Steal This Game, Please
MochiCoins
The single largest problem in the indie Flash game biz is rampant piracy.
Generally speaking, a Flash game designer makes their living by investing time and effort into a game and then publishing it online surrounded by glorious banner ads. This model kind of works until some unsavory individual steals the .swf from the designer’s site and embeds it on their own site…surrounded by their own banner ads. Since this model is unreliable, to say the least, the solution would seem to be that Flash games need to be able to generate revenue independent of ads that they might be juxtaposed to. Enter Mochi Media and their core product MochiAds. According to Mochi:
The MochiAds technology offers around-game advertising opportunities for game developers to monetize their games, where consumers are shown pre-game and inter-level ads during natural breaks in game play.
Sounds great right? Even if some dude steals your game, people still see your ads, and you still generate revenue. The only problem is, it isn’t very much revenue ($0.50 per 1000 plays according to Tech Crunch). So in order to help game designers earn more for their games, and to help Mochi earn more for itself, Mochi Media is slowly deploying a new service called MochiCoins. MochiCoins is essentially a gives Flash game designers a method through which to allow players to purchase in-game upgrades via credit card, PayPal, etc.
While exacting details are scarce, most believe that if MochiCoins are a true micro-economy approach it has the potential to be wildly successful. Mochi sources have let it leak that early tests are returning an average profit of $6.50 per 1000 gameplays. That’s 13x the ROI of in-game adds alone. So if some dude want’s to steal your game, more power to him because he’s just being kind enough to set up another storefront for you.
My only thinking is if these ROI numbers prove true, how long before the big boys opt in to MochiCoins…or build their own clone of it.
posted by Dakota Brown on June 25th, 2009 at 3:24 pm Permanent link to this post
