I don’t care how much the developers earn. The ones that make good games can easily make several thousand or tens of thousands per game. The crap games don’t make any money.

The reason I don’t add these games is because it requires users to go off-site to register, login, and buy coins. That causes me to lose traffic. At this point, we have nothing to gain, but traffic to lose by adding these games.

10% is not going to interest me. Programs that sell premium versions of flash games have been around for a while. They vary from 15-30% commissions to affiliates with an average around 25%. Thats about the average for vendors trying to sell “premium” versions of their games via publisher’s sites.

If your going to take away visitors from my site like the other vendors do, I’m not going to add your mochi-coin games unless you can match their affiliate offerings.

If you read the reviews for SaS Zombie Assault at Newgrounds, you can easily see that a good number of people do not appreciate having to pay for items inside a flash game and its obviously effected the game’s rating.

I didn’t like regnow or youdagames produces “lesser” versions of games in flash, but that 30% commission on the sale changed my mind about it.

The “taking gamers away from our sites” seems to be the rallying call from all portals put out by this system.
In reality is it that bad ? I’m really not trolling for the sake of it, I’m actually interested.

Say I play a mt enabled game on your site and I fancy joining up to spend some of my hard earned cash, does the register link open a new window / tab ? Does it give me an option to return back to the site with the game on that I was playing ?
I assumed that clicking the register button would pause the game and open a new window, I sign up, I buy some coins, and then I close that tab and continue playing the game from your site.
( Perhaps I should actually register rather than just guessing ).

What’s the difference between a player clicking on a register button and clicking on a sponsors link ? I mean I imagine that a lot of the games you host have a link to someone else telling the player how there are more great games to be had there.
A good ctr is what, around 5% ? Is mochi with it’s one off registration proving to have a greater ctr than that ?

Also is there any historical data anywhere that suggests that once a player leaves your site for whatever reason they are less likely to come back ? I mean I can’t even picture someone deleting their bookmark to your site never to return after registering at mochi.
You may lose them for a day, but if you’ve got all the content that mochi has, if you’ve given the player added reasons to come back to you, then they will won’t they ?

I know I have a bias as a developer, I want mt’s to succeed as lets face it in-game advertising isn’t worth a cup of cold pee ( No matter how many times your read that some devs are making >$10k a month ) and sponsorship is variable at best, and I understand the portal owners concerns, it’s new territory for everyone ( mt’s aren’t a licence to print money for devs either, it’s going to take a lot of work to justify charging a player for things ) but is the system really that bad ?

Say I was playing on portalxyz and register with mochi and never go back there, if I stumble upon your site you’re good ’cause I’ve already registered so I’m ready to start buying and when mochi sort it out, provide you with your share. It seems very much a case of swings and roundabouts, rather than the evil mochi empire taking money out of your pocket.

Yes, right now for Mochi Coins, you have to leave a site and go to Mochi-coins to register, login, and buy coins. Thats plenty of good reason for portal to not add games with Mochi-coins.

You don’t need to click on a sponsor’s site usually to access all of the features in a game(most of the time) but as for coins, you need to register and complete offers off-site to access the full game.

If mochi integrated it so you could do all the transactions on the portal and/or if they offered commissions around what youdgames offered(25-30% affiliate commissions for portals), I wouldn’t be against it.

There’s hardly any industry or system where the distributors don’t get a significant chunk of the pie for making the sale.

Realize that most of the traffic I get comes from games that are either made by myself or games produced by large companies by places like armor games or miniclip(in-house games). These games produce 85% or so of my traffic.

The micro-x games would take away more traffic than it makes me.

Its really not the Micro-x I’m against, its the way its being implemented.

Once someone registers for Mochi-Coins, its not like they have to come back to my site to use them. They can use them anywhere. This is made worse by the fact that the site they register for them on features these games. Its not very different from hosting a “restricted” version of a casual game on your site with the author selling a full version — except Mochi doesn’t pay you 25% commissions like most casual developers do.

There are quite a few games that get into the thousands by sponsorship alone. The %-wise is small but then against the games that don’t hardly bring portals any traffic.

If you want large portal to embrace Micro-X and give sales – you need to pay them what other casual game developers are paying them in terms of commissions. That is how they work with them — not trying to convince them to add these games while giving them nothing in return except a way to lose visitors to another site.

I agree. Somewhere along the line Mochi failed to realize that without the publisher they don’t really have a business. Good god man – I never asked for $$$ – only respect at the effort and work that goes into creating an active destination. DO NOT hide poaching behind services that are unreliable or designed to ultimately drive away our users/community.

This is – and WILL ALWAYS BE – a symbiotic business between Developer and Publisher. The sooner everyone involved comes to terms with that the better will all be.

The best thing to do,

IF game = Mochi {

run your own damn 20 second preloader and cut these fuckers out!;

}

25% or higher is not uncommon for any type of commission sales in any industry. I doubt Mochi is going to all of a sudden change the publisher’s cut because some portals die off.

If you want to make money off of portal’s traffic, you had better pay them the same % of affiliate commissions that other companies do.

When I mention casual games, I’m talking about the ones that Youda games make. They make “free” flash versions of their games with an option to buy a premium version in-game. Its the exact same as asking people to buy premium content via Mochi-coins. And yes, they still pay 30%. If mochi does not offer 20-25% or more, its just not going to look attractive.

Its not a one off thing for having to go off-site.

1. You must go to mochigames.com to register
2. You must go to mochigames.com every time you want to login
3. You must go to mochigames.com every time you want to buy coins.

That equals alot of people leaving our site to go to mochigames.com, which, look, is a competing portal trying to siphon our traffic any way they can!

Its just not worth it right now for publisher to support Mochi-Coins at this point. It doesn’t help us, it hurts us.

Until Mochi can fully integrate their coins thing where people don’t have to leave our site to register, buy coins, or login and give a decent commission on Mochi-Coin games, there’s no way you can argue its good for publishers.

It doesn’t matter who is losing the traffic. If someone else loses the traffic, its not me thats gaining it, its mochigames.com. Mochi claim that they aren’t interested in building a big game portal to compete with its publishers is pretty much a bullcrap statement.

Mochi has never been good to its publishers, so this kind of reaction should not be unexpected.

Oh, but it works for devs too. Devs already get sponsorship money and I allow the in-game ads on my site. Wanting Micro-X without giving the portal who is driving the traffic a share on top of those two things already is unacceptable so I will not host these games unless I get a share of the Micro-transaction fees.

You wanting to push more and more stuff on portals without giving them a cut is not going to make portals want to support your either.

Mochi will work with publishers, they realize that they have to for their business to work. They need the publishers just as much as they need to developers.

An evolving relationship does not mean we continously cave to developer demands without receiving anything more in return.

These have to be some of the most ignorant statements I’ve heard in a long time:

“An evolving relationship does not mean we continously cave to developer demands without receiving anything more in return.”
-Admin

“I am sure Flash Game Developers make a lot of money already. This is kind of greedy.”
-Below the Belt

First of all admin, you make so much more from us than we make from you. Take Kongregate, for example, and the successful game: Achievement unlocked, Right now, the game has 795114 views. Kongs avg eCPM is around $8.00. That equivocates to $13347 and cents. They give 35% to the developer because of thier revenue share. So they made $8676 and cents. How much did they pay to have that game on thier site? Nothing but bandwith, which is nowhere near what they profited. And they offer rev share. Do most portals? NO. They takes games and make money as they see fit, while not giving a shit about the developers that make their content (without whom they couldnt survive).

@Below the belt: I hate to break it to you, but the majority of flash game developers (even good ones) make less than $1000 per month of actual game development time after development costs. The developer of Upgrade complete is one of the most successful flash game developers out there, and 99% of full-time developers aren’t even close to making 1/3 of what he is making. But I’m guessing that you’ve never developed a game before, otherwise you’d know this. The avg sponsorship amount is around $1300 in the past year according to Flash Game License. The avg game development time is 1.5 – 2 months. A game that makes $1300 from sponsorship will likely yield about 500000 – 1000000 views across the internet. ads would get them about $150 -$300 depending on thier eCPM (not mochi though. We can all agree that mochi is the worst thing for the flash games industry). We’re going to assume the better of these cases, and say they end up with $1600. After paying any development costs (such as artists, sfx, and/or music), they will likely end up with $1000 – $1300 final, and after taxes, that looks strangely small for 1.5 months work. Eating ramen and living in a box never sounded so good.

Summary:

Developers have it harder than portal owner, namedly because most portal owners dont give a shit about the developers that rake in the money for them. The average sponsorships and ads revenue arent enough, even if you ignorantly think they are. If we want to make even an ok living, then we will have to rely on microtransactions, which may be the only way to break even and feed ourselves.

We can all agree that mochi is horrible. I personally hate what they are doing for the flash game industry and dont use them anymore. If you want a much less intrusive alternative thats fair for developers and sponsors alike, then I suggest looking at gamersafe. They dont actually take traffic away from your site, because they go back to play the game anyways, and they offer a share with portals. Not to mention that they only accept high-quality games into their system, and are not a portal site themselves.

Mr. PhotonStorm is right about the industry evolving. If you dont adapt to it, then by the time us quality developers realize they could be making what they deserve with micro-transactions, you will be letting all of the quality game hits slip away from you because it might lose you the money that you wouldnt have made without them anyways, just because they are asking to sell good content for a miniscule fee.

I look forward to you ignorant and incorrect responses. Thank you.

First of all, your Kongregate example completely falls apart because if you had bothered to read any of their forums posts about profit at the beginning this year, you’d know they were still making a net loss. They have to foot the bill for a staff, servers, etc so they actually are not even in the black yet. How many developers lose tens of thousands of dollars each month after subtracting way costs?

By the ways, did it ever occur to you why sponsors even purchase primary licenses? They’re not paying for the game to be on their site with all that money. They are paying for the their version of the game to be on everyone else’s site when they give you a primary deal. Basically, when they pay you for a primary or exclusive sponsorship, the are paying distribution and they have already paid for the right for every other site to host your game. They’ve already paid you. Why do the rest of us owe you anything anymore? The reason they pay you for a primary is because all these other sites exist that could send them traffic from that game. If the other sites didn’t exist or if only sites that existed were the ones who bought site-locked versions of the game, no one would ever buy a primary license. Why do you expect additional revenue share when someone has already paid you to put the game on other people’s sites? Its not like you share any of the sponsorship money with the other publishers even though they are the primary reason your sponsor bought the primary license from you. Likewise, you shouldn’t expect revenue share even if your game is the primary reason people come to our sites. Sites like Kongregate are going the extra mile and providing us extra by providing revenue share.

A lot of flash developers of these awesome games don’t do it full time. If your not putting in 40 hour weeks into developing, you really shouldn’t complain that your not making a full-time salary out of flash games.They are part time and more like a hobby than an actual job. People who do it as an actual job are the people that get over $10k in sponsorships like the author of Shadez 2. Of those that do it full time, there is a good % that make more money than me. I will accept gamersafe games right now, but I still prefer completely free games.

I publish alot of games myself as I develop alot for my own portals. Games that can rake me in over $100 in the first month and then about $20 or so each month afterwards, I can easily pop out every day or two if I worked 8 hours a day on making games. Since I sponsor my own games, I don’t look for sponsorships so that could be a few hundred more for games that take me 2 days or so.

Don’t forget, these things are cumulative. I spend a lot more time on my sites than developing games, I probably don’t even average an hour a day developing and I still make hundreds each month off mochi-ad and CPMstar income alone. If I dedicated 40-hour weeks to develop, I could have easily made a couple of thousand dollars off in-game ads alone with Mochi and Star.

Because of places like armorgames and miniclip, there will always be tons of high-quality games that are completely free. It won’t hurt us to only add those games and leave out a few with coins in them.

There’s a good number of portals that don’t depend that much on freelance developers for their content or traffic. They have their own in-house development staff. These places also produce the highest quality games which are highly distributed.

Portals did exist(I owned one) before mochi came along. Most of the games were from places like Miniclip or sometimes Armor. I got just as much traffic, even though there were far fewer games. If people don’t have a large choice of games, they’ll just play the ones that are available. For a regular portal, it won’t get less traffic if there are less games released. The “changes” in the last two years are just that there are ads in some games now and there are more games which in turn has sprouted out thousands of more portals. It hasn’t improved things for us who have had portals before these great “changes”.

I highly doubt the micro-X will become the norm as long as places like armorgames exist. These places outproduce the rest of all the freelance developers put together.

It really doesn’t matter if I don’t pay for the content, because someone else has. Someone else has payed a sponsorship fee to you or whoever the developer was for the right for that game to be on my site. It doesn’t really matter who pays for it, someone had to buy it from you. If I buy an air freshner at a store and decide to put it in a public building for everyone to enjoy, then there is no talk about everyone else not having to “pay” for it because someone has footed the bill. Its the same as if I buy a keg of beer and all my friends drink for it. Why would it make any sense for everyone to have to pay for it again? That doesn’t even make sense. When I sponsor something under those terms as I do every off and on, I’m footing the bill for everyone else. Realistically, nothing is really free because someone had to pay for the games to be there in the first place. Its really just a matter of who paying who.

I don’t really ever see this working out for portals, it only really works for developers at the cost of portals. There are far more people who are just plain annoying that any content costs money than people who are actually encouraged by it.

Now there are platforms like gamersafe(because they offer portals a small cut and are in the process of letting portals re-skin the login links) that I will accept games from although the quality of those games will have to be much higher. Come2play I’m very welcoming on because their platform is seemless, and their publisher’s cut seems to be around 25%, which is more of what I expect from affiliate commission off game sales.

Your gold example doesn’t work either because the Gold doesn’t come with in-game links or in-game ads. In other words, hardly any games are truly ‘free’ for us. Also its really no a valid example, especially for sponsored games. For that its life the sponsor bought some gold from you and then decides to give it to us for free to sell. In that scenario, you’ve already gotten your payment, so you didn’t really give anything to me for free.

Almost all games have these and these in exchange are the payment for having the game on our site.

I feel that Micro-X is just going too far without publishers receiving a decent chunk of the money being transacted.

In every industry the distributors get a fairly large chunk of the pie, what makes the Flash games industry so special?

The $X thing doesn’t work like that. Most of those people who played that game would have just played another game without Micro-X is that game wasn’t there. That game probably doesn’t make me much.

Once you lose the visitor, you lose the profit it would have made. Thats a straight loss. That loss could easily be great than what you gained by putting that extra game on the site. At 10% and without seemless integration, its really not that attractive to publishers. Especially with the way Mochi is doing it where you get 10% on the first purchse and nothing afterward.

Oh cry me a river… poor publishers get all these games that developers make, for nothing. Plus they get 10% of the revenue that the games make. Poor developers get something for nothing… and now that developers make a little more, you’re all throwing a tantrum. I got an idea, make your own games! There you go! Then you can have all the $$$! Oh wait… you’ve got to have talent to do that.

Grow up, grow a pair, and stop whining like little b*tches.

What a lively discussion!

In order to really understand how the flash game industry works and how it’s changing, I find it useful to consider how value for the player is created. Traditionally, Flash games have been short experiences that provide only a few minutes of amusement. No player is going to pay for only a few minutes of amusement. In order for a player to spend any significant time on them, the short games need to be aggregated into large collections (portals). Now instead of a few minutes, the player could drop an hour or more playing many of these short games. But even still, he’s not going to pay, because free games are everywhere. The developer can’t charge for so little value, and the portal can’t charge because there are a 100 other portals that don’t.

Fortunately for portals, 3rd party vendors have been willing to pay for ad placement. Some of that money has trickled down to developers in the form of sponsorhips, site licenses, and rev share, but most is retained by the portals. And the reason for that is because there’s no incentive to pay developers more when so many are giving their games away for free (the same reason portals can’t charge players).

In the traditional model, portals are the ones creating most of the value for the players. Portals deserve most of the money. They’re earning it by collecting all the games that developers give away and by negotiating better and better ad contracts. The value created by developers is spread out so thin that very few developers get anything.

What’s changing though is that as the Flash game industry matures, the quality and size of game projects naturally increase. In order for these larger projects to work financially, the developers have to make more money. Especially with the current economy, that money isn’t going to come from ads. It has to come from the players directly, just like in the rest of the PC game industry. Micro-X provide a way for that market to be tapped, which enables flash game projects to increase in quality and size.

When a player spends 5-10 hours on a single game, then the developer is the one creating more value for the player (The portal is still creating value by providing the player himself, but the developer is the one keeping the player engaged. When players are constantly switching games, it’s the portal keeping the player engaged). In order to create that value, a lot more time and resources had to be spent, so revenue needs to be proportional to development costs for these larger games to be sustainable.

The number of free games is only going to increase (there will always be hobbyists who make little games and give them away), and portals can continue as they are aggregating the free ones and keeping most the ad revenue.

Micro-X will support bigger games and pay for them by tapping the players’ pockets. Players will still only pay for games that offer sufficient value, but the end result will be a LARGER pie. And even if developers get a larger piece of that larger pie than they get from the freebies, there will still be more revenue for the portals too. I mean, portals are already getting $0 from players directly. If players start paying anything and portals get any cut (MochiCoins currently is 10-20% for the portal, depending on the developer), then that’s MORE than $0.

As for losing traffic to mochi, that might just happen, depending on what kind of value a portal creates for its players. As a player, creating a MochiCoins account and playing games that use it, I have a roaming profile I can use at home and at work, and my items and progress go with me everywhere. To me, THAT is real value for the player (and I didn’t have to pay a dime for that). If players judge mochi to be the one creating more value than your portal, you will lose those players.

Of course, there are portals that probably offer that kind of service, but the best service for the player will be the one that more developers support.

Think about how you’re going to create MORE value for your players. Players will go where they get the most value for their time and money. If your focus is on creating value, then you’re moving the industry ahead (like Mochi is). But if you lose focus and become more concerned about holding on to what you have, then you’ll just get left behind. The internet moves way too fast for that!

“Mochi can get as much developer support as it wants. Without portal support, its going to sink.”

Anything will sink without developer support too. Developers, portals, and payment providers are all necessary in the pipeline for creating value and collecting money.

Whichever the developers choose will be the one that takes over. Neither portals nor players can drive the choice, because they’re not creating the content.

You can boycott games that use services you don’t like, but if more and more developers use them, you’ll just be missing out on lots of content you could have on your site. Then all the other portals that recognize their place in the value pipeline and see the value for the PLAYER in those services will get the content that you don’t.

There are thousands of portals out there. If a few boycott our games, there are still plenty that don’t. Micro-X is shifting power from portals to developers, and that’s probably the core reason you’re so opposed to it. One of the fantastic things the internet has done is make the middleman obsolete. That lowers prices for players and increases income for developers, which increase game quality and player enjoyment. Portals will eventually fade away as the web becomes more and more socially driven. It’s just the way the wind is blowing.

u need a lot of work with mochimedia …
allali.net