The end of reign of my flash games has come upon me. It all started with a strange email that I got from the flash game advertising company I go through, MochiMedia.
Yesterday I got an email from MochiMedia whose subject was “Final Gift from MochiMedia”, and inside it was a zip file. That’s it.
I open the zip file up and within it are the statistics from the two flash games I have on the web, MX Creator II and Holeshot. Now, a bit of background on these games, MX Creator II was produced in 2009, and within the game I put a splash screen advertisement while the game had a chance to load all of its resources. The same goes with Holeshot (2010), it contains a single ad for while the game was loading. Both of these games when I was finished with them were released into the wild via me submitting them to popular game websites, as well as MochiMedia distributing them through their affiliated partners.
Through the ad views (impressions) in both games when people play them, they earn me a small amount of money. Not enough to pay the bills, but a little amount is better than no amount! So not that my lifestyle depended at all on the income these things were generating, but it was really cool to have something even out there working for me, churning out a good amount of change for me weekly. I am no Bloons or super popular developer, I was just a kid with an imagination at that point.
So after I released them into the wild, I basically forgot about them and just have been collecting the revenue over the years. Well as it turns out, the reason I got that “Final Gift” email is because MochiMedia is shutting down. No more ad revenue, and no more cool statistics either, so I took matters into my own hands and generated some statistics about each of the games I had with them. I took these stats straight from the file I received in the email.
MX Creator II
My first game to be officially released in October of 2009 and to utilize advertisements, this game came out swinging in its early release. Over its lifetime, it averaged 110 plays per day, had a maximum peak plays per day of 4,372, and in total people played it over 183,000 times! Thats pretty cool for my first game, and the fact that it was just me doing all the initial distribution and marketing for it. Lets look at a fancy chart:
You can see my testing phase in July and August, and then when it was released in October my plays per day (over a given month) skyrocketed! The rise and fall of the aftermath is kind of interesting, as I literally did nothing to market or distribute the game after its release. I think because it was picked up a bit, other sites saw the game and decided to get a copy as well, kind of like viral marketing. You can see a big rise beginning in Sept of 2013, and honestly I have no idea why that happened, or who picked it up. I just get the ads impressions for when people play the game!
Holeshot: The Motocross Card Game
This game came out swinging in May of 2010, and was definitely not as popular as MXCII, but still held its ground in the end. Holeshot averaged 37 views per day over its lifetime, with a max views per day of 959, totaling 50,563 views in the time I was doing statistics on it. Let’s look at another pretty chart:
So now, all I can say is that the life-cycles of these two games are basically complete. I will no longer have any statistics on them with Mochi shutting down, and am not going to go hunt them down in the wild to see what sites are carrying them. The ad revenue they were generating me will be missed, but I am happy to know that I made it through the whole process, and that amazingly some people are still playing the games.
You will always be able to find them at their home here on my own website, and who knows what dark corners of the internet they will end up in before they find their final resting place. As with everything, all good things must come to an end.
