Mochi Media, a Flash game monetization provider, is launching the Mochi Social platform today, which helps Flash game developers monetize, develop, socialize and distribute their games. One of the key features of Mochi Social is the distribution platform: with little to no extra work, developers will be able to publish their games across many social networks and websites, and still have access to social and viral features. Those social features include twitter integration, RSS feeds and news posts.
Mochi Social claims that you can “tap into all the key social networks with a single implementation” and that “players can pick friends from across all their network”. This is certainly similar to the products that were released earlier by companies like J2Play and HeyZap, and is somewhat surprising coming from Mochi Media, who has traditionally focused plainly on monetization. There is no doubt that their timing is excellent, as the recent removal of Facebook notifications makes it harder for games to garner viral spread.
A key concern is the stability of the platform. When working with any cross-network platform, the game that implements the platform is at the whim of any breakages in the platform. For instance, if my game, “Dungeon Cake War”, is integrated with Mochi Social, and Mochi Social goes down, it will affect my game’s ability to write news feeds or access friends lists, which is a huge problem. Furthermore, because Mochi Social adds a layer between the game and the social network, any changes to the Facebook API will cause the Mochi Social layer to break momentarily, unless they get notice from Facebook beforehand.
Mochi Media was acquired for $80 million by China’s Shanda Games last year. View more details about Mochi Social here.
