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Iconic Future’s goal is to bring together the worlds of licensing rights and video games.
Founded in January 2011 by Thomas Martens, Malte Barth, Ze’ev Rozov and Christian Weddigen, the company has worked with rights holders including Sony, CBS, Hasbro and the BBC.
It enables studios to integrate branded virtual items and licence brands into online, mobile and social games that it believes will increase monetisation, brand engagement and create more value for those properties.
Iconic Future provides an online marketplace for rights research, discovery and transaction services for both rights holders and game developers alike.
“What makes us unique is our portfolio of licensable rights, which ranges from top sports organisations like FC Barcelona, Real Madrid or Arsenal FC to characters like Shaun the Sheep and Garfield and top movie properties like Star Trek,” says CEO Weddigen.
Iconic Future aims to be a ‘one-stop shop’ for developers’ games licensing needs. The firm manages all aspects of a project under a single framework, which it says avoids time-consuming and expensive legal processes. It dedicates project management resources throughout the entire process to handle launch planning, asset management, product approvals, PR and marketing support, reporting and analytics.
“Most importantly, though, we care about the games we work with and make sure that the branded integration makes sense. Besides adding value, it is crucial to add relevant content that the players will enjoy,” adds Weddigen.
He explains that the first step in collaborating with games producers is identifying which intellectual properties or licences would resonate most with the client’s target group.
“This has enabled us to provide several highly engaging campaigns, including My Little Pony in Farmerama (developed by Bigpoint), Premier League football clubs and Wembley Stadium in Goalunited 2013 (Northworks), Star Trek in Galaxy Life (Digital Chocolate) and Ronnie O’Sullivan signed cues in Pool Live Tour (Geewa),” says Weddigen. “During Euro 2012, we sold over 40,000 official England team football shirts in Talking Tom 2 (Outfit 7) at the weekend of the England versus France match alone.”
Next, Iconic Future plans to enhance its technical platform with further automation, broaden its consulting services for game publishers and extend its activities in Asia. In particular, it will be focusing on game integration opportunities for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
Finally, Weddigen says developers should come to Iconic Future for their rights needs because: “When it comes to popular IPs for games, we either already have access to them, know how to get to them or know that they are not available. Moreover, our digital marketplace provides for unique data analytics and insights from millions of item sales. Last but not least, we have a well-established working relationship with our partners who trust us with their IP for use in multiple games.”
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