Mochi Media continues to quietly build out monetization and reporting tools for Flash game developers. In May we reported on the big growth in their ad network – over 100 million people a month now play games that include their ads. You can find their games on big sites like Hi5, RockYou and Meebo. We’ve heard that games that include Mochi Media stats or advertising products are played over 1.5 billion times a month.
These games are embedded on publisher sites and are very often “borrowed” by other sites who just lift the Flash files. So it’s important that the game files generate revenue directly. Ads served by the publisher around the game aren’t reliable. Mochi Media puts the ads directly into the games, so even if they are ripped off, the ads still show and create revenue.
The problem is these ads don’t make a whole lot of money – the industry average is around $0.50 per 1,000 game plays.
To fuel revenue growth to developers (and therefore Mochi Media), the company has launched a payments platform called MochiCoins with a handful of game developers. MochiCoins lets developers charge for game upgrades – users can pay for coins via credit card, PayPal or SuperRewards, and the coins that then be used to purchase upgrades in games.
The early results, we’ve heard from someone close to a game developer on the platform, are stunning.
Ninjakiwi’s SAS: Zombie Assault 2 is killing it. The game has normal Mochi Ads, but users can also purchase better weapons and other stuff to kill zombies faster and better. It’s addictive. I spent over an hour “testing” the game earlier this evening and spent $5 in upgrades in an astonishingly short period of time. Try it – you can log in via Facebook Connect and be spending money like a drunken venture capitalist in no time.
In early testing, says our source, users are buying stuff and lots of it. The average revenue has increased dramatically to $6.50 per thousand game plays.
Users are paying for upgrades and subscriptions on the iPhone, Facebook and other platforms already and proving that good apps and games can generate a lot of easy money. But what Mochi is doing is completely decentralized. The game I embedded on that page, without the developers permission, is making money for that developer and for Mochi Media.
In other words, go ahead and steal these games. They’d love nothing more.
Mochi Media has raised $14 million over two venture capital financing rounds.
‘like a drunken venture capitalist’
does that mean entrepreneurs should start making deals with VCs in a bar with lots of beer? .. jk lol
…it is funny to me that monetizing web apps has resolved to tapping into people’s worst most addictive “wants” and not real needs. All the hype is about virtual currencies and ultimately playing into a dark addictive side people have, rather than actually solving problems. I guess it’s just that competitive right now that people can’t actually think just a little bit more to make the world better with their inventions!
Mike,
What upgrades did you buy?
Hopefully this new revenue rout for flash game developers will increase the development volume of new and creative games offered.
i really like the auto shotgun. really does the trick against multiple zombies at close range. The pulse rifle supposedly fires much more quickly though.
You have way too much time on your hands!
Michael, NinjaKiwi also has one of the top ranked iPhone App, “Bloons”, also very addictive! They’re great at building addictive games.
Did not know you’re such a hardcore gamer Mike..
intriguing.
You Bet! I think it’s awesome. In-game payment system with real money! Now, try that with the Sims
.. don’t forget you are using real cash…
“Easy money”? ROFL
Did you say EASY money? Go get some, kid.
This is nice.
Hopefully, we’ll start seeing the same thing for all content on the internet so no developer/writer/musician ever gets ripped off
This is a perfect example of thinking outside the box. It is exactly the sort of creative thinking the “entertainment industry” has sort of banned out of their collective consciousness ever since the the introduction of the tape recorder.
Instead of asking the unanswerable question “How can we stop people stealing from us?” ask yourself “How can we make (more) money when people steal from us.”
It’s cool, I love it.
exactly! clever lot over at mochi…kudos to them for finding new ways to make money…can only *imagine* what’s gonna happen when flash hits mobile hard in late 09/early 10….
yeah…
let’s walk through that logic for a sec…
i steal the app/content that i would have had to pay for. the app/content has ads in it.. or other ‘things’ that i can pay for… i’m willing to do that because i’m going to get more enjoyment from the app/content that i stole because i didn’t want to pay for it!!!!
right… i got some really good, well watered land right off florida for you too!
look.. copying an app that’s free.. who cares… the user might pay for the internal ads/upgrades… for a user stealing an app/content that had a cost attached to it… not so much…
try again….
In the flash games sphere, ’stealing’ means taking the SWF file from the original site (with whom the developer may have a revenue agreement) and hosting it on another site to bring in traffic for that site.
With this system, since the payments seem to be working out for the developers, the idea is that spreading the game around just brings in more revenue.
Great start.
Mochi are doing it all right so far.
They should implement a more robust in game stats/achievements system and they’re golden
Awesome. Congratulations Jameson!
Another good move by Mochi.
Interesting but need much more information. What’s the revenue split for developers? Is that $6.50 number from friends and family testing? How many game portals have these games been distributed to? How many plays are they getting? Don’t players just quit the paid games and go to the zillions of free ones? Where’s the API documentation? Fraud? Hacking?
A++ For the name ‘Tactical Chainsaw’.
This is a very smart move for Mochi and they are in an excellent place to drive a lot of developer adoption.
It’s not, however, something new. Nonoba, Kongregate and Whirled (Three Rings, my company) have all offered very similar micropayment functionality for at least six months.
Arguably Kongregate are best positioned because they are a destination site and can create customer loyalty, trust, and mandate that games on their site use their payment architecture. It’s a challenging prospect for a Flash portal to host a game that’s driving transactions via a competitive service, and many of the larger portals simply won’t run these finance-enabled games, or require that they use a native service (the same as they would swap out Mochi’s ads with their own in-house ads).
That all said, this is a great leap forward and I wish Mochi luck — because getting the Flash gamer audience to cough up some dough is a very fine idea indeed.
“Many of them” i.e. 3 of the millions of gaming sites. Only Mochi and HeyZap services is the other 2 million 9 hundred thousand 9 hundred and 97 gaming sites that don’t have the time or resources to build their own micropayment functionality–and have no need to after this.
Owh, thanks for the info!
Better try Zombie Assault 2 after this, maybe can be used to fill in my leisure time.
I really doubt these numbers – lots of Flash game developers have tested using micropayments/Paypal with pretty bad results – like less than 0.01% paying users. I wonder what the numbers are like if you take out Mochi employees and friends of the developer. Mochi has also claimed they are charging CPMs ‘in the teens’, but if you look at what developers are actually getting it’s more like teens of pennies.
There’s a difference between what CPM an ad network can charge, and the overall effective CPM. They are probably charging in the teens to US advertisers, but due to the heavy mix of international traffic, the overall CPM is lower.
I believe the numbers because the Mochi guys are a pretty straight forward bunch. That, and I bought $10 worth of coins myself.
Wow thanks for the article! Currently we’re running the game exclusively on Ninja Kiwi which we normally do with new games to work through any bugs that might have escaped the beta testing. The game has had about 40,000 plays in the last few days (I don’t have that many friends or “friends” and we’ve seen eCPM jumping around a bit. Our guess is it will level out at around the $5-6 mark. Now we don’t know how much the micro transaction issue will affect viral distribution of the game, some publishers may prefer not to use it (Although I believe we’ve delivered a complete experience with SAS2 that is enhanced at the players option through the use of Mochi Coins) We believe that the success of this kind of thing is important for the flash industry and the games industry in general. This empowers developers to make better games.
So the game has made $200-$240 total? Somehow I don’t think that would have made as good a headline…
Not sure what your point is. Do you expect an article helping to promote a new service to wait 6 months until there are some bigger figures? Wouldn’t that defeat the point of the article talking about something new and exciting?
I’m all for experimentation and I hope Mochi Coins take off, but I don’t think it was an honest headline – I’m sure most people who read it assumed we were talking about a lot more than $240. I’m sick of Mochi saying they are making a bunch of money for Flash game developers when the actual CPMs are very low.
tsk tsk flashgamedev, such a hater!
the interesting aspect is that the model has a good chance of being scalable.. so then large profits becomes more an issue of distribution… which is what the ninjakiwi dude alludes to in his comment above. If the game gets distributed even half as well as all their other games have, they should do quite well.
Incidentally, I was one of Google’s Adsense Beta Testers. What we made in the beginning was nothing to write home about yet either, but it scaled quite nicely for them, wouldn’t you say?
I wonder if the 10% publisher cut counts for MochiCoins purchases too.
Fupa join the debate:
https://www.moc...ishers-rally#19
Very interesting! I read the Heyzap article this morning about their micropayments ideas as well. No coincidence, but I wonder what the differentiators are?
I am not so sure in success of Mochi. We have allot of their games on site, and relative ok number of visitors. But people are just not use to click on in game banner. It’s distractive, and totally uneficcient in my homble oppionion.
just curious.. did you read the article before you wrote this? the coins system has nothing to do with ads.
Can someone tell me if I can trust mochi media with my credit card ect.?
Mochimedia is great social network for games. And this option at this point it’s good only for devolopers but not much for publishers.
I believe Mochi Media is great and will only get better over time. There is not much out there in terms of competition.