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I own a educational game company. Long story short: it doesn't sell. At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games.

I own a educational game company. Long story short: it doesn't sell. At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games. 1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play. 2. Sell them to the public directly, but word of mouth here is often poor, specially if your age range is narrow, for example if your target is kids between 4 and 8, the kids will play the game, love it, but parents won't tell other parents to buy it, most of their friends probably WON'T have kids the same age. Thus if you are going for fun games, you need path 2, and to do path 2 you need a ton of exposure that is NOT word of mouth, we found out this means or you have massive marketing budget, or you have some kind of connection to media so they advertise you cheaper. Our biggest competitors all ended being media companies themselves, for example Disney is an obvious one, but another was Toca-Boca, at first they looked like a tiny indie studio, but somehow they ALWAYS get featured in multiple magazines, store front pages and so on, eventually I found out they were created by a multi-billion media empire named Bonnier, Since then I found that is easier to get money from creating other things, since I don't have the necessary media connections. Well, even NORMAL games often need media connectios (for example, Jon Blow was a journalist before he made Braid, Nintendo literally printed their own magazine for a while, the indie clique that existed around TIGSource was heavily tied to CMPMedia, many of them being presenters in events, or being friends of their employees, or working for them directly, the whole thing is very "incestuous").

greenhatglack 6y ago
Bonner basically owns and runs Scandinavia and parts of mainland Europe, you’re going up against a few countries. It’s hard, I wish you luck. Side note: Bonnier, apart from being a media empire they can destroy your life in seconds also has a schtick where they got a few companies pretending to be startups, like the example you just posted now. Some get acquired others get started by them.
- cinntaile 6y ago
  They don't really own countries though, it's just a multinational media company. I don't find it very surprising that you use your mother company to increase your media presence, that seems like the right move to me? Toca Boca was part of their venture arm [0] until 2016. They invest in companies with growth potential. Sometimes those companies are early stage companies, sometimes they're a bit older. [0] https://www.bonnierventures.com https://www.bonnierventures.com
  - greenhatglack 6y ago
    Something about life imitating art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roark_family#Cardinal_Roark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roark_family#Cardinal_Roark
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  Is that strictly a bad thing? Ok, we've got industry that makes non-educational games (I'm thinking the headshooting type, truly non-boring stuff). But there is small-ish money in that market, it's just retail after all! The same industry will happily jump onto a wagon containing some REAL part of the education budget. Create some captivating productions, spend real money, because I don't get that assumption that education deserves only cheap boring educational "games" of today. That's a political program - deep cut of the less effective part of 19-century structures. Kids generally like learning, parents know that, and they see how bad schools are now, so political gains are waiting right there.
- esperent 6y ago
  > Bonnier, apart from being a media empire they can destroy your life in seconds I've never heard that the Bonnier group goes around destroying lives. Do you have any examples of them doing so?
  - eru 6y ago
    I took that more as a comment on media empire than on Bonnier specifically?
1auralynn 6y ago
Spot on. I received a small ($150k) NSF grant back in 2010 and made a semi-popular science education app/game for iPad. It was featured by Apple a few times and was even in an iPad commercial - it made basically no money.
- kayhi 6y ago
  Can you share the name and does it still exist?
  - mysterydip 6y ago
    If they made it in 2010, without updates, it's no longer on the App store. Apple takes down things that don't get updates.
    - anticsapp 6y ago
      What's the max time in updates allowed?
      - msla 6y ago
        Better question: Is there a fixed answer, or does it vary arbitrarily?
        mysterydip 6y ago
        Good questions. I don't know for sure, but I know a couple of my apps have been delisted because I haven't updated them (they worked just fine and since then I upgraded and lost the development environment used). I was unable to find anything specific beyond "apps we determine to be outdated" here https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store-improvements/ https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store-improvements/
  - dmnd 6y ago
    It's this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/powers-of-minus-ten/id429123553 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/powers-of-minus-ten/id42912355... (note: I am not OP)
drewcoo 6y ago
How is it any different from selling any other non-entertainment service? #1 Institutions means administrators with budgets. a) What do they want their budgets to do? b) These things are presumably on networked computers. Can you aggregate and present data to those purse-string holders to justify their expense on an ongoing basis? Do your stats make their spending look smart? #2 The public means people who spend money on things for kids. Likely parents. a) Do you just get parents to buy things to get their children to stop asking for them (unlikely for educational software) or do you figure out what else parents expect as a result? b) Do you show parents results? On an ongoing basis do you show them progress? Maybe text them in the middle of the afternoon when their kids achieve something meaningful?
- Spooky23 6y ago
  I’ve served on a school board and can say at a high level that parents get pretty crazy about weird things, games included. Boring stuff that checks boxes is the safe answer for an institution. If it’s fun, the school will get bombarded with complaints about taxpayers paying for games, the devil inside the computer, etc. Parents tend to not care or think about outcomes if the angry box is ticked. The best fun things are maker projects. The tangible outcome is understandable to people. The educational content/value varies though.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > The best fun things are maker projects. The tangible outcome is understandable to people. The educational content/value varies though. Yeah, every parent these days seems to have the attitude "god forbid we teach more than one algorithm for addition, but it's unacceptable that you don't have CS in middle school!" And even get outright angry if you try to point out that teaching more than one algorithm that meets the specifications of addition over naturals is CS. But have the kids "build" some kit robot and you're a damn hero. The most frustrating thing about education is trying to explain to voters why their child has to learn something (at a young age) that the parent doesn't understand. You see this a lot in parental complaints about Common Core math. Over-involved stay-at-home moms who still can't add double digit numbers without using their fingers will complain that they don't understand their first grader's math homework. The point of the math homework is to teach mental math strategies for adding numbers together. Also, parents of fifth grade kids who are frustrated that they can't help their kids understand conditional probabilities, and express that frustration by telling us to "stop teaching their kids about gambling". It's impossible as a school board member to say "look, it's embarrassing that 10 year old German kids are better than you at math. Sorry we failed you. We're trying to do better by your kid."
manfredo 6y ago
I think this post wasn't about dedicated educational games, but rather education they occured naturally through gaming. E.g. Kerbal space program teaching basics of aerospace. One of the most prominent examples I had in my childhood was Fire Emblem for thr game boy. It's basically Kumon, you're constantly doing basic multiplication, addition, and substraction to tell whether a given unit will win in a fight. Similarly world of Warcraft teaches basic economics, if you want to turn a profit selling stuff on the AH.
- david-gpu 6y ago
  But how much are you learning relative to the amount of time you spend playing the game? I would expect a little of learning for a lot of time. You may as well study for a while and go play with your friends later.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    At least for fire emblem it was more about practicing basic math operations. You don't really learn anything in Kumon either. You just get better at math through practice. I think I didn't so much learn new things so much as I got an applied perspective on things that I had already learned. It's one thing to read about value added in a textbook, it's another thing to actually experience it in person buying reagents and selling potions in WoW. You can read about the benefit of fuel transferring lifting stages (aka "asparagus staging") in an article it's another thing to reach that design in KSP, and understand why SpaceX tried to do it.
    - eru 6y ago
      Yes, that applied perspective is extremely important. Especially for more abstract topics like, why does a market work better at discovering information than central command-and-control? A game can't help but have some mechanisms. The mechanisms don't necessarily reflect reality, but they have to bear more weight of themselves than eg just a story does. Game design shows at least some unintended consequences. Especially the more simulation type games like Sim City where the game world ticks along without your input, as compared to more heavily scripted player focused games like an FPS.
rvanlaar 6y ago
Hear Hear, I came to the same conclusion for software that caters to teachers. Teachers don't buy that, the administration does. They don't feel the pain the teachers are having. It also applies to programming lessons. Yes, everybody thinks it's important. No, it's hard to make a living selling it.
- alphydan 6y ago
  >> Teachers don't buy that, We do. See the success of teacherspayteachers.com or tes.com. As a teacher I have spent hundreds of dollars of my own money to buy resources. Simply because I don't have the time for the admin to claim the expense. The problem is that most resources are bad, if not terrible. The ones that are good are not adapted to what you need, not customisable, etc. You may have come up with a great resource but it has to tick a lot of boxes. Not because the teachers don't love real learning ... but because our hands are tied. We have this huge volume of content to cover in a limited amount of time and standardised tests await. If your resource doesn't use the same notation, terminology, depth ... some students may be more confused than helped (of course the very smart ones will make deep connections ... but you have to teach for everybody). It's not an easy problem to solve but more time / money for good teachers is the obvious place to start.
  - 6510 6y ago
    More money for teachers might help but I think it should be an entirely separate job description. Automation [in my view] should be something invested in for a while, enough to make it work, have a period of maintenance then do it again. Gradual improvement may get stuck.
  - dhimes 6y ago
    You do- sort of. The problem I ran into is that a lot of what we know comes from educational “gurus”- not science. So if you have software that disagrees with what the teacher thinks is the right way to teach, they won’t budge even if all the data show that you’re giving them a better way. I don’t hold it against them though. Nobody was going to tell me how to teach physics. Fun fact(?): Back when I was teacher my friend Eddie (math teacher) decided we could teach pretty sophisticated ideas to our community college students if we used this fancy program called “Mathematica.” We wrote a grant and got a good price from Wolfram and after that they introduced a pricing for community colleges. This was way back in the ‘90s- but I don’t remember the year. The point is, nobody sold me software. I decided what my problem was and set about solving it. I suspect most teachers either (a) do that too or (b) want an accepted solution.
blueboo 6y ago
I think it's this simple: Making successful, novel games is very difficult. Most people/groups fail. Adding an educational component multiplies the unlikely probability of success by a very unhelpful coefficient. Adrenaline, story, polish -- this aspects now compete with an educational aspect.
- indigochill 6y ago
  It is true that making games is hard and making a profit on them even harder. I disagree, however, that adrenaline/story/polish necessarily compete with the educational aspect. I think The Learning Company soundly disproved that through the mid-90s. I happened to be in the right place at the right time to benefit from the height of the education game boom in the early/mid-90s, so I got to play the fun Math Blasters, ClueFinders, Carmen Sandiegos, Incredible Machines, Dr. Brains, Zoombinis, and also a bunch of adventure games which featured some logical/observation puzzles like the Myst series (never mind others mentioned like Oregon Trail, Civilization, etc). So I'm a strong believer that -someone- could pick up the magic that The Learning Company (and Broderbund) once owned.
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    The problem is that most of the games you mention are not what are considered educational games by the average parent nor institutions. Even young generations, with casual gamer parents, can hold positions like "videogames are banned at home until our son is 8".
watwut 6y ago
Another issue is that majority of parents of 4-8 years old have zero motivation to buy educational game. I mean, I would not buy it either unless it is something super special or I am dealing with a problem.
acwan93 6y ago
It’s similar to many other industries, such as enterprise B2B software, where your buyer is not necessarily the actual user of the product, so you end up marketing and building features catering to the buyer (school administrations, parents) instead.
an_opabinia 6y ago
How does your quantitative implicit data about how good your game is, for example retention and session length, tell the difference between a a game kids like to play and a game that parents force their kids to play, because parents believes it improves test scores? Is cram school popular with kids, just because they are in cram school day after day and spend most of their time there? It definitely improves test scores. Anyway, my point is, your quantitative feedback for fun, it is confounded by being educational ie parents anticipate it will improve test scores or whatever. Coercion is the placebo not the treatment. That is why this article is sort of bunk. It’s adults literally discussing how to meddle with what their kids are interested in, in the exact same breath as describing how the best and most educational parts of childhood occurred in the absence of adults and their priorities.
homarp 6y ago
On toca-boca ownership, it's now owned by Spin Master: https://www.bonnier.com/en/news/bonniers-app-hit-toca-boca-to-get-new-owner https://www.bonnier.com/en/news/bonniers-app-hit-toca-boca-t... https://tocaboca.com/press-post/toca-boca-and-sago-mini-joins-spin-master/ https://tocaboca.com/press-post/toca-boca-and-sago-mini-join...
Agentlien 6y ago
This reminds me of surgical simulation where there was always the debate between making more realistic and educational simulations or, on the other hand, making the graphics more shiny because that tends to impress the person making the actual purchasing decision at hospitals.
- sanotehu 6y ago
  A solution to this is having user-chosen programmes with an allotted study budget. This is the model in UK post-grad medical education. I know around London there are a couple of schemes running that teach practical skills using outdated non-sexy software that nevertheless works because of its strong educational underpinnings and excellent practical execution.
MattRix 6y ago
How does something like Prodigy fit into this? It seems quite successful at being an edu-game.
- bluGill 6y ago
  I'm not sure how educational it is. They clearly are selling to the schools first as we wouldn't have found it without our teacher assigning some activities for home schooling. I thought about paying for it, but I want my kids to spend more time outside instead of in the house... They act better for more time outside.
tmaly 6y ago
What type of product would be easier to sell to kids in your opinion?
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Hmm, The Oregon Trail comes to mind as an educational game which was quite fun, and clearly sold to a lot of institutions. Do you have any thoughts on how that came about?
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  Ugh that sure were early times! Nevertheless Wikipedia says: "By 1995, The Oregon Trail comprised about one-third of MECC's $30 million in annual revenue." And it doesn't matter how much of it was sold to institutions. What matters is how many users benefited from this game and similar ones (Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, etc. come to mind).
  - dlhavema 6y ago
    I played civilization a lot back in the day mainly because it was the only game my computer could play. I monitor was so crummy I think it had EGA graphics. because of this now I know what the gardens of Hammurabi and a lot of other of the wonders of the world just by building them and knowing a little bit about what they did for the civilization that actually built them. factoria is another good one that's really really fun and can also be really really educational if you think about the materials and resources and how you combine them. also if you really want to go crazy with it learning some math will help you fully optimize your factory but it's some pretty complicated math, at least for me.
shafyy 6y ago
We also tried to make educational games and came to a similar conclusion. The truth is, kids (or adults) don't want to play "educational" games. They just want to play fun games. And, let's be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft. Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as "educational" games. So, what we're trying to make now are creative games. In my opinion, creativity is extremley important and there are fun ways to be creative, that are not eductional in the strict sense. For example, Lego comes to mind.
- the_af 6y ago
  They can't compete with Fortnite or Minecraft, but Castle of Dr. Brain was so good I played it back in the day and didn't think of it as educational ;)
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    I used to play so many of those educational point and click games as a kid. Don't remember the details well but it seems the style has died out in the last decade.
  - xrd 6y ago
    It's so cool that you can get this on internet archive absolutely free, inside the browser, in a JS emulator! https://archive.org/details/msdos_Castle_of_Dr._Brain_1991 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Castle_of_Dr._Brain_1991
    - teddyh 6y ago
      Review for those who want to see it before playing the entire game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGtw5eOfZ48#t=2m39s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGtw5eOfZ48#t=2m39s
- c3534l 6y ago
  I would think Maxis actually tells you the best way to be a success. Maxis doesn't say their games are educational and players don't feel like they're trying to be. But they were, and Maxis wanted them to be. I've heard Will Wright talk about giving his kids things like microscopes as "toys" that let them play and explore which causes them to sort of learn against their best intentions. If I were to get into the educational software space, I would go the Maxis route of making games for gamers, marketing them as wholesome for all ages, and then having a secret educational agenda. That is, I'd try to straddle the line, and maybe if I were good at it, word of mouth would spread and the school administrators would hear positive feedback from their students and teachers about how engaging the games are. You would essentially have to create your own market since one doesn't exist; you'd create a need administrators don't know they have. Alternatively, you could go Minecraft and hack in education through mods and stuff to existing games kids are already engaged in. But I fully admit as much as I admire Maxis, I don't work in that space and unless I win the lottery I won't be quitting my job to get into educational software any time soon.
reaperducer 6y ago
You have a lot of laments about "media connections" to let people know about your business. I think you're looking at this wrong. It's not about "connections." It's about doing business the old-fashioned way: advertising, and hiring a public relations agency. Advertising is self-explanatory. But for some reason a lot of tech companies don't hire PR firms. They like to cheap out and do PR in-house, or they simply never think of it. It's the PR firm's job to have the "media connections" you so desperately crave. Tech people are notoriously bad at public relations, so it's perfectly logical to farm this out to people who specialize in just this sort of thing. There are even boutique PR agencies for various industries, including tech. But in your case, you should have hired one of the several hundred that specialize in education. You could have been the next Oregon Trail!
- msla 6y ago
  Do you have any hints on how to pick a good PR firm? The last thing anyone needs is to hire one who thinks it's a really neato idea to buy a few weeks' worth of pop-unders on the OANN website.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    The last thing anyone needs is to hire one who thinks it's a really neato idea to buy a few weeks' worth of pop-unders on the OANN website. You have a fundamental misunderstanding about what a PR company does. You're thinking about an advertising agency. They're not the same thing.
    - lmm 6y ago
      Rather than dunking on someone who's already admitted they don't know how to hire a good PR agency, how about answering the question?
      - reaperducer 6y ago
        Because it's beyond the scope of a comment box on a web forum. It's like asking someone on HN "Tell me how to hire a good person." I can't hand-hold someone through the internet.
isx726552 6y ago
> Long story short: it doesn't sell. This can often be a problem with education in general, not educational games specifically. Trying to make money in education is like trying to make money in news: you can’t. Both are vital, and both ultimately no one wants to pay for. Disclaimer: I used to work at an educational startup, which failed. No, I’m not bitter. (Well, maybe a little.)
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Had a similar problem in medicine in a startup, which also failed. Although people did want to pay, you can only have large scale deployments if your are able to finance multiple studies over multiple years. By then smaller manufacturers are most certainly broke. Want to make money there? Don't try to find cures or therapies for indications a small percent of people suffer from. Just invent another beauty cream, that's where the money is. No, I’m not bitter either, just maybe a little.
ses1984 6y ago
Most educational games are straight garbage. I'm sure there are some good ones but there is a lot of chaff to sort through.
ashtonkem 6y ago
One of the great challenges of the 21st century is that what the markets are rewarding seems to be tenuously connected to the public good, at best.
hrktb 6y ago
It seems the author is not thinking about games (educational or not) in the common sense, but in way broader terms: > A video game is just: > > (a) a simulation of reality > (b) with fast feedback loops. I’d agree with both of you. “Educational” games are a hard sell. I’m a parent and the educational mini-games pushed by school is boring to death and won’t stick with my kid. It’s hard to articulate, but the underlying principle of trying to teach a specific thing doesn’t go well. Yet the ones that I found that seemed to work ok had way lower “educational” focus, and it was hard to recommend over any other standard game. Then simulations stick very well. Minecraft is a barebone one and “teaches” a ton of true and untrue stuff. Racing simulations stuck, flight simulator stuck, hell even lego simulator stuck. I see animal crossing in the same vein, and am trying to find a serious fishing simulator as a beginner’s guide to fishing. And kids can spend hours on Streetview for the same reason.
- eru 6y ago
  The original Sim City also comes to mind. It teaches a lot, but is still fun.
  - anthk 6y ago
    Now it's libre, Check Micropolis. Also lincity/linticy-ng are great too, even more for a climate changing world.
  - tasogare 6y ago
    I spend hundreds of hours on this series (from 2000 to 4) and I love it yet I don’t think I learnt much out of it. "People and companies want low taxes", "nuclear power plant are dangerous" and "wind power is inefficient", that’s pretty much it. Also when I was kind I wasn’t really able to build a good city. I understood years later this is because the game expects cities to be built in the US fashion: big residencial/commercial/industrial zones separated from each other, linked by roads, lot of roads. And square based layouts. That was totally different from where I lived so I’ve always found the cities layout that works in the game where very artificial. So there wasn’t too much to learn about city planning.
deleted 6y ago
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craftinator 6y ago
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I had a fairly blasé education that involved switching schools a lot. Looking back, I can see that most of the information recall I have came from video games. The Civilization series taught me history, math science and logic came from the Dr. Brain series and a hodgepodge of other games, time and resource management came from Sim City and real-time strategy games, and more formal and specific subjects from Khan Academy. The problem here is one of reward. I loved the challenge inherent with Dr. Brain; the puzzles did a great job at teaching basics of chemistry, biology, math, and I was actually accomplishing goals I was interested in. I think that the disconnect it that the people making these purchasing decisions do not remember what motivates children, what goals they are interested in achieving.
lend000 6y ago
I don't think the author is referring to video games specifically geared towards education. If anything, real video games, especially social multiplayer ones, provide complex environments to learn from, and sufficiently open-ended games reward innovation and creativity, while also encouraging gamers to reverse engineer game dynamics. For example, I learned the ideas behind "merchanting" (i.e. arbitrage and price discovery) at a young age through Runescape, where some time and patience could leverage capital to buy small amount of coal from casual gamers on less populated servers and sell large amounts on busy servers at a 50% markup.
dynamite-ready 6y ago
Making games, especially ones that sell at any volume, as the blog suggests, is extremely hard. And that's why the 'Educational' market is traditionally believed (or possibly, 'percieved') to be very tough (i.e. Professor Layton, or Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego). Those games will always exist. But what the blog author appears to allude to, is a latent category of games, that already exist, but he believes their true market value to be hidden. Kerbal Space Program appears to be the most overt example of the class of games the author identifies, but I'd argue that most of the EA licensed sports games offer a similar experiential quality (I'd worked at a sports analytics company and know, for example, that FIFA rankings are used as a starting point for some lines of investigation). I also remember learning more about cars from Gran Turismo, than from any other source of information I had access to. Including the internet. As a lifelong video-game enthusiast, the article resonated with me, as I've always believed this potentially educational property of great video-games to be one of the most valuable parts of them. Though to date, it feels like successful manifestations have proven to be surreptitious, rather than prevalent, or even recognised at all for such qualities.
deleted 6y ago
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greenhatglack 6y ago

Bonner basically owns and runs Scandinavia and parts of mainland Europe, you’re going up against a few countries. It’s hard, I wish you luck. Side note: Bonnier, apart from being a media empire they can destroy your life in seconds also has a schtick where they got a few companies pretending to be startups, like the example you just posted now. Some get acquired others get started by them.

cinntaile 6y ago
They don't really own countries though, it's just a multinational media company. I don't find it very surprising that you use your mother company to increase your media presence, that seems like the right move to me? Toca Boca was part of their venture arm [0] until 2016. They invest in companies with growth potential. Sometimes those companies are early stage companies, sometimes they're a bit older. [0] https://www.bonnierventures.com https://www.bonnierventures.com
- greenhatglack 6y ago
  Something about life imitating art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roark_family#Cardinal_Roark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roark_family#Cardinal_Roark
kubanczyk 6y ago
Is that strictly a bad thing? Ok, we've got industry that makes non-educational games (I'm thinking the headshooting type, truly non-boring stuff). But there is small-ish money in that market, it's just retail after all! The same industry will happily jump onto a wagon containing some REAL part of the education budget. Create some captivating productions, spend real money, because I don't get that assumption that education deserves only cheap boring educational "games" of today. That's a political program - deep cut of the less effective part of 19-century structures. Kids generally like learning, parents know that, and they see how bad schools are now, so political gains are waiting right there.
esperent 6y ago
> Bonnier, apart from being a media empire they can destroy your life in seconds I've never heard that the Bonnier group goes around destroying lives. Do you have any examples of them doing so?
- eru 6y ago
  I took that more as a comment on media empire than on Bonnier specifically?

1auralynn 6y ago

Spot on. I received a small ($150k) NSF grant back in 2010 and made a semi-popular science education app/game for iPad. It was featured by Apple a few times and was even in an iPad commercial - it made basically no money.

kayhi 6y ago
Can you share the name and does it still exist?
- mysterydip 6y ago
  If they made it in 2010, without updates, it's no longer on the App store. Apple takes down things that don't get updates.
  - anticsapp 6y ago
    What's the max time in updates allowed?
    - msla 6y ago
      Better question: Is there a fixed answer, or does it vary arbitrarily?
      - mysterydip 6y ago
        Good questions. I don't know for sure, but I know a couple of my apps have been delisted because I haven't updated them (they worked just fine and since then I upgraded and lost the development environment used). I was unable to find anything specific beyond "apps we determine to be outdated" here https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store-improvements/ https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store-improvements/
- dmnd 6y ago
  It's this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/powers-of-minus-ten/id429123553 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/powers-of-minus-ten/id42912355... (note: I am not OP)

drewcoo 6y ago

How is it any different from selling any other non-entertainment service? #1 Institutions means administrators with budgets. a) What do they want their budgets to do? b) These things are presumably on networked computers. Can you aggregate and present data to those purse-string holders to justify their expense on an ongoing basis? Do your stats make their spending look smart? #2 The public means people who spend money on things for kids. Likely parents. a) Do you just get parents to buy things to get their children to stop asking for them (unlikely for educational software) or do you figure out what else parents expect as a result? b) Do you show parents results? On an ongoing basis do you show them progress? Maybe text them in the middle of the afternoon when their kids achieve something meaningful?

Spooky23 6y ago
I’ve served on a school board and can say at a high level that parents get pretty crazy about weird things, games included. Boring stuff that checks boxes is the safe answer for an institution. If it’s fun, the school will get bombarded with complaints about taxpayers paying for games, the devil inside the computer, etc. Parents tend to not care or think about outcomes if the angry box is ticked. The best fun things are maker projects. The tangible outcome is understandable to people. The educational content/value varies though.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > The best fun things are maker projects. The tangible outcome is understandable to people. The educational content/value varies though. Yeah, every parent these days seems to have the attitude "god forbid we teach more than one algorithm for addition, but it's unacceptable that you don't have CS in middle school!" And even get outright angry if you try to point out that teaching more than one algorithm that meets the specifications of addition over naturals is CS. But have the kids "build" some kit robot and you're a damn hero. The most frustrating thing about education is trying to explain to voters why their child has to learn something (at a young age) that the parent doesn't understand. You see this a lot in parental complaints about Common Core math. Over-involved stay-at-home moms who still can't add double digit numbers without using their fingers will complain that they don't understand their first grader's math homework. The point of the math homework is to teach mental math strategies for adding numbers together. Also, parents of fifth grade kids who are frustrated that they can't help their kids understand conditional probabilities, and express that frustration by telling us to "stop teaching their kids about gambling". It's impossible as a school board member to say "look, it's embarrassing that 10 year old German kids are better than you at math. Sorry we failed you. We're trying to do better by your kid."

manfredo 6y ago

I think this post wasn't about dedicated educational games, but rather education they occured naturally through gaming. E.g. Kerbal space program teaching basics of aerospace. One of the most prominent examples I had in my childhood was Fire Emblem for thr game boy. It's basically Kumon, you're constantly doing basic multiplication, addition, and substraction to tell whether a given unit will win in a fight. Similarly world of Warcraft teaches basic economics, if you want to turn a profit selling stuff on the AH.

david-gpu 6y ago
But how much are you learning relative to the amount of time you spend playing the game? I would expect a little of learning for a lot of time. You may as well study for a while and go play with your friends later.
- manfredo 6y ago
  At least for fire emblem it was more about practicing basic math operations. You don't really learn anything in Kumon either. You just get better at math through practice. I think I didn't so much learn new things so much as I got an applied perspective on things that I had already learned. It's one thing to read about value added in a textbook, it's another thing to actually experience it in person buying reagents and selling potions in WoW. You can read about the benefit of fuel transferring lifting stages (aka "asparagus staging") in an article it's another thing to reach that design in KSP, and understand why SpaceX tried to do it.
  - eru 6y ago
    Yes, that applied perspective is extremely important. Especially for more abstract topics like, why does a market work better at discovering information than central command-and-control? A game can't help but have some mechanisms. The mechanisms don't necessarily reflect reality, but they have to bear more weight of themselves than eg just a story does. Game design shows at least some unintended consequences. Especially the more simulation type games like Sim City where the game world ticks along without your input, as compared to more heavily scripted player focused games like an FPS.

rvanlaar 6y ago

Hear Hear, I came to the same conclusion for software that caters to teachers. Teachers don't buy that, the administration does. They don't feel the pain the teachers are having. It also applies to programming lessons. Yes, everybody thinks it's important. No, it's hard to make a living selling it.

alphydan 6y ago
>> Teachers don't buy that, We do. See the success of teacherspayteachers.com or tes.com. As a teacher I have spent hundreds of dollars of my own money to buy resources. Simply because I don't have the time for the admin to claim the expense. The problem is that most resources are bad, if not terrible. The ones that are good are not adapted to what you need, not customisable, etc. You may have come up with a great resource but it has to tick a lot of boxes. Not because the teachers don't love real learning ... but because our hands are tied. We have this huge volume of content to cover in a limited amount of time and standardised tests await. If your resource doesn't use the same notation, terminology, depth ... some students may be more confused than helped (of course the very smart ones will make deep connections ... but you have to teach for everybody). It's not an easy problem to solve but more time / money for good teachers is the obvious place to start.
- 6510 6y ago
  More money for teachers might help but I think it should be an entirely separate job description. Automation [in my view] should be something invested in for a while, enough to make it work, have a period of maintenance then do it again. Gradual improvement may get stuck.
- dhimes 6y ago
  You do- sort of. The problem I ran into is that a lot of what we know comes from educational “gurus”- not science. So if you have software that disagrees with what the teacher thinks is the right way to teach, they won’t budge even if all the data show that you’re giving them a better way. I don’t hold it against them though. Nobody was going to tell me how to teach physics. Fun fact(?): Back when I was teacher my friend Eddie (math teacher) decided we could teach pretty sophisticated ideas to our community college students if we used this fancy program called “Mathematica.” We wrote a grant and got a good price from Wolfram and after that they introduced a pricing for community colleges. This was way back in the ‘90s- but I don’t remember the year. The point is, nobody sold me software. I decided what my problem was and set about solving it. I suspect most teachers either (a) do that too or (b) want an accepted solution.

blueboo 6y ago

I think it's this simple: Making successful, novel games is very difficult. Most people/groups fail. Adding an educational component multiplies the unlikely probability of success by a very unhelpful coefficient. Adrenaline, story, polish -- this aspects now compete with an educational aspect.

indigochill 6y ago
It is true that making games is hard and making a profit on them even harder. I disagree, however, that adrenaline/story/polish necessarily compete with the educational aspect. I think The Learning Company soundly disproved that through the mid-90s. I happened to be in the right place at the right time to benefit from the height of the education game boom in the early/mid-90s, so I got to play the fun Math Blasters, ClueFinders, Carmen Sandiegos, Incredible Machines, Dr. Brains, Zoombinis, and also a bunch of adventure games which featured some logical/observation puzzles like the Myst series (never mind others mentioned like Oregon Trail, Civilization, etc). So I'm a strong believer that -someone- could pick up the magic that The Learning Company (and Broderbund) once owned.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  The problem is that most of the games you mention are not what are considered educational games by the average parent nor institutions. Even young generations, with casual gamer parents, can hold positions like "videogames are banned at home until our son is 8".

watwut 6y ago

Another issue is that majority of parents of 4-8 years old have zero motivation to buy educational game. I mean, I would not buy it either unless it is something super special or I am dealing with a problem.

acwan93 6y ago

It’s similar to many other industries, such as enterprise B2B software, where your buyer is not necessarily the actual user of the product, so you end up marketing and building features catering to the buyer (school administrations, parents) instead.

an_opabinia 6y ago

How does your quantitative implicit data about how good your game is, for example retention and session length, tell the difference between a a game kids like to play and a game that parents force their kids to play, because parents believes it improves test scores? Is cram school popular with kids, just because they are in cram school day after day and spend most of their time there? It definitely improves test scores. Anyway, my point is, your quantitative feedback for fun, it is confounded by being educational ie parents anticipate it will improve test scores or whatever. Coercion is the placebo not the treatment. That is why this article is sort of bunk. It’s adults literally discussing how to meddle with what their kids are interested in, in the exact same breath as describing how the best and most educational parts of childhood occurred in the absence of adults and their priorities.

homarp 6y ago

On toca-boca ownership, it's now owned by Spin Master: https://www.bonnier.com/en/news/bonniers-app-hit-toca-boca-to-get-new-owner https://www.bonnier.com/en/news/bonniers-app-hit-toca-boca-t... https://tocaboca.com/press-post/toca-boca-and-sago-mini-joins-spin-master/ https://tocaboca.com/press-post/toca-boca-and-sago-mini-join...

Agentlien 6y ago

This reminds me of surgical simulation where there was always the debate between making more realistic and educational simulations or, on the other hand, making the graphics more shiny because that tends to impress the person making the actual purchasing decision at hospitals.

sanotehu 6y ago
A solution to this is having user-chosen programmes with an allotted study budget. This is the model in UK post-grad medical education. I know around London there are a couple of schemes running that teach practical skills using outdated non-sexy software that nevertheless works because of its strong educational underpinnings and excellent practical execution.

MattRix 6y ago

How does something like Prodigy fit into this? It seems quite successful at being an edu-game.

bluGill 6y ago
I'm not sure how educational it is. They clearly are selling to the schools first as we wouldn't have found it without our teacher assigning some activities for home schooling. I thought about paying for it, but I want my kids to spend more time outside instead of in the house... They act better for more time outside.

tmaly 6y ago

What type of product would be easier to sell to kids in your opinion?

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Hmm, The Oregon Trail comes to mind as an educational game which was quite fun, and clearly sold to a lot of institutions. Do you have any thoughts on how that came about?

kubanczyk 6y ago
Ugh that sure were early times! Nevertheless Wikipedia says: "By 1995, The Oregon Trail comprised about one-third of MECC's $30 million in annual revenue." And it doesn't matter how much of it was sold to institutions. What matters is how many users benefited from this game and similar ones (Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, etc. come to mind).
- dlhavema 6y ago
  I played civilization a lot back in the day mainly because it was the only game my computer could play. I monitor was so crummy I think it had EGA graphics. because of this now I know what the gardens of Hammurabi and a lot of other of the wonders of the world just by building them and knowing a little bit about what they did for the civilization that actually built them. factoria is another good one that's really really fun and can also be really really educational if you think about the materials and resources and how you combine them. also if you really want to go crazy with it learning some math will help you fully optimize your factory but it's some pretty complicated math, at least for me.

shafyy 6y ago

We also tried to make educational games and came to a similar conclusion. The truth is, kids (or adults) don't want to play "educational" games. They just want to play fun games. And, let's be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft. Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as "educational" games. So, what we're trying to make now are creative games. In my opinion, creativity is extremley important and there are fun ways to be creative, that are not eductional in the strict sense. For example, Lego comes to mind.

the_af 6y ago
They can't compete with Fortnite or Minecraft, but Castle of Dr. Brain was so good I played it back in the day and didn't think of it as educational ;)
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  I used to play so many of those educational point and click games as a kid. Don't remember the details well but it seems the style has died out in the last decade.
- xrd 6y ago
  It's so cool that you can get this on internet archive absolutely free, inside the browser, in a JS emulator! https://archive.org/details/msdos_Castle_of_Dr._Brain_1991 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Castle_of_Dr._Brain_1991
  - teddyh 6y ago
    Review for those who want to see it before playing the entire game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGtw5eOfZ48#t=2m39s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGtw5eOfZ48#t=2m39s
c3534l 6y ago
I would think Maxis actually tells you the best way to be a success. Maxis doesn't say their games are educational and players don't feel like they're trying to be. But they were, and Maxis wanted them to be. I've heard Will Wright talk about giving his kids things like microscopes as "toys" that let them play and explore which causes them to sort of learn against their best intentions. If I were to get into the educational software space, I would go the Maxis route of making games for gamers, marketing them as wholesome for all ages, and then having a secret educational agenda. That is, I'd try to straddle the line, and maybe if I were good at it, word of mouth would spread and the school administrators would hear positive feedback from their students and teachers about how engaging the games are. You would essentially have to create your own market since one doesn't exist; you'd create a need administrators don't know they have. Alternatively, you could go Minecraft and hack in education through mods and stuff to existing games kids are already engaged in. But I fully admit as much as I admire Maxis, I don't work in that space and unless I win the lottery I won't be quitting my job to get into educational software any time soon.

reaperducer 6y ago

You have a lot of laments about "media connections" to let people know about your business. I think you're looking at this wrong. It's not about "connections." It's about doing business the old-fashioned way: advertising, and hiring a public relations agency. Advertising is self-explanatory. But for some reason a lot of tech companies don't hire PR firms. They like to cheap out and do PR in-house, or they simply never think of it. It's the PR firm's job to have the "media connections" you so desperately crave. Tech people are notoriously bad at public relations, so it's perfectly logical to farm this out to people who specialize in just this sort of thing. There are even boutique PR agencies for various industries, including tech. But in your case, you should have hired one of the several hundred that specialize in education. You could have been the next Oregon Trail!

msla 6y ago
Do you have any hints on how to pick a good PR firm? The last thing anyone needs is to hire one who thinks it's a really neato idea to buy a few weeks' worth of pop-unders on the OANN website.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  The last thing anyone needs is to hire one who thinks it's a really neato idea to buy a few weeks' worth of pop-unders on the OANN website. You have a fundamental misunderstanding about what a PR company does. You're thinking about an advertising agency. They're not the same thing.
  - lmm 6y ago
    Rather than dunking on someone who's already admitted they don't know how to hire a good PR agency, how about answering the question?
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      Because it's beyond the scope of a comment box on a web forum. It's like asking someone on HN "Tell me how to hire a good person." I can't hand-hold someone through the internet.

isx726552 6y ago

> Long story short: it doesn't sell. This can often be a problem with education in general, not educational games specifically. Trying to make money in education is like trying to make money in news: you can’t. Both are vital, and both ultimately no one wants to pay for. Disclaimer: I used to work at an educational startup, which failed. No, I’m not bitter. (Well, maybe a little.)

raxxorrax 6y ago
Had a similar problem in medicine in a startup, which also failed. Although people did want to pay, you can only have large scale deployments if your are able to finance multiple studies over multiple years. By then smaller manufacturers are most certainly broke. Want to make money there? Don't try to find cures or therapies for indications a small percent of people suffer from. Just invent another beauty cream, that's where the money is. No, I’m not bitter either, just maybe a little.

ses1984 6y ago

Most educational games are straight garbage. I'm sure there are some good ones but there is a lot of chaff to sort through.

ashtonkem 6y ago

One of the great challenges of the 21st century is that what the markets are rewarding seems to be tenuously connected to the public good, at best.

hrktb 6y ago

It seems the author is not thinking about games (educational or not) in the common sense, but in way broader terms: > A video game is just: > > (a) a simulation of reality > (b) with fast feedback loops. I’d agree with both of you. “Educational” games are a hard sell. I’m a parent and the educational mini-games pushed by school is boring to death and won’t stick with my kid. It’s hard to articulate, but the underlying principle of trying to teach a specific thing doesn’t go well. Yet the ones that I found that seemed to work ok had way lower “educational” focus, and it was hard to recommend over any other standard game. Then simulations stick very well. Minecraft is a barebone one and “teaches” a ton of true and untrue stuff. Racing simulations stuck, flight simulator stuck, hell even lego simulator stuck. I see animal crossing in the same vein, and am trying to find a serious fishing simulator as a beginner’s guide to fishing. And kids can spend hours on Streetview for the same reason.

eru 6y ago
The original Sim City also comes to mind. It teaches a lot, but is still fun.
- anthk 6y ago
  Now it's libre, Check Micropolis. Also lincity/linticy-ng are great too, even more for a climate changing world.
- tasogare 6y ago
  I spend hundreds of hours on this series (from 2000 to 4) and I love it yet I don’t think I learnt much out of it. "People and companies want low taxes", "nuclear power plant are dangerous" and "wind power is inefficient", that’s pretty much it. Also when I was kind I wasn’t really able to build a good city. I understood years later this is because the game expects cities to be built in the US fashion: big residencial/commercial/industrial zones separated from each other, linked by roads, lot of roads. And square based layouts. That was totally different from where I lived so I’ve always found the cities layout that works in the game where very artificial. So there wasn’t too much to learn about city planning.

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craftinator 6y ago

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I had a fairly blasé education that involved switching schools a lot. Looking back, I can see that most of the information recall I have came from video games. The Civilization series taught me history, math science and logic came from the Dr. Brain series and a hodgepodge of other games, time and resource management came from Sim City and real-time strategy games, and more formal and specific subjects from Khan Academy. The problem here is one of reward. I loved the challenge inherent with Dr. Brain; the puzzles did a great job at teaching basics of chemistry, biology, math, and I was actually accomplishing goals I was interested in. I think that the disconnect it that the people making these purchasing decisions do not remember what motivates children, what goals they are interested in achieving.

lend000 6y ago

I don't think the author is referring to video games specifically geared towards education. If anything, real video games, especially social multiplayer ones, provide complex environments to learn from, and sufficiently open-ended games reward innovation and creativity, while also encouraging gamers to reverse engineer game dynamics. For example, I learned the ideas behind "merchanting" (i.e. arbitrage and price discovery) at a young age through Runescape, where some time and patience could leverage capital to buy small amount of coal from casual gamers on less populated servers and sell large amounts on busy servers at a 50% markup.

dynamite-ready 6y ago

Making games, especially ones that sell at any volume, as the blog suggests, is extremely hard. And that's why the 'Educational' market is traditionally believed (or possibly, 'percieved') to be very tough (i.e. Professor Layton, or Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego). Those games will always exist. But what the blog author appears to allude to, is a latent category of games, that already exist, but he believes their true market value to be hidden. Kerbal Space Program appears to be the most overt example of the class of games the author identifies, but I'd argue that most of the EA licensed sports games offer a similar experiential quality (I'd worked at a sports analytics company and know, for example, that FIFA rankings are used as a starting point for some lines of investigation). I also remember learning more about cars from Gran Turismo, than from any other source of information I had access to. Including the internet. As a lifelong video-game enthusiast, the article resonated with me, as I've always believed this potentially educational property of great video-games to be one of the most valuable parts of them. Though to date, it feels like successful manifestations have proven to be surreptitious, rather than prevalent, or even recognised at all for such qualities.

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