than a million to get to this point, just based on that tech.”
Flanagan says the future of mobile gaming will involve more customized experiences for individuals based on how they play. She sees Itavio playing a big role in helping parents better monitor these experiences.
“For us, our long term vision is to be the good housekeep seal of approval on content so that moms and dads can make the best decisions for their kids,” she says. “Because every kid is different and the person in the best position to make those choices is their parents so we just really want to empower and connect that audience.”