Mochi Media, which helps indie game creators monetize Flash games, is launching a platform today that makes it easy for Flash game developers to create, monetize and distribute social games.
Mochi Social will enable developers to build games with social features, such as the ability to invite friends, send gifts, or post to a news stream. The company, which was acquired by China’s Shanda Games in January for $80 million, is announcing Mochi Social at the Flash Gaming Summit that it is sponsoring today in San Francisco. The idea is to let Flash game developers enjoy the benefits of social networking without being locked into a single social network.
“We are making social games distributable across many sites,” Jameson said. “They have been locked social networks. Now we are letting them out.”
San Francisco-based Mochi Media has been a key player in the democratization of game development. Flash game developers use Mochi to insert ads into their Flash games. Mochi collects game play data and charges advertisers for the number of times their ads are viewed. Mochi then shares most of that money with the developers. On its network, Mochi says it can reach 150 million monthly active gamers who play 15,000 games across 40,000 different web sites. That’s a pretty big empire.
But social games on Facebook have been so successful that advertisers and developers have moved in that direction. To save Flash gaming and adapt to the new world of social games, Mochi has added new ways to monetize beyond ads. Last July, the company launched its Mochi Coins virtual currency to enable Flash game developers to make money from free-to-play games, where users play for free but pay real money for virtual goods. Mochi is moving to build an Xbox Live style service around Flash games.
In doing so, it has been in a kind of leapfrog race with rivals such as Heyzap and Hooked Media. Now Mochi Social is an attempt to duplicate a lot of the functions on Facebook. As Facebook puts more restrictions on what game developers can do, Mochi is trying to court indie developers to move back in its direction for the sake of more independence and better monetization, said Mochi founder Jameson Hsu.
The good thing about Mochi Social is that the social features can be tapped by a user regardless of what Mochi Social-enabled site they play on. Mochi Social gamers can post updates on their game achievements to Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. All of the Mochi Social components are embedded in a game file, so they follow the game wherever it is distributed. A gamer playing a game embedded with Mochi Social can send a notification inside the game to friends, regardless of what platform they are using.
Mochi Social is in private beta. The first Mochi Social-enabled game is Kingdoms at War, a social game from developer Thinking Ape that has been a success on the iPhone and now debuts on the web. Wilkins Chung, co-founder of Thinking Ape, estimates his company will be able to use the social features to reach millions of new gamers with no advertising cost.