After that shipping is free, although you’ll have to pay for the game play going forward. Once you win your first prize, there’s a one-time fee of $3.99 for shipping. There are also accessories, jewelry and apparel in some of the claw machines. Brightman and his team have negotiated deals with many of the biggest toymakers in the world – including Disney, Marvel and Nintendo. Not that players don’t covet the prizes, too. “That further proves that people love the joy of playing the game and not just the prizes.” “The more you play the game, we find, the more you exchange the prizes and don’t take them home,” Brightman says. Prizes can be shipped to the winner or exchanged for more coins and more game play. Three employees can service all 220 machines, Brightman says. Dual video cameras in the warehouse show you what’s happening on the real-life claw machine.Ĭlawee’s games run 24/7, but when a player wins, the machine is taken out of service for a few minutes while an employee restocks the prize. Once you’ve chosen a machine, you navigate the claw on your mobile device. That plush Pikachu doesn’t cost the same as a Bluetooth speaker, for example. Unlike in a traditional arcade, there is only one prize type per machine, and different machines cost different amounts depending on how desirable the prize is. So, like so many aspects of our pandemic lives, the claw has gone virtual too.ĭownload the app, buy some tokens and choose a machine to play. These days, with Covid-19 still raging, visiting a real-world arcade to try your hand at the claw is not as easy – or as safe – as it once was. Users film themselves “jumping in excitement not because they’ll be getting a prize but just because they managed to catch it,” Brightman tells ISRAEL21c. Winning prizes is a big part of the fun, of course, but it’s more than that. “It has this psychological mechanism that’s just so exciting and engaging.” “There’s almost no country in the world where people aren’t familiar with claw machines,” explains Ron Brightman, CEO of Gigantic.
The app has been downloaded 8 million times and the company has raised a total of $9 million.Ĭlawee is the name of Tel Aviv-based Gigantic’s first game it’s patterned after the ubiquitous “claw” games where users navigate a metal hand to hover, then drop down into a sea of prizes, hopefully returning with the desired plush toy or electronic item rather than a “dud” of a keychain or an oddly branded toothbrush. It sounds like the wackiest idea for a startup: An online gaming company that uses real arcade machines - 220 of them stored in a massive warehouse in Petah Tikva - and a mobile app to control the gameplay from home.īut wacky in this case equals crazy success. “Covid-19 has been good for the entire gaming industry.”
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