Mochi Media

» see mochimedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

mochi media was infrastructure. you saw the preloader and not the company, the same way you used to see akamai's logo on a streaming buffer screen and not think about who akamai was. between roughly 2007 and 2013, if you played a flash game on a small portal (kongregate aside), the chances were good that mochi had served the pre-roll ad, hosted the swf file, or syndicated the title in the first place.

mochi media was founded in 2005 in san francisco by bob ippolito and jameson hsu. the original product was a flash game distribution network that bundled an ad-serving preloader into a swf wrapper. game developers got revenue share. portal operators got fresh content with monetization built in. mochi sat between them, taking a cut and routing the ad inventory. by 2008 the network claimed about 140 million monthly active users across 40,000 publisher sites and 15,000 game titles.

shanda games, a chinese mmo operator that wanted a western browser-game footprint, bought mochi in january 2010 for 80 million dollars (60 in cash plus 20 in equity). the deal was the high water mark of flash-game-business valuations. for the next two years the rest of the industry watched to see whether the shanda integration would produce anything new. it did not.

on 15 march 2014, ceo josh larson announced that mochi media would shut down on march 31. the closure note read "if mochi had a more meaningful position today beyond flash, then there may have been a different path." that line did the work of an obituary. flash on mobile had been deprecated since 2011, browser security policies were turning hostile, and adobe had announced that the desktop runtime was on a multi-year wind-down even if it had not yet picked a date.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it did ~

the mochi preloader was the small mochi logo that animated for two to five seconds before a flash game started loading the actual title. inside that load window the preloader served a banner or video ad and reported analytics back to the mochi servers. developers wrote one line of actionscript to invoke it. portal operators added a few lines of html to embed the wrapped swf. payments to developers ran on a monthly cycle.

beyond the preloader there was mochi distribution, which syndicated wrapped games out to a long-tail set of portals (the family-friendly arcade sites you would find when a school computer would let you load anything). mochi coins was an in-game currency layer that let developers monetize beyond ad revenue. mochi coins was the last meaningful product launch, sometime in '08. by 2012 it had been folded into general account credit.

~ the flash collapse ~

the steve jobs "thoughts on flash" letter from 29 april 2010 was a starting gun. for the next four years mochi's revenue base ran inside a deprecated runtime. mobile traffic was the growth direction for any game-publisher business after 2011, and mochi's ad-and-distribution network had nothing to ship there. flash on android was killed in '12. the chrome plugin entered click-to-run mode by '15. the writing was on the wall well before mochi formally closed.

the shanda parent had its own troubles by '13. the company delisted from nasdaq in november 2014, eight months after mochi closed. mochi was not the load-bearing acquisition that justified the 80 million dollar spend. shanda's bigger problem was that the chinese mmo business was being beaten by mobile-first competitors during the same window flash was dying in the west.

~ what remains ~

the flash game archive at the internet archive owes part of its existence to mochi developers who exported their swf libraries during the march '14 wind-down. flashpoint, the community-run flash-preservation project, has thousands of titles that originated in the mochi distribution network. the company is gone and most of the wrapped games are gone with it. what survived is the layer between them, the small mochi spinning logo on a school-computer screen, recognizable to anyone who played in that window.

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