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Game Boy Advance

With 30mn visitors a month and a third webby award under their belts, Flash games site Miniclip has seen solid growth since 2001. Ian Delaney talks to founder Rob Small to find out the secrets of its success.

With 30mn visitors a month and a third webby award under their belts, Flash games site Miniclip has seen solid growth since 2001. Ian Delaney talks to founder Rob Small to find out the secrets of its success.

Where did Miniclip come from?

We started it in 2001. I'd just left university and was an avid gamer. Our co-founder Tihan Presbie came from a background in stock trading. We seized on the opportunities of Flash as a production tool. At that time, most people had a dial-up connection and we saw its possibilities for delivering lightweight, compatible rich media experiences.

Initially, we tended to produce topically-based games - throwing tomatoes at Tony Blair, that sort of thing. Those sorts of games may not have a great deal of longevity, and they weren't especially well-coded. I produced a number of the early games myself, so I can testify to that. But they do work very well virally for a quick, short-lived hit. People send the link to their friends or post it onto their websites. That gave us a user base of a million people after only two months.

And how did you grow from there?

Once we'd established that user base, we realised that we needed to produce a broader array of games that belonged to a variety of genres. We also wanted to hit more of a mainstream audience.

We have an internal development team to create content, but we also work with a lot of partners. We've worked very closely with the Flash community and in some ways the growth of that has mirrored Miniclip. We still produce a lot of games in-house, but we also have a network of over a hundred Flash development houses.

We have two server farms, one based in Madrid and one in Miami. The first serves Europe and the other serves the US. And these are fully redundant in case of emergencies. We can register up to two million visits a day, so looking back I think it was a very shrewd move on our part to buy our own server farms. If we had been paying someone else for our bandwidth then we could have folded overnight when the site first started to become popular.

How much is this worth and where do your revenues come from?

I can tell you that we've been profitable for five of our six years of existence. Our last audited accounts - from 2005 - showed a turnover of £5.2mn.

Our main revenues come from subscriptions. A lot of our games are free, but subscribers who pay £5.95 a month have access to more and can download the games to their desktop. We have some advertising, but the main form that takes is advergames - games created to promote certain brands or products. We're getting a lot of those around film releases, for example. The click-throughs from those games to the related websites are very strong - a lot better than conventional banners and so forth. They still have to go through our quality control, though, and we have turned advergames down when the gameplay hasn't been strong enough. Ultimately, if the games are weak, our users will be unhappy and that - ultimately - will make those clients unhappy.

What trends do you see in the development of Flash games?

As I said, in the early days we tended to have a lot of topical stuff. Nowadays, we're spending more time creating learning and puzzle games. Miniclip is used by teachers a lot, as a reward for good behaviour or finishing their work quickly. So we want to make games that they'll want the kids playing.

We're seeing an increasing interest in multiplayer gaming. Runescape and Club Penguin, in particular, are very popular, which reflects what's going on elsewhere on the web with social networks. We're going to be building more of those sorts of features into the site so that members get more of a sense of belonging to a community. There might be hundreds of thousands of players online at any one time, but at the moment we don't really convey a sense of that being the case.

There's also a trend towards a greater degree of creativity being available to the player. I'm thinking of things like Line Rider - a game that we wanted really badly for the site. These games are more like mini applications than the traditional Flash game. There will be some announcements along those lines before too long.

Lastly, the emergence of Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Apollo appear to be heralding a time when these sorts of games can be considerably more ambitious. Both because they are very sophisticated development environments, and because on both platforms, performance is much improved. We constantly have to tone down games at the moment because we have to pitch them towards the majority rather than the minority with blazing fast machines.