Ærthlings is bringing Toys-to-Life back from the dead

In the eight months since launching the mobile toys-to-life game Ærthlings, indie studio Modern Games has sold more than 100,000 Ærthlings figures. Founder Justin Kifer says the number that matters most isn’t the total — it’s that more than half of those buyers came back for more. 

Toys-to-life games like Skylanders and Disney Infinity dominated toy shelves in the early 2010s — then all but vanished after generating billions of dollars in combined revenue. Many observers in the industry interpreted this disappearance as proof the category itself had run its course. Justin Kifer, the chief executive officer and founder of Modern Games, reads it differently. He believes toys-to-life didn’t die of natural causes — it died because trading a physical toy meant giving up the character a player had built with it. Ærthlings, which launched in Australia last October before expanding to the U.S. in late March, is intended to that single problem. Eight months in, Modern Games says the fix is working.

Of the over 100,000 Ærthlings figures Modern Games has sold since launch, roughly 70,000 were in Australia and more than 30,000 were in the U.S., where the product sold out on Amazon within three weeks. More than half of buyers have made a repeat purchase. A recent Kickstarter to fund a PC expansion and a second wave of toys averaged roughly $300 per backer. These numbers are notable, per Kifer in an interview with GamesBeat, “because Ærthlings is an entirely new IP competing for attention without an established franchise or a major studio’s marketing budget behind it.”

Each Ærthlings toy, or “Fig,” is a blind-box collectible containing a serialized NFC tag. Scanning it “hatches” a character permanently into the game, with individualized stats and visual traits, meaning even a duplicate species comes out with a new, unique persona. Trading a Fig no longer means losing that progress. When a player trades a Fig away, they keep the character they already hatched from it and the new owner hatches a different character of their own. Every subsequent owner is then linked in what Modern Games calls a “lineage.”

“It gives them benefit as each trade happens and it gets longer,” Kifer said, adding that some Figs have changed hands 60 to 70 times across Australia, the U.S. and Asia. Players earn ongoing rewards tied to their lineage even when they aren’t actively playing, he said.

To prevent players from exploiting the reward system by repeatedly trading the same Figs back and forth, Modern Games built in a permanent restriction: once a Fig has been scanned and hatched, it can never be received back into another trade. “You do need to have fresh Figs coming into the ecosystem,” Kifer said, acknowledging that some players had created second accounts to trade with themselves, but that Modern Games doesn’t consider this practice a meaningful problem eight or nine months into launch.

Modern Games, founded roughly six and a half years ago, built Ærthlings as an evolution of Beasts of Balance, a tabletop stacking game the studio acquired in 2020. Kifer and his wife, Amanda Kifer, are co-founders; the company’s roughly 20-person team is fully remote, with staff across the U.S., Colombia, the U.K., Slovakia, and the Philippines. 

Modern Games originally designed Ærthlings for players ages 10 to 14. Its Australian data told a different story: 75 percent of the player base is 16 or older, and more than half falls between 25 and 45, a crossover between kids and adult collectors that Kifer said the studio didn’t fully anticipate.

A strong community has formed quickly around the Ærthlings collectibles. Modern Games’ Discord server grew from about 20 invited members to more than 1,500 after an Australian gaming convention appearance, and fans have designed 3D-printed accessories, display cases, and handmade plush versions of the characters.

Kifer said he expects competitors to enter the toys-to-life category if Ærthlings continues to grow, and that Modern Games holds patents pending on its trading and lineage system. His hope, he told GamesBeat, “is that new entrants innovate rather than copy” — something he believes didn’t happen the last time the toys-to-life category was this crowded.

Beyond the collectibles and the game, Kifer said the part of Ærthlings that is often overlooked is the world built around it. The characters live on a digital version of Earth that was destroyed when a neighboring civilization, the Moonlings, accidentally crashed their moon into it. The impact scattered the Ærthlings into the real world, and scanning a Fig is framed, in-universe, as returning one of them home.

“There’s a very intricately designed world that these characters live in,” Kifer said. “Our job as players of the game, as collectors of the Ærthlings, is really to put their world back together — to help them and to repopulate Earth with all of the Ærthlings, which are now in our world.”

Modern Games has also released a 10-episode, 60-minute animated series building out the story of Ærthlings, along with companion comics, and Kifer said the studio has assembled a full franchise bible it is now shopping to media partners. The company plans to launch its Ascension Series Figs and a PC expansion later this year, funded through its recent Kickstarter campaign.

For Kifer, the number that matters most isn’t in a pitch deck. It’s the players who show up to trade Figs at a local game store, or the fans who spent their own time cross-stitching Ærthlings onto fabric within days of first hearing about them.

“We just want people to fall in love with the world and the characters,” he said.

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