PAX Aus this year was dominated by the launch of the new toys-to-life mobile game Aearthlings. The creators of the game even flew all the way from Texas in the USA to entertain the crowd and get us hyped while we waited in the entrance queue. It certainly set a great tone for the gaming weekend, and after some feedback and testing, the game was officially launched in Australia and is ready to play. I was lucky enough to be able to sit down with the CEO of Modern Games, Justin Kifer to talk about the game, their epic Aussie launch and what’s next for Aerthlings.
Alaisdair : Hi Justin, so great to speak to you! Are you guys still in Australia?
Justin : The U.S.A! i’m back in Southern California, the trip was phenomenal I mean what’s not to like, we launched Aerthlings and you know, especially at pax, and people loved it, and we had a really good time. So it was a blast.
Alaisdair : On Sunday, i did the lineup with my friend, who was like please please just line up with me i don’t want to be on my own and yeah we had no idea what was coming, and that was just like next-level energy. It was so good!
Justin :So the pax crew is just like everybody there, just so much so much energy, everybody’s excited to immerse themselves in everything that pax has to offer, and it’s just uh it’s really good, my my first pax was actually pax west here in the united states in seattle yeah yeah it’s just i mean it’s the same sort of thing right, different place but you know same type yeah and it’s really really good group of people and community so amazing
Alaisdair : Congratulations on the launch! You know i guess we’ll jump into more Pax stuff later, but yeah, i guess could you probably just take me back and talk me through how this all started
Justin : Absolutely yeah, you got to go back almost four years for that you know we’ve been building modern games for almost six years at this point. Ee have another game which you actually see on my shelf kind of up there beast of balance it’s a tabletop stacking game has nfc tagged creatures that you stack on a plinth and you know kind of go as high as you can until it all falls down but it comes to life on a screen, you know through a connection to the plinth and whatever device you’re playing the game on and we knew that that was a magical experience just nfc enabled toys that then kind of you know come to life in game and when this world comes to life as a result of playing the game with them and but it was a tabletop game and it was the sort of thing that was never going to scale you know kind of beyond 100 000 people that had it already and so we just set out to to make a version of beast of balance that also was all about kind of collecting and trading these mystery box blind bag uh figs and and a game that people can immerse themselves in on mobile and uh yeah that’s kind of where it all started and it was just several years of work to kind of bring it all together and tell the story and build the world and all the pieces that were necessary
Alaisdair : So the actual toys you’re talking about are the boxes on the key chain loop.
Justin
So yeah so you’ve got the the earthlings figs so the cube shaped collectible toys that all have the nfc tags inside of them that are serialized and yes they do hang off lanyards which makes it really nice to transport and wear and you know kind of have with you as you run into other players you can trade those yeah so with the
Alaisdair : So I’m going to ask a couple of technical questions, with the trading side of it, so i think i watched it may have even been you trade one at pax with someone in the audience while there was a video or an ad playing or something, how does that trading work?
Justin : Yeah that was fun yeah fortunately, that was the third day we had done all of that, and so i was comfortable enough, and i kind of knew how long the video took and stuff like that, i was like all right i’ve got a moment i got four, almost four minutes to jump down here and do a trade and i think i did two or three but yeah so the way the trading works you’ve got the character that you’ve you know kind of received it out of the box, you scan it into the game that hatches that character, and kind of gives you a unique procedurally generated version of that character in-game and then the fig is tradable with other players, and you transact that trade through the game by scanning the fig, then again unlocking it for trade and then exchanging with another person, scanning the one that they just gave you into the game, and then completing the trade you know, it kind of takes both people participating in that, and that you know it’s really important to understand that when you trade a fig you you exchange the physical toy right ,but you keep the digital character that’s in your collection that’s attached right thing that you just traded, so you’re only ever expanding your digital collection by trading, you’re never losing or giving up anything that’s already in your collection and then the other aspect of this is really cool, is that when you start trading these every digital earthling that’s hatched from the same fig, so as a result of trade to trade to trade, we have now created a lineage which is, you know, just a collection of all of the Aerthlings that hatch from the same toy, and we connect all those players together through that lineage, and then as it trades again and again, all those players lineages grow and they earn lineage xp from that, and then you earn mutation points which allows you to unlock mutations in the skill tree for your Aerthlings of that species type so trading is all about helping other players kind of build their collection and you know kind of level up their earthlings in game.
Alaisdair : That’s such a great concept of not having to do what i guess is the Pokémon effect of trading and losing so yeah, that’s fantastic.
Justin : i think yeah pokemon cards a great example right, i mean there are products, collectibles out there that people have traded historically though the main behaviour tends to be to to just collect as many as you can, and you know, not trad,e but yeah you know when you trade pokemon cards it might be hey, i’ve gotten this one i’ll trade you this one for three of these others or whatever, and so the trades often are asymmetric, and we spent a lot of time as we were developing Aerthlings. i mean the goal with Aerthlings from the start was to create the best trading platform on the planet, and you know you trade one for one it’s really fair, you know we do see players that you know they’ve got a legendary drazzle or udon and so they’re only willing to trade for another legendary you know because those are hard to get and come by right, but for the most part players are pretty willing to trade kind of across rarities and and stuff i think that, what we’re seeing in the data so far with the game, it’s about breaking down the disincentives the reasons that i might not want to trade this thing and building up the incentives in the right way
Alaisdair : With the trading, so you mentioned like the physical trade, is there a digital trading system or online trading system for players who don’t necessarily, you know live in the same country
Justin: No i mean that is that is one of the unique aspects of Aerthlings, it is all about trading the figs. There is no digital trading. We don’t have any plans right now to change that, it’s not to say we never would, but really it’s about collecting, you know kind of the fun of collecting, unboxing these character,s hatching them into the game, and then trading with other players to get all the benefits to come along with that, and you kno,w we fully expect when the game’s live in other markets, we’re going to go global next year with Aerthlings, you know we fully anticipate in fact actually we’ve already had earthlings that have travelled continent to continent because i traded a bunch and brought them back from Australia and so did Joe so you know so that’s already happened. Now we don’t really have players here other than folks on our team that we can further trade with yet, but next year we will and so those lineages, you can also kind of see where they’ve been traded last as well so you know we can see that oh this this particular fig kind of jumped from Melbourne to Los Angeles and then to San Francisco and so on so we want them to get on planes you know, and kind of move around the world with people as they’re travelling kind of naturally and going about their lives fantastic
Alaisdair : in relation to i guess probably like the road map so you launched in Australia the game for the first time. Are we currently the only region to have it?
Justin : So we launched we made the game available in Australia and New Zealand for PAX, mainly because we expected that there were probably folks from New Zealand that would come over to Melbourne for PAX and and that was true and yes, the game currently is only live in Australia and New Zealand, you cannot play it anywhere else in the world so yeah you world first which a lot of people tell me is not the normal thing to happen there so no we’re pretty excited. We usually watch things for years and just go oh one day and then the party’s over and we get it and we’re like yeah so good to i can’t tell you how many times i’ve said to folks on our team and elsewhere just how happy i am that we launched australia first um it it’s honestly been the perfect kind of what we’ll call geo beta um you know for earthlings and we’re learning a ton the community’s been absolutely fantastic and uh of course our toy partner moose toys is based there you know in melbourne global toy company but you know kind of headquartered and founder founded in melbourne a number of years ago so yeah we’re just yeah ecstatic that we launched there,
Alaisdair : We touched a little bit earlier but i kind of want to expand a little bit more on pax how is australian pax. compared to pax west
Justin : That’s a really great question, i think it felt a little bit more contained, and you know a little bit smaller, though you know i think the numbers that pax west umprobably like closer to 100,000 or when i originally went, maybe even higher than that 110 120 000 people um the fact that it was all in Melbourne Convention Centre made it nice from my perspective, because pax west was in the convention centre, but also spread out across a bunch of hotels and kind of local area um you know venues so i yeah i you know but again the energy was very similar between pax australia and pax west and pax east so i think it’s a bunch of gamers they love gaming you know, they’re there to have fun. There’s a lot of cosplay going on you know, and it’s a mix of video game and also tabletop, you kno,w it’s they’re very similar events
Alaisdair :Did you do any kind of sightseeing or anything when you were here in Melbourne, or it was just all PAX all the time?
Justin : It wasn’t all PAX, we were over for a couple of weeks, and so you know, as the game was launching, we launched the game in the app stores just a little bit before PAX and so we kind of made our way over right around that time, just to be on the ground to you know deal with any issues that might come up, and we did a little mini launch event at Moose the week before and you know just like 100 people kind of you know celebrate the launch of Aerthlings with the teams and all of that I was in Melbourne and Brisbane and i guess we we flew through sydney but yeah it was just their airport. I did not have any time at all to do any sightseeing, you know, I had a weekend in Brisbane, where I pretty much worked. Still, you know i was in the new farm area along Brisbane River. The river walk and stuff, so I got to do some runs and stuff like that, you know, over the weekend, but largely was just cooped up, you know, kind of working. Yeah, I’ve been to Australia four times since last December and last summer was my first time. Uh, I’ve spent a lot of time in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. i will honestly say i mean i guess i made it to opera house in sydney on one of those trips for a meeting and you know but for the most part i have not gotten to do any sightseeing.
Alaisdair: What’s the plan from here so you’ve launched here in NZ, what’s the you know what, can you tell me about the rollout
Justin : Yeah, we we’re going global next year, so we will launch in the USA North America, Europe, you know asian markets as well throughout the year next year, and you know, we’re locking in finalising some of the dates and obviously each market country and continent will be a little bit different next year in terms of the rollout plans you know the expectation is that we will be back at pax over here you know amazing yeah for some of that i certainly want to be back at pax os next year as well so uh you know yeah yeah exactly i think we’ll we’ll be you know hopefully do it bigger next year um you know in terms of like booth and stuff like that. Right now in Australia New Zealand, there’s lots of work that’s being done, you know, collecting feedback from players, making sure that we’re tuning everything and just kind of ironing out the kinks if you will, and then continuing to build the game. We’re a small team, for quite a while we were building this, we’ve got four game devs who are actively working and building, and yeah it’s an ambitious project as well so yeah we’ve got a pretty deep roadmap of things that we want to continue to add to the game and enhance it, and we should have multiplayer coming out here in the coming weeks, we did hope to have that live for launch, but didn’t quite make it and just continue to iron out the bugs and make sure that it’s as glitch free as possible so that should be coming soon and just continuing to work and build amazing worlds.
Alaisdair :
Thank you so much for your time and for the launch of Aerthlings. Looking forward to seeing you at PAX in 2026!
Aerthlings is now available on Apple App Store and Google Play. You can purchase the mini-figs required to play at Big W, JB Hi-Fi, EB Games
