Brief:
- Hasbro partnered with online marketplace Quidd to create limited-edition digital stickers, trading cards and digital toys based on 40 of the toymaker’s popular brands such as Nerf, G.I. Joe and Dungeons & Dragons, according to a press release. Quidd’s free app offers a way to create, distribute and sell digital collectibles with transactions that are recorded on a digital ledger.
- The agreement with Hasbro means that Quidd can create digital properties out of Hasbro characters such as Optimus Prime, Rainbow Dash or Demogorgon. Quidd gives fans a way to engage with their favorite Hasbro characters in a digital format, said David Henderson, Hasbro's senior vice president, consumer products North America.
- Quidd has sold about 1.75 billion individually serialized items since launch, making the company’s digital goods ledger and catalog the biggest in the world, the company claims. Quidd last year closed a financing round of $6.75 million from angel investors, per TechCrunch.
Insight:
The idea of digital collectibles can be difficult to grasp, considering that images of popular cartoon characters can be easily replicated, shared and deleted online without necessarily owning the image as a collectible. Quidd develops an inventory by partnering with licensees and manufacturers to turn physical products into digital goods, creating scarcity for digital properties so that they can be collected and maintain a value that depends on what collectors are willing to pay for them.
For Hasbro, the toymaker has another way to extend its brand into the digital world, which has become a key competitor to physical toys as more kids play with smartphones and tablets instead of dolls, race cars and board games. The company has had a particularly difficult year with the bankruptcy of Toys 'R' Us, which was blamed for a 16% drop in Hasbro's Q1 2018 sales from a year earlier, per CNN Money.
As another way of extending its brand, Hasbro last year introduced an interactive version of its popular board game Trivial Pursuit for Amazon Alexa, according to a press release. Trivial Pursuit Tap lets people create their own kind of game show competitions at home using Amazon's new Echo Button devices as buzzers that light up in different colors.