Although Candle Media’s Moonbug Entertainment has already dipped its toes into gaming waters with 2022 console/Netflix game Play with JJ and 2023 Roblox title Blippi’s Playground, the company hopes to make a big splash with its upcoming mobile game CoComelon—Kids Learn & Play. 

Launching later this month, this preschool title offers fun and educational activities (such as tracing letters or identifying shapes), as well as open-ended sandbox-type spaces where kids can play more freely. Music is a vital component of CoComelon—Kids Learn & Play, which leans heavily on nursery rhymes from the CoComelon YouTube videos. At launch, it will feature four games that are built around these songs. 

The title will have a subscription model, with pricing that’s competitive with high-end early learning products like Sago Mini, which costs about US$10 per month, says games & interactive VP Ed Barton. Every month, the team will add new songs and games in which there are no wrong answers and kids can explore and learn at their own speed. 

Barton joined Moonbug in May 2023, after working as a COO at Moshi Kids (which produces an app with bedtime stories and educational games) and co-founding a tech company called Curiscope that makes educational VR/AR and mobile games for families. Since landing at Moonbug, he has been quietly pulling together a team that includes former Sesame Workshop and HOMER staffer J Milligan as an executive producer and creative director, and ex-HOMER senior product manager Michelle Lazarow as a senior producer charged with creating new games and evolving a strategy that will position the YouTube hitmaker well in the lucrative gaming market. 

“As a business, we’re very, very motivated to make this another function within the company and another space in which we interact with our consumers,” says Barton. “It’s ultimately impossible to foresee a world where a modern entertainment company does not have [gaming] as a tenant.” 

In particular, Barton says Moonbug is focused on bridging the audiences on Roblox and YouTube, bringing users from one platform onto the other, and vice versa. 

So far, Moonbug has been running its game development and publishing in-house. But moving forward, the plan is to set up licensing and co-development agreements with outside partners who can create titles based on Moonbug’s brands, explains Barton, who is looking to work with companies that have game-making experience and that are interested in creating “a great learning space for kids.”