One game that has confounded me in its popularity, especially on Mindjolt is Crazy Taxi. The game is pretty simple: there are three lanes you can switch to and you can jump over other cars. You must try to race to the end of each level before time runs out. The further the distance, the higher your score. Its a very run of the mill car game with nothing special and the game-play is not all that addictive. Yet, despite its mediocrity(it scored less than a 3.0 on Newgrounds), it has held the top spot on Mindjolt forever. This of course means a lot of views which results in a lot of brand awareness for its developer.

I’ve had games published on Mindjolt before and I haven’t even come close to reaching the top spot when my games hit 20,000 plays per day from Mindjolt. The top game on there must at least get 40,000 plays per day. If the game had Mochi-Ads, this would result in several hundred dollars of revenue per month. Usually new games on Mindjolt only stay popular for a few days before dropping back down into the unknown.

This game has not been nearly as popular on any other portal as Mindjolt and in most places has not received nearly as many views. So what makes it so popular on Mindjolt?

To answer this or even attempt to answer it, we have to look at what separates Mindjolt from other sites. Mindjolt depends on Facebook for most of its traffic and a major draw is the high-score API that many of their games has integrated. Since most of the traffic comes from Facebook rather than their actual website, most of the gamers are not likely to be hard-core gamers and are therefore just looking for a easy, no-too-intense, casual game to play. Being able to keep track of score and compete with their friends is a huge bonus. Thats where this game cashes in. It has no hard-to-master mechanics so the game is playable off the bat for anyone. The game also doesn’t take any time to get into as once you start the game, the game-play is pretty much the same no matter how long you play it. And most of all, it only takes a few minutes to finish a game. There is no maximum high-score I’m aware of as you can always just keep on going. Its a complete test of how fast you are at pushing the arrow keys and the space bar so someone can always beat you. Since it a fast game to play and high scores are easy to achieve, it would naturally draw a lot of people on Mindjolt. It also helps that it is one of the oldest games on Mindjolt so that first-game type of effect gives it an advantage too. Overall Mindjolt is a site where not-so-great games can become insanely popular. The key here is not fancy graphics or complex game-play but easy to play games that have high scores and that would draw people back again to beat other people’s high scores. Simple shooting and matching games tend to do well at the site. Mindjolt presents a great oppurtunity for developers and games that many of us can develop in a few hours can make us quite a lot of money by Mochi-Ads views here. I, myself, am making a lot of highscore, point-and-click type of games to see how they do on Mindjolt. Maybe one of them will hit big, like crazy taxi.

A recent series of games that have become very popular are the games of the 10 gnomes series(10 Gnomes 7 features at left). This game series is a series of find the objects hidden on the map. In this case, find the 10 small gnomes hidden in a given environment. There are 8 games in this series and I have no doubt that more will be made due to their success.

Even though these games are well-made and fairly fun to play, I still do not get the series’ runaway success. There isn’t too much differentiating them from most ’search the map and find objects” type games, yet they have done so much better than average. It could be because it was made into a 8-game series with each game being in a different environment. Since each game was pretty good, the popularity just spread from there. The style of the environment may have also contributed to the success of the series as a whole as most of the environments have a throwback feel of an old black and white photograph. I can’t explain why, but this kind of environment appeals to me a lot more than most.

There are some other things about the series too that make it a little better than most point and clicks. There are more click-able areas on the map where you can enlarge to find gnomes. There are also some hidden areas which you can find and some that you must find to find gnomes. I’ve heard from some people that they just like to explore the environment. I’ve also heard from some that the environments have more than 10 gnomes and the real challenge is to find them all. However, I still think that the major draw is that it is an ongoing series and if a player comes in at the 5th game, he’ll want to try the first four as well. Every game being suitable for casual play also boosts this game’s popularity a lot.

If there’s anything a flash developer can learn from 10 Gnomes is that when you’ve got a decent game, don’t change a winning formula, just change the background and tweak the game-play a little and you can keep producing many winning games based entirely around the first game.

In case your looking for a walk-through the episode 7, one can be found Here