Software publishers focus on family life

Discount Store News, Sept 18, 1995

The computing industry is aiming squarely at the American family as its primary growth vehicle through the rest of the century, and software publishers are unleashing a torrent of new titles meant to appeal to these new family users. Until now, the primary market for most publishers has been the power user, which generally put the major software focus on games, business applications and utilities. In recent months, however, the accent has slowly shifted to titles that enhance family life. That is happening, in large part, because the new core customer is primarily female, and she is looking for products that help her kids learn and that make household duties easier and promote family activities.

A recent poll of The New York Times showed that most Americans have little good to say about television, movies or popular music. They feel, rightly or wrongly, that those mediums are subverting a parent's role in the family and shoving sex and violence down their kids' throats.

They see the computer, despite some misgivings about Internet access to a large degree (see story, p. 33), more family-friendly: Parents can, control what goes on and stays on their PCs.

And family-friendly selections are booming. Delrina's Echo Lake, for instance, is a simple authoring tool that allows even novice users to compile photos, video, audio and text into true multimedia family scrapbooks, then copy them to diskette to share with friends and relatives. The main drawback is that consumers have to buy a scanner or video frame grabber to take advantage of Echo Lake's potential, but prices on such peripherals have plummeted in the past year, and Delrina plans a bundled scanner/software package to reduce the cost even further.

Family scrapbooks are big business overall. Some simpler (and less expensive) alternatives to Echo Lake include Essex/Multicom titles (published as FamilyWare) like The FamilyBaby Book, Imagery Studios' Color Me Fun (a coloring book for kids that doubles as a sophisticated sound and image compiler for multimedia journals) and several others.

For those who want to share their journals with the whole wide world on the World Wide Web, Quarterdeck has introduced low-priced Web authoring software and its own Webserver, each about $100. Both allow consumers to create and launch their own home pages, which are capable of absorbing up to 25,000 "hits" per hour.

Essex Interactive's Dick Greener, vp of marketing, noted that mass merchants are keying in on titles that address family needs. "They're putting our [FamilyWare] titles on outposts at checkout," he said, citing Kmart and ShopKo as two Handleman accounts that will stock FamilyWare this fall.

Other titles available from FamilyWare include FamilyValuables, which allows each member of the family to maintain a running inventory of collectibles and important family documents (including scanned photographs of each item, if desired), along with vital stats, like purchase price, date and appraisals; Family-Memoirs, again allowing each member of the family to maintain his or her own (and password-secured) memoirs; and FamilyInfo, which files vital information like birth dates, marriages, health records and so on in an easily accessible and relatively secure environment.

A growing area in family computing is the migration of family-oriented games to the PC. Parker Bros. is preparing to introduce its multimedia version of the classic Monopoly, including funny full-video views of each property in various stages of development, while Interplay stuffs a $5,000 pool table onto the PC with Virtual Pool, a game so realistic that users can almost feel chalk on their fingertips.

Both games allow multiple players to go at it head-to-head and to compile tournament records, as well as to save lengthy games and finish them later. "Not everyone can afford or has room for a pool table," Interplay's Kirk Green noted. "But at $50, anyone with a PC can afford the game, and we're so sure that it'll actually improve their play on real tables that we're offering them their money back if they see no improvement."

Another approach is to append family projects to standard games and children's storybooks, Living Books' The Berenstain Bears title, for instance, includes recipes for the same pancakes Brother and Sister eat in the storybook, as well as crafts-oriented activities that go along with the book.

Multicom's Better Homes & Gardens Cool Crafts, which includes more than 100 crafts projects for kids and families, adds a special section for parents that offers creative ideas, party planning hints, safety tips and holiday-theme ideas.

Similarly, DogByte Development's Stationery Store Plus (which is also available bundled with Canon Bubble Jet printers, see hardware story p. 29) allows kids and adults to design their own professional-looking stationery, greeting cards, invitations and fliers.

Software Affiliates adds yet another wrinkle to the category with Animated Greetings, an inexpensive animation program that packs themed animation templates onto a disc. These can then be customized with graphics, text and a soundtrack, then turned into a screensaver, Emailed or sent on diskette to the lucky recipient. A birthday-theme package is first up, with various holiday and special-occasion versions on the way.