Using HeyZap to Make Money From Your Flash Games…

Immad, from HeyZap, talks about their new virtual goods platform for Flash games…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/heyzap-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Interviewer: Hi. Welcome to the Indie Game Development Podcast Show today. How about you introduce yourself.

Immad: Hi. It’s Immad from Heyzap. I am one of the founders of Heyzap.

Interviewer: And you also did the Swine Fighter game, so I think you were on a bit earlier.

Immad: Yes, I did. If you had a chance to check that out, that was a bit of a small experiment for Heyzap.

Interviewer: Great. And so, what is Heyzap about?

Immad: Heyzap lets game developers distribute and monetize their games. What we launched this week is Heyzap Payments which is basically a drop-in library to let game developers for Flash games mainly embed and sell virtual goods. So, we have a full system for inventory management to stats and you can basically set up a game in about a couple of minutes, copy/paste incurred, and then you can sell an item within your game.

Interviewer: Do developers need to already have a Flash game ready to go to use this, or do they make their own game, or how does that work?

Immad: So, we’ve seen a lot of game developers retrofitting those existing games. If you’ve already got a game, you can make a new level for it or even put in a donation link at the end to let users kind of directly give their thanks to game developers. But, yeah, a lot of people are developing new games, and we mainly cater to Flash games right now.

Interviewer: What types of Flash games work best with such a monetization platform, like a virtual goods platform?

Immad: Flash games fall quite alone. Most games have had some sort of stall, upgrade kind of experience point system built in. That works really well with these games. So, the idea is you can obviously let the user buy various convenience items or various upgrades so they can play the whole game without necessarily paying for anything. But if they want to get faster or further or unlock a special part of the game, they can pay for it or they can do one of the offers to get there.

So, the games that work best are definitely the games that already have a shop component in them or already have some sort of currency mechanism in them. Other games are games that are social. Users get much more involved in games where they can play with their friends and if they get ahead in some way or get impressed with other people, then they are more likely to want to pay for that.

Interviewer: But does it also work for single player games because I noticed the social games, the MMOs, the virtual goods model, is popular there? What if there is a developer who has a single player game? Is that more challenging?

Immad: Yeah, definitely. I wouldn’t consider this overly new. Obviously, it’s a developing system. If you look at casual games, even video games, users are very much willing to pay, even in the case of video games, like $50 for single player experiences. So, it’s just about how much depth you provide in the game and what you can offer the user.

We made a little guide. We have to improve it lots, but some of the things that you can sell, most of these actually apply to single player games. So, things like item purchases: unlock a web pin, unlock a tower, get a new spell, things like level access. You might make 20 levels for your game and then to get the last 5 levels which are interesting, you have to pay slightly or to get an extra character you have to pay a bit. Another interesting one that I’ve seen a few game developers use is mechanics upgrade, so being able to get an object which lets you not have gravity or get extra speed.

If you go to heyzap.com/developers/guide, we talk about this in more depth, but we think there’s basically a bunch of opportunities on enhancing games and single game developers would be more willing to do it.

Interviewer: Once you released the platform, what were some of the challenges or surprises that you encountered as people started using this?

Immad: It’s very early days. We literally did the launch last Thursday.

Interviewer: Definitely.

Immad: It’s still a case of really understanding what game developers want to be able to give them the best product, but we’re very much learning from the market still and figuring out how to style it. We want to definitely give a lot more customized ability to game developers.

So, right now if you have a chance to check it out, when you go through Heyzap Payments, we make it much more about the game than other people, and we want to increase that so let game developers have their own currency which they can offer game users and kind of interact much more deeply with the game.

Interviewer: With the users, what’s the minimum amount of purchase they can make in this virtual goods platform?

Immad: This is dependent on, unfortunately, the credit card, the cost and things like that, so the minimum at the moment is… Actually, the game developer can set whatever price they want. They can sell an item for free even, but the user has to get, at least, X amount of points which at a minimum right now, I think, is about $3.00.

Interviewer: OK. You know, there’s other competition or other types of ways to monetize Flash games. So, how is this different than, say, multi media ads or some of the other platforms that may offer ability for real money?

Immad: Definitely, traditionally the flash games, this being a case of licensing and then advertising, which has helped to monetize. We see this as kind of a complete new opportunity which is very uptapped. It’s happened in other types of games, but it’s not really come to Flash games yet. It’s really going to be a new market. It’s definitely on a very distributed level. We think it’s going to make more money than advertising will, especially if the game is right for it just because if the user is paying directly for something. If they pay $1.00 per thousand users, that can only be advertising revenue. It will be interesting to see how this works out, but we definitely think it’s a new source of revenue for game developers, and it’s very complimentary to the other sources.

Interviewer: OK. So, it can be used in addition to some of these other advert things.

Immad: Yes, exactly.

Interviewer: Where do you see things going then in terms of this whole market, and where indie game developers can actually make more money off of their games, off their Flash games?

Immad: I think the whole Flash gaming market is heading towards virtual goods, especially this year. There’s a couple of well founded companies, such as… You know Casual Collective’s Desktop Tower Defense?

Interviewer: OK, yeah.

Immad: They have actually launched a website which has some virtual goods so you can upgrade your tanks in some of the defense games. There’s also OMG Pop. They used to be called “I’m in like with you”. They do pretty high quality Flash games there. They actually launched a shop as well. So, we think this is a developing and interesting and exciting space.

I think the Flash gaming market as a whole is going to be massively increased in terms of size, and I think because Flash games will be able to monetize more directly, they are probably going to make more in depth games which is going to be better for the user as well. Games at the moment aren’t necessarily as complex as obviously Flash video games and downloadable games, but they’re going to head that way as well. I think there are interesting times ahead.

Interviewer: Great. Are there any other things that are in store for Heyzap that you can talk about that are coming up?

Immad: Oh, we have so many things to do. We actually recently received funding from Union Square Ventures.

Interviewer: Oh, great.

Immad: That was straight after the Swine Fighter thing. So, we’ve got a ton of plans to help game developers get more out of their games, monetize them better, distribute them better. That’s pretty much our focus right now on games.

Interviewer: How does the funding impact your plans? Does it change anything, or is it just that you feel more secure because you can offer or deliver stuff more quickly? How does that work?

Immad: Yeah, definitely, it changes things because then we feel like we’re hiring. We’re aggressively trying to grow. We’re executing a lot, so it’s just speeding things up really and getting us to our goals faster.

Interviewer: Have you found that Venture Capital, the people are aware of the game space? Do they provide a lot of value in terms of ways to accelerate having a business in the game space?

Immad: It varies a lot depending on who the VC is and stuff. Union Square Ventures also funded Zenga which obviously does a bunch of stuff in the gaming space, and I think there’s a couple of other investments as well. They are really smart guys, and they definitely provide a lot of ideas on how we can help and what are the best ways to work with game developers and other people in the ecosystem. They just have a lot more experience than we do. We’re both just like 25-years-old, so they are bringing a lot of business experience and know-how which is cool.

Interviewer: Great. So, if developers want to find out more about your platform, where can they go to?

Immad: Heyzap.com or if you want, you can email me directly. I’m immad@heyzap.com. I’m always waiting to answer anyone’s questions.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much. Take care.

Immad: Good talking to you, Action. Speak to you soon. Bye-bye.