Should Disney Open ToonTown to Advertisers?
By Charlie Crutchfield on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
Disney’s ToonTown Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). Although Disney has opened this game to people of all ages, it is clearly geared toward children 12 years of age or younger. With ToonTown’s user base steadily growing, they recently made the decision to open the game for marketing and advertising.
About ToonTown:
ToonTown offers both free accounts and membership accounts. In order to make gameplay more “exclusive,” Disney made the chat feature available only to members. For those with free accounts, there is ”speed-chat”, which essentially allows users to quickly select from preset phrases. Normal chat can only be used between two players and they must both enter a password (which must be told outside of the game, to ensure that only friends chat together).
It is my belief that the game is open to all ages in order to allow parents to monitor the gameplay of their children, since the game is very clearly designed for youngsters. However, after opening the game to advertisers, Disney may continue to leave the game “open to all ages” so that marketers and advertisers can more easily monitor the sucesses of their marketing efforts.
Advertisers:
Even though Disney has opened up to marketers, I couldn’t find any sign of an advertisement for anything other than Disney itself. So, it doesn’t look like any companies have jumped on that band wagon yet.
My opinion is that the problem lies in the fact that only small children play the game - meaning most companies that would be interested in advertising in ToonTown would have products for children. This could present a problem for Disney since the most likely companies to advertise children’s products come from rivaling television networks (e.g. Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon) - as many popular children’s toys are the result of merchandising for those network’s television shows. Since the major children-geared companies are rivals with Disney they may not be willing to advertise (or even if they wanted to Disney might have something to say about it). This could leave only the smaller children’s companies who might not have the marketing dollars to allocate for advertising in such an emerging medium as virtual worlds.
My Two Cents:
Although advertising in this game wouldn’t be HARD to do, finding an advertiser who isn’t a rival company may prove difficult for the Disney empire. If you’d like more info about Disney’s ToonTown, visit: http://play.toontown.com/about.php.
Where do you get your facts? The majority of toontown players are adults, not children. Many families and kids play together, it’s true, but Toontown has a significantly large adult fanbase. If you had spent any time at all learning about the game before you wrote about it, you would know that.
While it is true that many adults also play ToonTown Online, Disney originally created the game for children and was surprised to find that adults played.
Advertisers in ToonTown will need to cater to a younger audience in part because Disney will not approve ads for a product considered unacceptable for children - as children are present in the game.
In addition, advertisers will need to appeal to a diverse audience – something that is much harder to do than when Disney created jokes that would appeal to all ages. Even companies with products for all ages may choose not to advertise with ToonTown because it is a children’s game – even though it is widely advertised as a beginner’s MMO.
Here are websites that share this information:
This website indicates that Disney was surprised to find that adults played the game, and that it was developed originally for children.
This website states that the average age of a ToonTown player is 11.
And, this website shares information about the rivalry between TooTown and Nickelodeon.
I to am an adult who plays toontown, and I have an extensive network of friends who are also adults that play. Most of us have more than one account, up to 6-12 toons of our own, and our children play less than we do. The average I have heard is average age on Toontown is nearing 40. And from the people I know, this would be closer to accurate.
I am a kid(ish). Toontown is a totally awesome online game, one of the coolest that I have ever played! It’s very easy to get addicted to. …
Adults have more time to play on the PC and never get grounded THEMSELVES, so they basically have free roll on the computer. Us kids….ya, we play when we CAN. We don’t really have all that much time–that is, if you are a normal person like me who gets grounded…um…often. Actually, I don’t know ANYONE who’s a kid that actually PLAYS Toontown. At least that I’ve asked. Which I’ve asked a lot of people.
I (or me, my family, blah blah..) have two accounts that get played, uh, kind of equally. One holds the all mighty, the other holds the wimps. Heh. I play both.
But, yes: Adults play Toontown more than kids; but they are not necessarily the magority. That, I am not quite sure the answer to.
My info help?
-Knowledgeable
Oh yes: And no, Disney should not open advertisements.
*KNOWLEDGEABLE*
I’m 16 I will help up.
i think that the majority of Toontown players is adults. because i mean, come on…of what according to age, kids are considered 4-18, and then you’re an adult. The majority of the WORLD is old people. I mean, adults…heh. So most of Toontown is probably adults. I don’t know why, but they find kid online games more ADDICTING than their normal boring old grown-up games, so why couldn’t they be the majority? Why wouldn’t they be?
Well if this helps then I’m glad. Thank you.
~lolly
PS: I’m not trying to offend anyone, I’m just cracking jokes, so I’m sorry if I made you cry.
Dear Interested,
I play the game, but I started for a different reason. I have been playing MMOG for over ten years now and other than the military sims I did not find anything I liked until Toontown. I actually wanted to find a game where I didn’t need to kill someone to have fun. I love flying military jets, driving tanks and other military devices and getting involved in rescuing some poor dude caught by the baddies, but killing all of the time wears on me. This game allows a little strategy and with the speed chat we are all on the same page. The only thing I can find wrong is the limited phrases in the menu. I find myself always looking for a way to say something and getting frustrated because of the limited ability to communicate. This causes so many problems in the game where better than half of the fights are started by confusion over what is trying to be communicated between players. The people who use the true friends feature (real time chat) do not think much of the people who can’t and tend to ignore these people and treat them as sub standard wannabes who should be thrown out of the game. Many of the high-ranking players feel the same way and will not even talk to the new players because they have cooties I guess. This is unfortunate, as one needs a friend to figure out some of the nuances of the game that are not in any of the FAQs or player guides. I was lucky I found some of the few people who spend time looking for newbies to help. I wish there was a web-board where these players could be applauded for their devotion to the game and other players. They ROCK! There are remarkably few problems other than the normal slow down of the servers when to many people get in to each room. While they try to compensate for to many players in one room they continue to allow people to transfer to other players in that room with no limit on players or player transfers. The room with it’s overload gets to the point where no one can play because of the LAG. This is a difficult problem to fix and every game I have played on-line deals with this problem unless we set-up on our own private server and control the amount of players we allow on the server. The many different servers the data passes through as it travels around the world also complicate this problem. There are dozens of private companies who own the phone lines these signals pass through and any one of them can cause a problem and there is no way to compensate for these other companies and problems. All in all it is not a perfect world when it come to data going through hundreds of switches all over the world. Sometimes I am shocked it works as well as it does. All in all this is a great game and has something for all ages. It may have been started for the younger crowd, but it has been taken over by the young at heart.
Best Regards,
Dennis/Sir Edmund Hotdog