Porter's World

Persistence

Microtransactions have been a pretty hot topic of discussion in the world of games, especially flash games. Services such as MochiCoins and GamerSafe are making their way into more and more games every day. These services definitely accomplish their tasks, and people are using them for sure, but something is still missing. Aren’t the earnings just not exactly where you think they’d be? I think something is missing, and that something is persistence. We all know that microtransactions work, and work well. MMO’s such as MapleStory, Trickster Online, Combat Arms, and more, all thrive from the earnings generated through microtransactions. Well, if it works, and flash games now have services such as GamerSafe and MochCoins, all should be well right? Not as well as you would think actually, because most flash games lack what the above MMO’s don’t, that word again, persistence.

When an MMO is created and released to the world, it sticks around, usually for a very long time. When a flash game is created and released into the wild, it doesn’t exactly get the longest life out there. Sure it could get front paged, maybe grab some badges on Kongregate, but it won’t be a hit for long, at least not your average, or even above average game. It’s exactly this that makes the effort of putting microtransactions in flash games almost a waste of time. Don’t get me wrong, there are exceptions, and it does offer additional revenue, sometimes rather significant revenue, but with a bit more planning, perhaps some persistence, those numbers could be significantly increased.

So there you have, I’ve mentioned persistence three times now, elaboration would probably be a good idea at this point. As I mentioned, flash games have a much shorter life than other games, at least a much shorter life containing a significant amount of players. This cripples any selling of goods within the game because there simply aren’t that many people around to pay anymore. However, if your game was to offer some persistence, this could be fixed, and earnings could be substantially better. If you were to add weekly updates to your game, such as new levels, bonus maps, new quests, just anything to get players to keep the game in mind and coming back, you would see a huge difference. If the game continues to change, it will continue to grab peoples attention, and that will have them coming back over and over again; granted your game is good enough to keep their interest in the first place, and people can find it.

Fantastic Contraption

That brings us to our next issue, how do players find a game that’s old, even if it has persistence? Sure many players may bookmark the game, remember it’s name, and so on, but many will forget about it as soon as it’s buried in the depths of sites across the net. There are many options on how to go about this, some a bit risky, others less effective. One option is to self sponsor the game and release it into the wild, while having many links lead back to a site dedicated specifically to the game. This could include character class guides, rankings, weapon guides, so on, there’s plenty of things that would draw players in. Once a player has clicked one of these links, they will likely remember the game has it’s own website and play it there, or go there when they can no longer find it on their portal of choice. If your project is a bit bigger, and likely to be more successful, you can take a different approach. You could simply host the game on a single site (generating a lot of traffic to that site in addition), and spread the word to bring people in. This could be done by hosting a development blog, doing press releases, getting some of the bigger review sites to look into your game before, and post completion, advertising with ad networks, so on. This may be a bit harder to start up, but your players will always know where to go to find your game, and you won’t risk getting your game buried around the net. In addition, you’ll see a nice boost in ad revenue from all of your fans playing the game on your site, rather than all around the net.

So we’ve determined what works best and what doesn’t, let’s take a look at a few games. Guardian Rock was a pretty successful sliding tile puzzle game. It uses MochiCoins, offers a few free goodies to users, and allows you to buy additional level packs. Although this game did well, it never made it to the top games section of many sites, if any. This unfortunately leaves this game rather low in views at this point (in comparison to what persistence could have offered), leading to low revenue from MochiCoins sales. Had this game had a bit of persistence for fans, the earnings would have been greatly increased. Fantastic Contraption is an incredibly successful game that made amazing earnings off of selling the full version of the game. It’s perhaps the most successful microtransactions flash game to date, in fact, I’m rather sure it is. As you’ll see, this game has what Guardian Rock doesn’t, a persistent place to play the game, a site dedicated entirely to it. Lastly, my newest example, Remnants of Skystone. Remnants of Skystone is an incredibly well built flash-based MMORPG. The game hits the nail on the head when trying to pull players into their world, as well as their microtransactions setup. The game is free to play, but offers a ton of additional features to those who join the Nidarian Guard, AKA the subscribed users list. Certain NPC’s sell things to Guard members only, menus remind you to join the guard for bonuses (without being annoying), and certain additional game features scream at you (figuratively) to join so that you can use them. The game is constantly getting new updates, and in-game links lead you to the game’s site; this is exactly the kind of persistence that will make a microtransactions game thrive. I keep in mind that Remnants of Skystone is basically a full blown MMORPG. I’m not saying that every flash game with microtransactions needs to be an MMORPG, but somewhere between what Fantastic Contraption and Remnants of Skystone does would be a perfect balance.

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Persistence in microtransactions games isn’t exactly a genius thought, but nobody seems to be taking the idea in. Perhaps the majority of flash game developers have no experience with PHP and Databases, and because of that leave the idea behind completely, who knows. Regardless of the reasoning, it’s basically common sense to see that persistence will make all the difference in the world. This doesn’t mean you can take a sub-par project and add persistence to make amazing earnings via microtransactions, the game obviously has to be good in order to get a dime out of anyone (or perhaps addicting, but that’s a topic for another day). Either way, you definitely won’t be seeing a game with microtransactions and a lack of persistence out of me, hopefully more and more developers will follow.