why so little interest in education games for kids?

[Mike018]

Looking at most of the kid's games on android, almost all of them are garbage and have very static content. Is there a reason more people and companies are not taking an interest in making high quality educational games for kids? Seems the perfect fit for html5. I'm also wondering, has anyone tried to make a high quality kids game and was there enough interest behind it?

I've personally been browsing phaser content almost daily for the last 3 months and I've seen 0 kid's games.

[sombriks]

Hi mike, 

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but no one (parents, schools, book publishers) wants to pay for such material.

Even harder: find someone to finance a B2C startup to develop such material.

I had an experience with scenario a few years ago, we bumped on many doors bu no one gave us 1 or 2 years to develop such model.

there are a few success cases, but even those had a difficult start.

 

 

[labrat.mobi]

Probably e-learning games are just boring to code. We have a inside joke - when game developers retire, they join e-learning company.

[d13]

Mike, I believe this is a huge, neglected untapped market.

I disagree that schools and parents are unwilling to pay - in my experience there is no limit to what parents are willing to pay to further the education of their children.

There's a killing to be made for any company that takes this on seriously.

[Mike018]

14 hours ago, labrat.mobi said:

Probably e-learning games are just boring to code. We have a inside joke - when game developers retire, they join e-learning company.

Haha, yeah, I can't imagine going backwards like that as a programmer. Luckily, I'm pretty new to programming, so in the prototype I've been building, it's still given me lots of interesting challenges, while still allowing me to have plenty of time for illustrations and animations.

[Mike018]

15 hours ago, d13 said:

Mike, I believe this is a huge, neglected untapped market.

I disagree that schools and parents are unwilling to pay - in my experience there is no limit to what parents are willing to pay to further the education of their children.

There's a killing to be made for any company that takes this on seriously.

That's what I've seen from some of the few high quality games I've found. Parents would always comment about how their kids were enjoying the free content so much, that they still purchased the remainder of the content, no matter if it was a bit overpriced.

I'm just curious why more people aren't taking this route. I can understand why programmers wouldn't be interested in it as @labrat.mobi mentioned above, but I want to know why the hordes of designers out there with some coding abilities aren't already swarming over this market.

[dimumurray]

This has been an ongoing discussion for some time. The guys over at ExtraCredit have many videos on the issue:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ExtraCreditz/search?query=games+in+education

[d13]

On July 17, 2016 at 6:36 PM, Mike018 said:

 I want to know why the hordes of designers out there with some coding abilities aren't already swarming over this market.

I would love to know this too!

[bdekk]

I guess that schools et cetera do not want to invest yet in games for children, I noticed the same when talking with schools about CodeCombat (a game that teaches children how to program). Next to that there is of course also the parents but they alone might not generate as much profit as you think. There is one nice game series though. The Dr. Panda games.

 

 

[marksjohn]

i don't think so. there are some games with "fresh content" and academic games are food for kids. I acknowledge that there is a number of games are violent and this affects to children and their development. we should encourage kids play game with suitable content and specific purpose. Maybe, idea of developing games without violent and garbage contents will be the trend for developing apps in 2017.

[devandy]

A friend of mine said that education games has good revenue. He is an Android developer and his products are always catered to kids.

[Red Spark]

I believe It's considered very non cost effective in terms of money spent to measurable knowledge outcome. Same thing will happen with VR education probably.

[kbmonkey]

@Mike018 Great question! A game does not need to be commercially viable to get created, many other games are created for all other reason: for the fun of it, for programming experience, for a collaborative effort. So your question still stands despite the commercial success corollary which other replies echoed. On the other hand if there was a bigger market for educational games, maybe it would spur an interest within hobbyist developers to create them for all other reasons too.

"Magenta Mystery" is a remake I made, of a classic educational game. It is mobile compatible so should work on any mobile browser, tested on Android. The game is completable, ironically I got distracted by other projects to polish it off with the finishing touches.