If you’re a Flash game developer, you’re in at the ground floor of a new service: payment systems for Flash games. These systems make it easier for game developers to charge money both for their games, and for things within their games. Here’s how it works:

1. Player pays real money to buy fake money through one of these systems.
2. Player spends fake money on virtual stuff. As a game dev, you can technically charge for whatever you like: level packs, hats, extended versions/director’s cuts, etc etc. The sky’s the limit.

It’s So Workable, It Just Might Work

i’ve been following the microtransaction model for a number of years. It’s been crazy popular in places like Korea for a good long time, and it was amusing to see the initial resistance and resentment in North America to the idea. Panels at the Game Developers Conference were filled with folks nibbling their fingernails and asking “Will it really work over here?” and “Won’t players be angry with us?”, with at least a few devs boldly insisting that micropayments are strictly a Southeast Asian cultural anomaly, and the system won’t work here. Meanwhile, in the other room at the Worlds in Motion (virtual worlds) summit, early North American pioneers of those systems were running panels titled “Can You Believe We’re Making All This Money?” and “Who Wants a House? Cuz I’ve Got a Bunch of Em”.

Of course, virtual currency systems do work here, as evidenced by Microsoft’s successes with its GamerPoints (AKA “BillyBucks”), enabling the creators of Rock Band and others to pocket obscene amounts of cash in dribs and drabs for virtual whatsits. Microsoft’s new fall Xbox 360 seems to exist only to take more money from people in the form of digital doodads for their avatars. Proprietary systems have been rolled out in numerous other games and portals, including Three Rings (OOO) Puzzle Pirates with its dual-currency system, and the WildTangent game portal, where players can spend virtual coins to “rent” games. But no one has thought to capitalize on the literal kerfillions of players in the Flash casual games space. Until now.

There are three companies i’m aware of who are rolling out virtual payment systems for Flash games: MochiMedia, GamerSafe and HeyZap. Please let me know if there are others. They all work roughly the same way: pay real money for fake money, and spend fake money for fake things in fake games for real thrills. One of the key take-aways for me from GDC 07, by the folks running the “Seriously. My Pants Are Woven From Hundred Dollar Bills” panel, was this: do whatever it takes to enable your players to give you money.

What they meant was that you should provide as many payment methods as possible if you want to take as much money as possible from your players. This came up in the context of the myriad wild and wooly ways that Europeans pay for things online. (The French, for example, pay by cheque. True story.) The speakers advocated pay-by-phone, PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, SMS, and a number of crazy payment methods i’d never even heard of. (Pay with your own hair? What the heck is that about?)

Untold Entertainment Enters the Fray

So here we are, poised to release a few games in the no-longer-free-to-play ecosystem. These are early days, and i have no idea which microtransaction system will take the biggest piece of the pie: MochiCoins, GamerSafe or HeyZap. And frankly, i don’t care. Why should i have to choose between them? Here’s what i want to do:

ME: Hey Player! Wouldn’t this game be more fun if your character was wearing SexyPants??

BUTTON: Hell yes!

ME: Great! A pair of SexyPants will cost you 95 cents.

BUTTON: Pay via HeyZap!
BUTTON: Pay with GamerGold!
BUTTON: Pay with MochiCoins!

Sounds good, right? i’m not shutting anyone out. i’m not preventing the GamerGold folks from buying SexyPants. i don’t particularly care which system the player supports – i just want to take his money.

However

The scenario i described above can’t happen at present, because MochiMedia has written into their terms of service that devs shall not hook multiple transaction systems into their games. GamerSafe and HeyZap have not made this stipulation. So i can have a game that either allows MochiCoin payments exclusively, or i can have a game that allows for GamerSafe and HeyZap payments. And that, in my professional opinion, stinks.

This type of exlusivity is NOT analgous to going into a restaurant and ordering a Coke, and the waitress says “Is Pepsi okay?” because the restaurant has an exclusive arrangement with PepsiCo. No – this is much more like eating your meal (Coke or Pepsi nothwithstanding), and trying to pay with your VISA card, but the restaurant only takes MasterCard and American Express. If i walk into a store and they don’t make it convenient for me to pay with a commonly accepted system, i walk out of that store and i don’t come back … but not before i punch someone right in the face, because that’s how angry it makes me.

Three Facts About Payment System Exclusivity

MochiMedia’s exclusivity clause is not good for developers. We want to lower the barrier to entry for our players, especially since getting people to buy goods in the formerly-free-to-play space is already an uphill battle.

MochiMedia’s exclusivity clause is not good for players. It’s forcing players to wait until a clear winner emerges in the Flash virtual goods space. Why would i sink my money into GamerGold only to find that every single game supports HeyZap or MochiCoins? i’d better play it safe and let early adopters figure it out for me. When a leader emerges, i’ll start spending my money.

No, Mochi’s exclusivity clause is only good for Mochi. It’s a clear attempt to be the only game in town, and to monopolize this service in its infancy. And we all know what happens with monopolies, don’t we? You end up rolling a “3″ and landing on Park Place with a hotel, and then you get reamed up the pucker.

Thankfully, it’s still early enough in the make your voice heard about how this stuff will work. If you think Mochi should play nicely with others, why not toss them an email here?

team@mochimedia.com

Or, if you think they’re making the right decision, give them a call and let them know:

(415) 680-3740

Or, you can just voice your opinions in a comment on this blog and bathe me in sweet, delicious Internet traffic.

For my part, i believe they’re hurting players and devs right out of the gate in an early, unnecessary bid for domination. Given the choice, i’d rather support two systems than one – HeyZap and GamerSafe. Ideally, i want to support all three, along with any other system that enters the space. So i’m making a public appeal to you, Team Mochi, to rethink your policy. i’ll even use your first and last names here so that your Google vanity searches will bring you to this article.

On George Garrick! On Jameson Hsu! on Bob Ippolito! On Vixen!
On Comet! On Cupid! On Justin Wong! On Eric Boyd!
To the top of the porch! To the top of the stair!
Renounce this proviso, and please grow a pair!

We auditioned a half-dozen actors for the role of the Chief Inspector. As soon as we heard Gray Gleason’s read, we knew we’d found The One. His voice was an exact match for the voice in my head (one of the voices in my head, anyway :) Give Gray a shot if you need v/o work. He’s quick, professional, and his low range “trailer guy” voice can lend a lot of gravity to your next high fantasy epic.

The intro was built over a series of very late nights leading up to Casual Connect. We had run into some opposition from the portals claiming that the game wasn’t high quality enough, and i had to explain that the big blank gaps on the title screen and intro scene (you beta testers know what i’m talking about) were not actually final. Sheesh. i figured that having a completed title screen and intro would go a long way towards convincing a portal to sell my game and claim 65% of the proceeds.

Anyway, the strategy worked out, and now a number of outlets are excited about the game. i actually got the chance to meet a few people on submissions duty who had seen the first playable, and dismissed it as Yet Another Match-3 Game. Those of you who have played Kahoots™ know that although you are selecting groups of three, the game has as much to do with Bejewelled as chevre has to do with Cheez Whiz.

Either way, the game is still pretty cheesy.

It was my first time at the conference. With a tight economy, i hadn’t planned to go, until my colleague Kala from Alien Concepts here in Toronto clued me in to the fact that the Canadian feds were comping $550 passes to the show. Can’t beat that.

If you weren’t able to attend, let’s save you five hundred bucks. Here are the things everyone couldn’t shaddup about.

Social Gaming

These are games tied to social networks like MySpace and Twitter – but mostly Facebook, with its oft-cited 250 million active member install base. That’s ACTIVE members. Facebook defines an active member as someone who’s logged in at least once in the past thirty days.

Tired of seeing endless messages in the stream like “So-and-so from your grade ten biology class who you friended just to be polite just gifted a virtual tchotchke to that girl you had a crush on from cadet camp who’s really let herself go since her skiing accident”? Expect to see a LOT more noise along those lines in the near future, as game developers harness the power of social media spam to get the word out about their (usually) microtransaction-based social games.

Microtransactions

MochiMedia unveiled their new MochiCoins system to compete with a few others in the increasingly crowded payment provision space. MochiCoins uses a digital wallet that players can fill with fake cash (using their real cash, via credit cards and various other means). Then, players spend their coins on bonus content and digital bric-a-brac in any of the (soon-to-be) bajillions of Flash games that implement the system. A number of these types solutions have been released for Flash developers, (HeyZap, GamerSafe) and the whole thing is well worth a separate article.

Payment Providers Aplenty

i couldn’t walk a few feet through the conference hall without slamming into a payment provider booth. These are joints that set you up with online transaction pages so that you can charge real money for your digital crap, and there are SCADS of them. The companies take a cut of whatever sales you rack up. Their percentage depends on how much crap you sell. They don’t give you a lot of love if you’re a small studio like Untold Entertainment, because they don’t stand to make a lot of money on you in the very near future. Forget about treating people well when they’re small to foster a strong relationship when the company grows. Most of these companies are all about making money NOW, baby! Yeah! Oh, garçon! More cocaine, please.

The Long Tail

Please stop using this term. It makes my left eye twitch.

Building Strong Brands and Innovating

The call for innovation rings out loud and true at many conference, i’m sure – even gatherings of paperclip manufacturers and vacuum cleaner salesman. Innovation is a good thing, and no one can disagree with you if you stand on a stage and thump the podium, driving home your plea for differentiation. What most speakers don’t do, however, is tell the audience how to innovate. Why give away great ideas at a show when you can execute them yourself? So you wind up with a bunch of panels and lectures with everyone on stage stressing the need to innovate, everyone in the audience agreeing, and nothing getting accomplished. One only has to look at the throngs of hidden object or match-3 games on portals, or the flagrant farm game rip-offs on Facebook, to know that there are those who innovate, and there are those who clone. I know which side of that equation i’d like to be on.

But a word about strong brands: i got a lot of strange looks when i told people the name of our newest game, Interrupting Cow Trivia. That’s because it’s a stupid name. But it’s stupid by design. We went through a pile of name ideas before settling on ICT that were even crazier – Welfare-Dependant Antelope Trivia and Obsessive-Compulsive Aardvark Trivia are two that come to mind before we settled on Interrupting Cow Trivia, which is a little more familiar to people because of the knock-knock joke.

Sideline! I’m amazed that some people aren’t familiar with the joke. Here it is:

- Knock, knock!
- Who’s there?
- Interrupting cow,
- Interrupting c…
- MOO!

Hilarity.

The whole strategy behind picking a nutzoid name for that game is (hopefully) obvious. If we named the thing Super IQ Trivia or Brain Buster Knowledge-O-Matic Trivia or Thinky-Pants Trivia, you’d probably forget the title pretty quickly, and the game would be lost amid piles of generically-named trivia products. We haven’t said much about the graphic style of the game, but it also doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a rather different look for a trivia game. Just one more way we’re hoping to create a jarring, disruptive presence online and stick out in people’s brainheads.

Throw Mama from the Train

One of the distinct advantages of the casual games business is that it’s like Gigantipus, an enormous sea squid slowly converting non-gamers to gaming addicts with its terrifying robo-tentacles and face-melting eyeball beams. The portal owners and portal game developers have long boasted to the core console side of the business that they’ve landed the coveted female demographic, creating games and services that appeal to 35-year-old (and up) soccer moms. Their words, not mine. “Soccer moms.” i wondered how many non-North American audience members understood the term (in Canada, it’s usually “hockey moms”). These are usually high-strung, type-A personality women who drive their kids to soccer practice in SUVs, inhaling coffee and getting a little too involved in the competitive and social aspects of their kids’ lives.
This past week at Casual Connect, many of the speakers dreamed of reaching a demographic beyond soccer moms. It all had an air of world domination, but in a good way … in a way that makes everyone’s eyes bug out and go bloodshot as they try to match just three more gems.

Untrends

Here are a few things that weren’t spoken of very often, which surprised me.

Augmented Reality

I expect this to be the buzzword at Casual Connect 2009. Augmented reality is bleeding edge visual technology where (generally) graphics are overlayed on a device’s video camera display, often using awareness of the user’s position and direction. The classic example is a user pointing his smartphone around a mall, and in the video camera image on the phone he sees little graphic fly-outs popping out of the stores saying “50% off fattening cinnamon buns here!” and “more crap you don’t need but are gonna purchase anyway over here!” It’s a lot like the shopping mall scene in Minority Report, except that the user actually requests this noise using a device he paid six hundred dollars for.
Here’s a very cool example of Augmented Reality in games:

The Futility of Ad-Supported Free-to-Play

Many of the panels were well-represented by companies like MochiMedia and AdMob protecting their interests and squawking about the amazing distribution potential, customer engagement and accessibility that ad support lends to their games. Of course, what they weren’t saying is that the eCMP rate is utter trash, and that precious few developers can ever hope to make an honest wage solely by injecting ads. It seems to do alright business for the likes of MochiMedia, though, who threw a swanky open-bar party at the Fairmont hotel.

Check out our Pimp My Game series if you haven’t already. It chaffs me that i’ve cooked up a cool eighty dollars in a YEAR by running one of my games through multiple monetization schemes, including MochiAds, Flash Game License and Kongregate. My new plan was to make up the difference by drinking a few thousand dollars worth of booze at the MochiMedia party. But since i don’t drink, it’d have to be Coca-Cola, and i’m not sure i could manage it. But i was tempted to give it a shot – that’s what matters. Watch yourselves, Mochi.

(i rag on the MochiMedia people a lot, but i finally had the chance to meet a few of them and they were lovely people. But even a shark has a gleaming smile before it chews your hip bones out of your body)

The Embarrassing Number of Rip-Offs in Casual Gaming

This was touched on a few times in the panels i attended, but nowhere did anyone apologize for the flagrant and downright embarrassing amount of copying going on in casual gaming. Dave Rorhl (a nice guy in his own right) with a straight face, and without apology, discussed the Facebook hit game Farm-Something, and his own company Playdom’s utter knock-off Farm-Something-Else, with a passing nod to Zynga’s Farm-Whatever. Dave just left Zynga a short time ago. He also discussed Playdom’s Also a Mafia Game, an “homage” to the inexplicably popular shopping list-inspired Facebook hit A Mafia Game. No batting of eyes. Not a single red-faced, navel-gazing mutter of explanation or justification.

Here at Untold Entertainment, our games are not completely unique either. Kahoots™ uses a fairly well-known math mechanic, and Interrupting Cow Trivia is inspired by Internet Relay Chat-style trivia bots. There’s nothing wrong with taking what works and spinning it in your own game. But these farm and hidden object games are the online equivalent to the toy section at the dollar store, where you can pick up a few “G.I. Jon” action figures, and something called a “Slunky”.

Why farming, Dave? Why not take what works and set it somewhere else, like outer space or a toy factory or at a summer camp or at the mall? I think we can all aspire to something better.

P.S. … Moo.