I first crossed paths with Flash years ago, and it was love at first sight.
I remember that several years back, small Flash games were hugely popular, and I was blown away by the Xiao Xiao series of Flash animations. Back then I played Xiao Xiao No. 4 over and over, and quietly made up my mind: one day I’d throw myself into the Flash world, build Flash pieces with real visual impact, and create games that are actually fun to play.
After I started working, I did Flash website development and Flash virtual community development, and in my spare time I never stopped playing games. Through the day-in, day-out accumulation of work and play, I picked up a lot of inspiration and kept writing it down; some of those ideas gradually grew into a system, and I looked forward to turning them into a series of games and realizing the dream I once had.
The reality, though, is no sponsorship and no return. Even though the games I design are ones I’d enjoy playing myself, I can only treat developing these mini-games as a hobby. I always hoped I’d find the spare time to finish them slowly, and hoped that one day my friends could play them and have fun with them. The result? The first few weeks I was full of energy, but then the daily job got busy, my own game inched forward, then stalled. I often felt I had no motivation — the moment I finished my day job, all I wanted was a couple of rounds of StarCraft II and then bed.
Time always moves too fast. I watch helplessly as my long-delayed hobby game stays a dream.
Among the friends I know, plenty are like me — busy on the career treadmill with an unfulfilled dream. Just counting the people I’ve shared a room with, there’s Proc (Legend of the Star Sea), Halley (MC) and others; of them all, only Huoshan made up his mind to live off his savings and shut himself away at home for six months to focus on developing his own project.
As Social Games took off, players idling away their time began buying and selling their friends at will in Social Games, parking cars in front of other people’s doors, and chasing the fun of “stealing crops”… At the same time, Web Games and Flash virtual communities sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain in everyone’s view: Dream Home, Sixth Continent, Seven Dragon Chronicles, Mole’s World, Undersea World, Box World, Hot-Blooded Three Kingdoms, Heroes of Might and Magic, Red Alert, Business Tycoon, Ming Dynasty Era, DDTank and countless more — a new product seemed to pop up almost every day. The huge profit potential of both of those shoved mini-games right out of everyone’s minds.
Mini-games gradually lost the luster they once had. It’s not that nobody needs mini-games themselves — so why do mini-game developers keep walking away? I think there are three reasons: first, the profits are small; second, they’re hard to promote; third, you easily end up sewing a wedding dress for someone else.
Small profits: The money you can make from a mini-game isn’t as tempting as what Web Games and Social Games offer, and anyone with cash and a team switched direction to Webgames long ago. Once a mini-game is finished, it obviously doesn’t spread as fast as an SNS game, and it has no real profit points either — at best embedded ads, or some company sponsoring it to promote its own brand. With not enough profit, developers naturally lose their drive. You make a mini-game, and you can’t even cover the cost of food, sleep, rent, utilities, rice, oil, salt, and gas — what are you supposed to do? If you’re going to make one, it can only be in these situations: custom work for a client (to promote their own product), public-interest and educational pieces, or a big company sponsoring it (embedding ads) and hiring the developer to build it.
Hard to promote: I’m sure every indie developer knows this feeling — unless you’ve got loads of time and energy left after finishing development, it’s very hard to both build and promote. There are certainly great developers who are also publishers, like armorgames, which I’m especially fond of, but for a small team the investment in promotion is still huge.
Sewing a wedding dress for someone else: Search Baidu and you’ll find tons of mini-game sites. Most are set up by individuals, and plenty are content alliances. They spend all day downloading every kind of Flash mini-game off the internet, with no awareness of copyright at all, publishing games straight to their sites without the author’s authorization, and the developer’s hard work turns into profit for those publishers.
Because of those three reasons, Flash mini-game development isn’t very active.
Just as my enthusiasm for Flash mini-game development was about to burn down to ashes, I happened to come across Mochi (https://zh-cn.mochimedia.com/) — the prairie fire that would let Flash mini-games rise again.
I’m an indie developer — you could call me a grassroots developer — and I’m also a gamer. My head is full of ideas, but I have neither money nor manpower. Planning and building a mini-game is no problem, but how to make a living from it once it’s finished — that’s a very real question. A single penny can bring a hero to his knees, and with no income, what’s the point of talking about dreams? As the saying goes: only when people have enough food and clothing do they learn honor and shame; only when the granaries are full do they learn propriety. In my frustration, wouldn’t I just follow the crowd and go make Social Games too?
After stumbling on Mochi, I found that Mochi was born for exactly this. Through Mochi, both indie developers and small mini-game teams can lower their development costs.
Most grassroots developers (especially those with their own ideas but not enough money or people) have no cash to burn at all, but we have the dreams and passion for games, and that shouldn’t be destroyed by reality. The platform Mochi gives us lets us realize our own small creative ideas and earn income once and for all.
Mochi has the whole pipeline ready — developer (earns) - advertiser (pays) - publisher (earns) - player (the ad target and the payer). Mochi Ads gives game developers a 50% revenue share and publishers 10%. Users who are both developers and publishers get 60%. Just like the appstore, as a developer you only need to focus on building your game; you don’t have to worry about anything after that. The more fun your game is, the more you earn. It’s a web platform with a pretty long long tail.
As this platform grows, it won’t just drive entrepreneurship in the Flash space — it’ll also push more talented indie studios to produce more great original work. Working with Mochi, developers only need to focus on building the product; everything else can be left alone. That not only lowers development costs but also helps improve game quality. Many developers have ideas and the ability to build, but no way to promote and operate — Mochi solves all those thorny problems for them, and all they have to do is give their best to the part they’re best at! A single, narrow responsibility — the optimal setup.
On top of that, Mochi also has a developer fund. Mochi’s game developer fund is a $10 million investment, used to help promising Flash and social game developers by supporting their games through sponsorship, licensing partnerships, and publishing. The fund will back small Flash game development studios and indie developers around the world, building world-class games and companies.
Open platforms are one of the most important internet advantages right now. Mochi isn’t just a middleman — it also gives developers open APIs to connect with all game users, so you can even build SNS applications. With this platform, development costs are even lower than for a social game. You don’t have to build N versions for different platforms, and the product is the same in nature anyway. Mochi has already handled the social side of things and provides the APIs — user data and online payments all come from Mochi — lowering development difficulty, lowering investment, lowering later maintenance costs… All of that is just fantastic!
Being able to turn your interest into your job is a very happy thing, and being able to reclaim the dreams of your youth through that job is about as perfect as it gets.
So let’s look now at whether Mochi solves those three problems that decide whether Flash mini-game developers live or die:
Small profits?
Mochi lets developers embed ads in their games, and when an ad plays, the developer earns income. It works much like Google ads: the developer’s income is determined by the traffic of the game or site and by how much players enjoy the game. A remarkable breakthrough of Mochi Ads is that the developer earns revenue every time a player plays the game.
Hard to promote?
If one person is both developer and publisher, it’s exhausting. Working with Mochi, developers don’t have to worry about publishing at all — what’s there to worry about when a big platform is doing the promotion? Developers can put everything into their own creative ideas and make games even they love to play, instead of thinking about how to promote them. That improves game quality and brings more original, polished work.
Sewing a wedding dress for someone else?
This is the beauty of Mochi Ads. It doesn’t matter who downloaded a developer’s game or which page it eventually ends up on — Mochi Ads keeps track of it the whole way and serves the appropriate ads. In fact, Mochi encourages game developers to spread their games across multiple sites to maximize their game’s revenue potential.
Every problem is solved, and Mochi won me over effortlessly. I have a lot of faith in it, and I’m really looking forward to picking my dream back up in the days ahead and developing my own games to publish on Mochi. What’s more, I’d be glad to become a Mochi publisher too.
Here’s wishing Mochi China growing better and better, creating mutual benefit and a shared future with developers, advertisers, and publishers. If you’re interested in Mochi like I am, head to Mochi’s Chinese official site: https://zh-cn.mochimedia.com/ to find more information.
Just watch Flash mini-games set off another wave in China — the new gold rush is right here!