Miniclip Downers
March 19th, 2007, By Duncan Gough
Justin has been kind enough to keep me informed of the recent GDC developments, and his most interesting (to me) email came the morning after the Three Rings, MetaSoy presentation.
Alice has the tofu-ily gory details here – http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/03/whirled_1.html, but the thing that jumps out at me is the Miniclip stat. As Alice says:
And, to mangle that a little futher, it seems that the Miniclip promotion drove a lot of users, but it also drove rates of completed-download-play down, from 30% to around 3%. Does this mean that Flash casual gamers, as opposed to downloadable casual gamers, are categorically are a different bunch, then?
Casual game downloaders are those people for whom downloading and installing software from the internet is an achievable goal, and for a percentage of those even paying for software, effectively virtual data bits, is no longer a barrier. Does this signal that flash casual gamers won’t tolerate that boundary?
Are flash casual gamers even more computer illiterate than casual game downloaders? That doesn’t feel right, most flash casual gamers are in fact gamers who play flash games because they are abundantly available, the good ones are of a decent quality and, perhaps most importantly, designed by games like themselves *for* gamers like themselves. With the exception of soduko, crossword and word puzzle games, themselves all clones of popular game genres outside of the flash games ecosystem, the most popular and effective flash games have been quite idiosyncratic. A game like the beautiful Fancy Pants Adventure is synonymous with flash gaming, and is almost a product of that environment – fun games informed by a decent knowledge of game history (platformers, shoot-em-ups, adventure games, puzzle games, etc). The best flash games are sometimes a living, breathing, sightseeing tour of the minds of gamers.
Having said all that, where does that leave Flash Games in relation to Casual Games? It was always an uneasy alliance. And just why did so few of the players who arrived from Miniclip play for such a short period of time?
My best guess answer is that the standard of games on Miniclip is consistently high. In fact, the graphics quality of most Miniclip games is on a par with Puzzle Pirates. So, I think it’s fair to say that although Miniclip looked like a good source of traffic and a great choice for some targetted advertising, the problems was that the users clicking those links were expecting Puzzle Pirates to play like any of the triple-A games on Miniclip – in-browser, in Flash.
It’s really no surprise, then, to see that Whirled, the product otherwise known as Son Of Yohoho (SOY), is a multi-user Flash game with a Java backend. That’s the clever stuff from Puzzle Pirates, the Java code, welded to the examples learned from the Miniclip audience (Flash and in-browser) with a large chunk of Web 2.0 social networking and user generated content thrown in. Chalk another one up for agile, iterative developement then.