Finally, within the last couple days, one of our games reached 1,000,000 plays (as recorded by Mochiads).  Pumpkinman was one of the first games we put on Mochiads, right after the service launched.

While this is nice mile-stone, it’s also kind of wake-up-call and time for reflection.

Creating games that will appeal to a mass audience is fairly difficult.   There are many competing games, and seemingly every genre has been tapped multiple times. (although I’m continually surprised by the variations people create)   A game like Pumpkinman, which is essentially a hyper version of the classic “Maze Eater” genre with 8-bit stylized graphics, is not necessarily aimed at the core audience that plays Flash games.

There *is* an audience for games like Pumpkinman, but that audience is mostly overseas in Asia and South America.  There is nothing wrong with this, except that currently the eCPM earned from these locales is much lower than the USA or Europe. 

As well, a game like Pumpkinman is fairly generic.  While we know that there are all sorts of interesting options and nuances, we can’t expect the general Flash game player to learn them, especially when there are so many other games to play that offer modern visuals and easier to grasp game-play.

What does this mean for us?  It means that we are starting to morph our development away from things that only we love, to things that we think other people will like (and we will enjoy making).  You will see some of these things in the coming months.  Games that offer that playability of that Flash game consumers want, but with our own “classic” twist. 

Hopefully this will help us see some “million players” in days or weeks instead of months or years.