Mochi Media is Closing on March 31,2014

It is a little bit surprising that Mochi Media is shutting down. After many years that it has been providing services for distributing flash based games on many sites, it is now saying good bye. Now, commercial and indie Flash developers will be forced to look for another games ad serving sites in order to manage and monetize games.

There could be a lot of reasons why the site is closing down. Flash critics could be eyeing on Flash as the main culprit on this. They may assume that the declining popularity of Flash may have not generated outstanding revenues for Mochi Media which forced Shanda, Mochi Media's parent company to make a move to deal with this problem by shutting down the site. Others are looking at it in a different angle which questions profitability issues. There are rumors that before the announcement, some staff of Mochi Media including some of it's founders arranged to make an offer to buy Mochi from Shanda. Sad to say, Shanda turned down the offer and finalized their decision to cease Mochi Media's operation.

Now, questions arise as to whether Flash gaming portals will also befall the same fate. Aside from Mochi Media, flash users and freelance game developers uses portals like NewGrounds, Kongregate and MindJolt to distribute and monetize flash games. If Flash is really a dying technology, then the fate of these sites could be hanging in the balance too but who would know.

For AS 3 lovers like me, it will be more helpful if we started learning new technologies aside from Flash. I would not say that we will stop developing flash games. It'll be better if we learn how to develop games in other platforms like Html5, Unity3d and other game development technologies. Action Script 3 is the first language I know since I started as a freelance game developer but I do not fear learning other languages as well. In freelancing, we should accept the challenges to become more equipped in facing situations like this.