I agree with what you said about persistence. The best earning games in terms of microtransactions revenue seem to be those with a dedicated site and userbase. Fantastic contraption is a good example of a game that managed to do this without leveraging social media and multiplayer modes, which I think is great news for developers out there that are still developing high quality single player games.

But social media can’t be overlooked either. Facebook has a massive userbase and users come back to it everyday. This solves pretty much all the problems about regular flash games you mentioned. Users will be checking facebook anyway, and can be reminded that if they log into the game, X reward will happen. When updates are added as well, users could be notified of them, hopefully drawing them back. Plus it adds in the competition aspect, in which players will want to do better than their friends.

Note that Fantastic Contraption doesn’t actually offer microtransactions – the game charges a single, flat $10 fee to unlock a sharing feature. The players are the sole providers of that “persistence”. The game is set up so that players can make, and pay to share, their own fun. The Fantastic Contraption developer doesn’t have to spend a single extra dime on additional content. This is simply smart design.

The risk that Squize is talking about is exactly what MochiMedia has identified as a barrier to devs creating longer-form games. They say that a multiplayer game gets more player playing and paying than a single player game … but if you’ve ever tried to develop a multiplayer game, you know that it can be expensive and difficult to pull off. Same with the RSS grabs and dlc planning that Squize mentioned. It’s a lot less straightforward.

That’s why Mochi’s ponying up that $10million. They want bigger, better, multiplayer persistent games, but they realize that the mostly basement-dwelling teenaged developers can’t take on that challenge. So they’re fronting the cash. i have no idea what kind of Faustian bargains they’re making with these devs in return – time will tell.

i agree with your landing page idea. That’s our “fish hook” plan for Interrupting Cow Trivia: leverage the traffic on the portals to bring people to our neighbourhood, where we can pet them and love them and call them ‘George’. And ‘George’ will be our friend.

http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2009/08/19/cash-cow-part-2/

- Ryan

It’s something we’ve thought about too. A mtx game needs a community building around it to sustain interest, either specific for that game or as part of a larger on-going community.

Also another angle we’ve looked at is the constant update. Something as simple as the game pulling in a rss feed that can update the player with frequent news, “New map pack launches next week”, etc.
In combination with that, giving “registered” users more.
To try and flesh that out, say you’ve bought a map pack for my game. When the next free update arrives you get the extra maps that everyone gets, plus a couple of exclusive ones. It’s both a reward to people who have spent money, and a further incentive to those who haven’t yet but have come back again to get the extra free content. The perceived value for money is increased which can only help sales.

The downsides to this though is the sheer risk. If you’ve already got an active community, then you can guess what percentage of your regulars will purchase dlc for the game, and plan around that in terms of additional dev time / cost.
Without that ready made market you’ve got the risk of making a game in the first place, very few games are sure fire 10 million + plays, ensuring that without any dlc it’s a great game and then also budgeting for the extra work ( Which you’re tied to no matter what. If you advertise future extra content in a game, even if only 10 people care enough about it to come back to the game on that day, if the content isn’t there then you know those 10 people will be very vocal about it ).

mtx isn’t the pot of gold everyone hoped for, yet. It will be, I think it’s just a case of judging when you want to dive in and take the risk.