There are countless Flash games on the web, but weeding through them to find the one you’re looking for can be a challenge. Heyzap the first company out of Y Combinator’s latest batch of startups, is looking to offer users a comprehensive database of the web’s best games, along with the ability to embed those games wherever they’d like. In short, they’re looking to become a YouTube for Flash gaming.
But unlike YouTube, founders Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila say that Heyzap isn’t necessarily meant to serve as a destination site, but is instead focusing on its widget (which has an integrated catalog of available games) as well as forming partnerships with publishers looking to integrate Flash games into their sites. The widget itself seems fairly well designed, with games sorted into categories like “Sports” and “Puzzles”. However, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to search by keyword, which could become frustrating if you want to search for a specific game.
The site currently offers over 4000 games, which come from a variety of sites including Addicting Games and Kongegrate (both of which offer embedding, so the games aren’t scraped). Akhund says that many of these games come from Mochi Media, which is sharing advertising revenue with Heyzap through a rev share agreement. The site will also earn money from games that developers independently upload to the site.
I think Heyzap’s biggest chance at success will lie in forming partnerships with popular sites looking to cleanly integrate Flash games without any development costs (for example, lifestyle sites and magazine homepages might use the games to increase engagement). As a destination site Heyzap will have a great deal of difficulty dealing with more established sites like Addicting Games and Kongegrate, which offer game catalogs of their own. Another contender in this space is Game Curry, which we covered in October.
This isn’t Immad Akhund’s first run at a Y Combinator company – he co-founded Clickpass, which was recently acquired by Synthasite.
To try out the widget for yourself, click on the button below:
Just when I thought I had broken my Bloons habit…
Too much fun.
flash games can definitely increase site engagement and there are tons of sites that would jump at the opportunity to immediately pop in a component that provides a ready-made solution.
Already making money – very nice.
It’s http://www.kongregate.com/
And i totally agree with you, they gonna have a hard time against Kongregate or Addictive Game, everybody nows those two, and it’s gonna be hard to get the interest of the Flash game community.
Hey Jason… I’m pretty sure the phrase “You Tube For Games” has been used http://pitches....ch/6-kongregate … adding the word “flash” to it does little to make it an original statement.
P.S. Want to fix your link to Kong? It points right to a parker-site.
Great longtail competitor to Oberon Media. Nice job Immad.
Way to execute quickly Immad and Jude!
Wow, I’m extremely pleased to see HeyZap gaining some serious attention in such a short period of time.
Jude approached me for some design work in relation to HeyZap only a month or so ago and they’ve already got a post on TC.
Can’t wait to see how HeyZap develops. Competition is fierce.
Way to sell yourself even if shameless! The economy is hard for sure.
Nice work guys!
Wow! Congrats Immad and Jude. That was FAST.
I don’t mean to be hater but, this is just a wrapper for Mochi’s standard publisher feed. Any site that wants to put any of these games up can do so without this widget.
Thanks everyone for all your support!
Or you could add 7000 games to your own site however you want using our REST API and wrap your own ads around them. 100,000 to 5,000 on Alexa is 6 months.
http://www.fupa.../freegames.aspx
This strikes me as incredibley naive.
The flash game sites are a dime a dozen.
They are all thoroughly rated and organized by a variety of views.
Flash games themselves are a dime a dozen.
Making a widget/gadget/app to display these games on any social site is very little overhead. It’s all freely available.
Flash game sites: dime a dozen ($.10/12=$.008 per site)
Flash games a dime a dozen ($.10/12=$.008 per game)
20 sites * 10000 games ===>
So income is…
ONE MEEELION DOLLARS. Oh wait I meant Rubles.
Um, this is just repackaging Kongregate.com games, this will fail.
Congrats Immad and Jude. Heyzap looks fantastic!
Well done on the launch. Look forward to seeing HeyZap progress and grow.
It’s would be nice if they will purchase this domain: http://www.heygames.com
HeyZap sounds odd to me!
The widget is small and easily overlooked, but once click it open a really nice lightbox to play in. I had hoped it would be larger.
Looks like a nice site! Lots of games to play and an easy to use website layout. Thanks for sharing it! I wonder when google will end up coming up with something like “google games” to index all of these flash games!