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This went on for months, where we would be adding more servers as fast as possible, trying to cope up with the massive influx of players, while being full-time employed, and fixing some bugs / add content (hats!)Īt this point, we knew we had to take a decision: leave our full-time jobs and create a company to take care of the game (which already generated some income), or kill it entirely because we didn’t have enough free time for its needs. The list of donators is still displayed on our website today, and most of the donations came from the US and Norway, but almost none from France despite being our home country. The Donate button with Paypal gathered around 3000€ before we pulled it off by the end of the next year. By the end of 2010, it generated about 11 000€, for an average 80 000 unique visitors a day. The advert banner performed well, with an average of 47€ a day, and allowed us to rent more servers. That’s why we went for the fastest and cheapest solution of putting an Adsense horizontal advertising banner under the game, and opened up a Paypal account for donations. We paid for the servers out of our own pocket, and there was no way we would be able to afford to pay for a dozen. The server usage became problematic quite early on.

GAMES LIKE TRANSFORMICE PC

Of course, this was the perfect moment for Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, and PC Gamer to write about us and make our bandwidth usage skyrocket a little more. The moment SomethingAwful found out about it, 4chan was meant to follow, and our unique little server simply melted under the demand. The funniest video in Transformice’s history (1M views) was made at this moment (I really recommend to watch it if you don’t already know the game, it’s a perfect summary).Īs we quickly translated the game to English to welcome the Goons, pure chaos ensued. The game wasn’t even translated in English, but the Goons didn’t care, and kept playing and yelling “OMELETTE DU FROMAGE” around. Then, a couple weeks after launch, we’re not sure how but the SomethingAwful forums found out about us. We added accounts very quickly to count cheese as a currency, so that people could use it to buy hats for their mouse. The physics engine (Box2D) and real-time multiplayer allowed extremely hilarious situations, and people got hooked fast. Things were going pretty well and people were enjoying the game a lot, even with its great simplicity: no accounts, no cheese-counting, very simple brown mice and color-solid grounds. We launched the game on May the 1 st 2010 (we thought it would be funny to do it on French’s Labor Day) and we only shared the news on a single French videogames forum we were familiar with, JeuxOnline. In about three weeks, we had a fully working prototype. The core gameplay loop was simple: climb your way up to the cheese, go back to the mouse hole, as one player (the Shaman) can summon planks and crates to help everyone. We quickly changed it for a super-mouse (the Shaman) summoning the planks and crates, but the name Transformice stuck. Thrilled by his ability to quickly make a gameplay hilarious, I accepted and proposed him a gameplay with mice having to transform themselves into crates and planks in order to help their other fellow mice to cross gaps and get the cheese: Transform-mice. Jean-Baptiste had a history of creating small browser games for fun, and asked for my help in order to a new one, with better graphics. In 2010, Jean-Baptiste Le Marchand and I were full-time employed at a French videogame company, him as a developer and I as a graphic designer / technical artist. Because making a game is hard, but making money from it is even harder. While the game isn’t actually “finished” and still under active development, today I would like to share what is has been like during those four years, from the game viewpoint of course but moreover, monetization-wise.

Games like transformice