Pyro II in Review
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:”
Of gameplay counts and CPMs,
Of dollars and ratings
Pyro II has been out a little while so I think it’s about time to talk about how it’s done. Overall it has been a definite success. Pyro II has met solid benchmarks of a success by reaching around 2.5m plays so far. Still a bit lower than it’s predecessor which has around 6.5m under it’s belt, but Pyro II had some more stiff competition for front pages at it’s release than the original did, and that tends to make all the difference in this world of 3 days of front-page fame and an eternity in the catalog of games where you may never be seen again.
Pyro II’s level editor has definitely kept it afloat on Kongregate longer than the original, and it seems to be getting more plays over the long term than Pyro got. I would expect that number to continually grow over time as players continue to check out user levels and build their own while earning the badges and playing the game. On Kongregate, there are well over 5,500 user-created levels uploaded to the level sharing system and that has definitely been a big boost to the game and was our primary focus on this release — user content.
Although the game has had significantly less plays than the original so far, it has been successful in reaching the same revenue benchmarks as the original Pyro, and I anticipate it clearing around the same $10,000 revenue mark by the time it has finished it’s run. The reason for this is predominantly in the way that we improved on our sponsorship. Like the original, Pyro II is based on a performance model. The more people we send to our sponsor, the more we get paid. Unlike the original Pyro, we improved our click-through-rate by adding in some links like the “Ace Guide” which shows a forum post of how to ace every level in the game. You can use that guide to beat levels that are otherwise frustrating. This link has brought a lot of traffic to the sponsor and increased our payout by quite a bit. On top of that we were able to go back to a lot of our established partners who bought licenses for Pyro, and sell them a copy of Pyro II.
One new license was for Platogo.com. This turned out to be very valuable, and involved the integration of very well done user content sharing API. In my opinion, the level sharing on Platogo is better than on Kongregate, but their site is still so small that it’s not very worthwhile beyond that interesting bit. They have a very limited library because they want everyone to have their rather complex API to be implemented, and its much harder to do than Kongregate’s even if the final product comes out feeling a bit more polished in my opinion.
Ultimately, the player reception for Pyro II was very mixed. It did better than the original in terms of ratings on most sites, but suffered some criticism for lack of innovation over the original design. A very fair criticism that we will definitely not need to hear twice. When you add a “2″ to the end of a game, players tend to anticipate a certain degree of newness. If the graphics and gameplay are not updated enough, they will find it lacking — even if the original game was innovative in it’s own right. It’s interesting because we felt like we might have been able to dodge this criticism if we had chosen our name more carefully. There’s a reason there has never been a “Bloons 2″ and that “More Bloons” is a more appropriate title for the quasi-sequel. Likewise, games like the Meatboy Player Pack or Crush the Castle Player Packs feature very limited updates and new content based on user submitted content (which is mostly what Pyro II’s content was). However, because of their naming convention, they avoid any criticism of lack of innovation. This was something I feared very close to release, but I was convinced by a friend to keep the sequel title. Ultimately, it’s hard to say how it would have gone if we had chosen a different name, but its a very interesting thing to have learned and we won’t repeat the mistake. If there is a Pyro III, it will definitely have some really new ideas in it and probably a whole revision to the graphics.
We’re happy. The game did well. It’s what I think Pyro should have been if we hadn’t rushed it. Whether it deserves to be called a sequel or not is less clear, but the game has stood on it’s own two feet and combined with the original Pyro the two make a fantastic amount of fire burning content that has been enjoyed somewhere around 9 million times across the web. It’s hard to look at that as anything other than a successful first two games in the world of Flash. Now that we got our feet wet, we can do some things that will really blow some minds.