Mochi Breathing Life into Casual Games

Signs of the casual game revolution are everywhere: on consoles with Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and Wii Sports; online with services by WildTangent, Pop-cap and others; and the casual boom is also spreading around to every corner of the web, in no small part to Mochi Media.

Tapping right into the nascent casual gaming market, Mochi provides real "turnkey" opportunities for casual developers online. Using MochiAds, both publishers and developers can monetize Flash games by virally distributing and tracking them online. It's a powerful technology that's gathering more and more steam every month.

We spoke at length with Jameson Hsu, CEO and Co-Founder of Mochi, about casual games and advertising, but sadly did not discover the true meaning behind the "Mochi" name.

Mochi in MyGame

One of the first deals announced for MochiAds is with MyGame.com. It was a win-win for both parties, as it gives MyGame.com many more games on its site, with MochiAds receiving a cut from each play through from the pre-roll/inter-game ads. MyGame.com also enhanced their webpage by showing users the newest and most popular games added to their site.

"[MyGame.com] saw that we had a lot of games on the web and we saw that they had excellent offerings at the Casual Games Conference," detailed Hsu. "Games are very compelling for audiences; people might watch online videos once or twice but not watch them again, and that's the reason why they were so interested in enhancing their offerings."

"To give you a little history about us, we started off as casual game developers," he continued. "We made advergames for Kraft, Burger King and the like and there was a need for developers to build things to try and appeal to consumers. There were problems we saw with this. For one, they'd maybe pay $100,000 and they wouldn't necessarily get a return. So the idea we had is to match these games for advertisers. Even before we came along, people made games for the web and they weren't able to monetize it. The most satisfying part for us is that people can eventually make money off of their games using our system. Flash 9 is also much more powerful than Flash 8, so you'll see amazing games, even from established developers. They like it because they won't have to go through the console makers to get their games out. At the end of the day, it's the content that matters."

Mochi is good for players

The value proposition when it comes to casual games and ads is a difficult sell because of their inherent nature. It's hard to offer an ad innocuous enough that consumers will be willing to accept it, since in most cases they are likely looking for something (presumably free) to occupy their time for around five to twenty minutes. MochiAds manages to fulfill this, with 10-second ads running before or during a pause in the middle of the game.

"For the consumer, it is much more acceptable to have these brief pre-roll ads," said Hsu. "When you have something littered all over the game, it all feels a bit contrived. Studies generally show that people are so engaged in the game, they don't notice ad placements all that much. So what we're doing is presenting a sponsorship message, something that's brief and unobtrusive to the game, which is much more compelling reasoning [than with advergames]."

"Advertisers enjoy it because they're not competing directly with any other advertisers; their message goes straight to the consumer," he added. "It's quick to add them too, and it can literally take less than 24 hours to get an ad up and running. Time of engagement is about 10 seconds before the game, so players are staring at the screen intently for that long. We did studies of the time for the ads, with ads also at 60, 30, and 15 seconds and we found that 10 seconds is a happy medium both players and advertisers will accept."

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