Update : Mochi Media quickly responds by switching back the game to it’s last working version. I send a email to NinjiKiwi hoping to get it’s side of the story.

Update 2 : NinjiKiwi responded in a comment below, a big mistake by one of his developer.

Thanks to Mochi Bridge I’ve been able to integrate in Jeuxgratuits.net a Medals rewarding system, visitors love it!  One of the first game i used for it was PowerPool from NinjiKiwi, an excellent pool game.

But today I received complaints from many visitors, they could no longer play the game and earn medals because  NinjiKiwi decided to redirect all the traffic from PowerPool to it’s own website.

Clearly a shady tactic…

He used the distribution power of the Mochi Media network to distribute Powerpool on thousands of portals and then… when it’s everywhere… he updates the code and redirect all the traffic to his domain… BS!  Well maybe it will pay off in the short term, but you can be sure that I won’t add his games anymore and I hope others do the same.

Mochi Media should clearly stands against this tactic, it’s in nobody interest.

The worst part it’s that visitors still get to wait and watch the Mochi ads before being tell that they can no longer play the game on their preferred portal.

I have no problem with exclusive games, demos, exclusive contents, but this…

The day that protals were content stealer are definitly over tks  in part to Mochi Media; collaboration is in everyone interest.

Summary: It is important, for the online flash game industry, to develop a unique free crowdsourced translation web service for flash games developers to help expand audience and revenues.

The flash gaming industry is exploding since companies like Mochi Media, Armorgames and Kongregate found ways to monetize games of small developers. Quantity and quality are rising fast for the pleasure of million of players all around the world. But there is still one issue that we, as an industry, did not tackle : accessibility.

Most of flash games are develop only in English. Why?

• It’s the biggest market.

• It’s where sponsors deal are lucrative.

• Small developers don’t have the resources to translate their games.

And that’s fine! Since independent developers want to make as much money as possible and reach as much users as possible with the reality of their means.

But it’s definitely not a perfect situation for many reasons:

• All games with complexes mechanics who needs extensive explanation and/or are story-driven loose appeals to players who do not understand English.

• The vast majority of internet users are not native English speakers and a really important fraction do not speak English at all.

• Players who do not get a good immersion don’t spend much time playing the game.

• Less play times means less money for developers and ads network.

• No localize content means less localize advertisement deal.

• English content only means less expansion possibilities for portals.

Those are some of the reasons why we need to create a simple, free and unique way for small developers to bring their games in every languages.

Without going technical it could be done by inserting a call in the flash game to a crowdsourced translation web service.

1. The game check the user operating system language. If it’s not English it send a request to the web service to check if a translation is available.

2. a) If there is one: the data is served and the game is translated.

   b) If there is none: a message is prompt asking if the user is interested in translating the game. If so, he is sent to a specially design translation website.

This implied that developers insert some api code in their games and use a special markup language to identify texts who need to be translated. A small time investment for big possible returns!

To be successful, this operation would need good publicity through the developing community and financing from partners to support the development and hosting of the web service.

I’m hoping this presentation can start a conversation and open the eyes of the industry on the huge market opportunity sitting on the other side of the language barrier.

Jeuxgratuits.net is my flag ship, it is my cash cow.  I started this website many years ago when I was still in High School (14 years old) on the now defunct free hosting service multimina.fr.  It’s a story of commitment, luck, discouragement and getting back on the horse.

I remember the day I started it, my mother was creating a genealogy website for our family, and I started laughing at how ugly the thing was looking!  (remember when website were still 99 km long page create with a big dose of animated gift!) She looked at me and challenged me : ” Well do one yourself!  And we will see who is the best! “.

The challenge was instantly accepted!  Remember I was 14 years old… my ego was bigger than the whole house!  So I started looking for information on HTML and everything linked to website creation.  I remember asking myself… “What the #$%? will I put in that website?” Why not free games? beside Solitaire and Minesweeper Windows lacks a lot of fun!  So there I go… without knowing it I had identified a NEED.  I released the first version…  black background… green links… no images. (wow!)  My mother easily won the competition!  But everything was not lost… it made  me discover my love for creating things!  And most importantly for the web.

After few weeks I realized that there were some visitors coming to the website! how exiting!  At least 5 per day! Wow!  Dig back into the code and put up a more structured version… most importantly understood how to use <table> to structure content!

More visitors, more contents, more visitors, me = happy.

Then came the light…  advertising = clicks = money = PLAYSTATION

I put ad banners on the website and started clicking on them none stop!  I was getting rich… 5$, 10$, 20$ I could soon afford my dream… a Playstation.  Well even if we were still in the 20th century … companies were not fools, sadly.  I soon received an email telling me I had cheated… they deleted my account and all my earnings. Fair enough!  I lost everything! 25$ … I was broke again.  But everything was not lost… it made  me discover my love for making money! And most importantly gave me a lesson that nothing was free and nothing was easy.

Then I bought a domain (jeuxgratuits.net), find a programmer willing to code for free and rent a server (sadly I lost contact and don’t remember his name).  Huge surge in visitors more then a thousand a day…  found a new ads agencies (this times decided to play by the rules)… and started making money again, ouf…

Then came my millions others failed attempts…  repeatedly started new website without success… always came back to jeuxgratuits.net and built on it.  Then years past and I lost interest… was living my life of adolescent and then my life  of young adult (sports, college, Europe trip, South-Pacific trip, friends, girlfriend, etc).

Then university  ended (a year ago)… like everyone i knew then, I asked myself : “wow… what will I do now?  work for someone? find a job?” no way! Dug back into the code… I decided I wanted to live from jeuxgratuits.net.  No more compromise and laissez-faire for the website!

Flew to San-Fransisco, bought a ticket to web 2.0 expo, why?  No real purpose, only to check how it was back there…   A shock!  Peoples a lot of peoples talking about the things I loved…  that’s it… I want to be a web entrepreneur!  But what, next?  Hopefully my godly Subconscious took over my brains and shouted :

Take a deep breath and finish your first project… the one you start 10 years ago and you neglect to much, prove yourself!  Do something that might not look incredibly important but do it! Do it!

Today jeuxgratuits.net average more then 30 000 visitors a day and growing.  In the past year I modernized it, built community features,  integrated a chat, built a js playing windows, optimize code, built a medals rewarding system, engage a team of reviewer, etc.  I invested a lot of my time from my tiny office in my tiny apartment to offer a great product.  And I’m proud of my work!

Now with my business management degree in pocket and my millions of ideas I want new challenges!  I want to create something completely new!

My name is Philippe Lehoux and I’m 24 years old men living in Québec city who is trying to build a professional life by himself.  Yes by myself, no boss, no authority, just my ideas and courage.  So I should probably call myself an entrepreneur…

This blog have a really important purpose for me… and contrary to many business blog it won’t be just about showing my skills and networking… but most importantly, I hope, it will be about breaking the barriers between me and my ideas, my ideals, my goals.  By writing about them here, I will , in a certain way, be committed to those and I will no more be able to make compromise.  Compromises are good and it’s one of those things that make us more humans, that get us moving forward… but there are things in our life that we should fiercely protect from compromising.

I hope that this place (a blog is definitely a place) will one day be home to passionate debates and that it will help me being a better person and a better entrepreneur.

Sincerely,

p.s. Je veux préciser à tous mes compatriotes québécois que je reconnais l’importance de la langue française dans ma vie personelle et culturelle.  Deux raisons me poussent à écrire ce blog en anglais…  la première toute simple: pour pratiquer ma grammaire.  Et la deuxième si réaliste: pour communiquer avec des gens de partout et de toutes les cultures.