Hacker News Reader

Comment by shasta | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who came up with the solution "embed the ads in your game" while reading the description of the problem? Of course, my excitement of having guessed this plot twist faded when I read on about how this was patented. Oh well, I'm sure the real genius was in the Romulan-like cloaking technology they invented to hide the ads in the games.

View on HN

It's also a poor solution! Getting people on your site is much more important than getting people to play your game, because some % of your visitors will return to check out what else you've done. If it's on other sites, they'll return to check out what else is on that site - not your games.

Ads pay out little but you can make decent money out of a site with traction. We don't even bother with ads on a lot of games at http://www.rocksolidarcade.com. The traffic is more important.

His company sounds much bigger and more successful than yours. Maybe you should take a lesson instead of critiquing what works.

I am speaking out of experience. I've done advertising on games that have been played 100 million times around the net, and I've tried directing that traffic back to my own site and profiting from selling games directly. The latter is obscenely more profitable, both in my experience and that of everyone I know.

In terms of success? They took VC and grew very well, we bootstrapped our way to 5 employees without taking a dime. Total investment under a thousand dollars and profitable after a few months. In terms of raw game play counts, I'd bet money on us being ahead.

All in all, I'd rather be in their position not mine, but I guarantee you, the strategy outlined is not the reason why. And their greater success does not mean that I should not be allowed to have an opinion on what I've been doing successfully myself for years!

By the way, if one must always learn from more successful companies, it would be hard to argue the case for Zynga to switch their monetization strategy over to ads.

The point he is making is that people were stealing his games...he was loosing traffic to thieves....he seemed unable to stop this so he turned the problem into a positive.

The solution seems obvious now, but the problem had to be framed that way to get it. I can only speak for myself, but this had not occurred to me before reading the article. I suspect that it would be the same for most -- considering that people argue the positive impact of piracy on business in terms of marketing, not revenue.

The embed-ads-that-travel-with-the-game solution is fairly well known among casual-games developers I think. That doesn't make it a bad idea, but I'd be surprised if it's really patentable, unless the "invisibility" they discuss is particularly novel. I'm not exactly sure what they mean by that part, so hard to say.

Here's a CNET article from 2007 touting the benefits of ads embedded in flash games, one of which is "Even if the game is stolen, even if it runs on a site surrounded by other HTML ads, the ad can still play in-game": http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9797689-2.html

I think they mean the ads only appear if the animation detects that it's been served from a website other than the original.

I don't think this is especially novel; not for ads but I remember writing code back in the 90s for Java applets to check that they were being served only from the original website.

Originality of solution is not in developing a technology (though getting patent for that might mean it is), but identifying a key problem in business and using technology in an innovative way to solve the problem.

Agreed. Doesn't mean it's patentable tho'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com