Heyzap shows fast growth with its embeddable casual game widget

February 19, 2009 | Dean Takahashi | Comments | |

Heyzap announced a month ago that it was launching a widget that web sites could use to embed casual games on their sites. More than 3,000 web sites have installed the widget so far, with gamers playing about 5 million minutes a month with an average game session lasting 17 minutes.

Today the company is launching a game  database that can be sorted into categories like sports or puzzles. By organizing the games, Heyzap says it’s something like a YouTube of Flash games. (Of course, Kongregate, which aggregates user-created games, already has that nickname). Publishers can easily select contextualized casual games content. For example, a political blog like huffingtonpost.com can now get an embed code for purely political games, or a basketball site like NBA.com could tune into basketball games.

Heyzap is also releasing an applications programming interface to let publishers create their own game portals and pull out specific games. Cooliris and Weebly are a couple of the partners. The publishers can use the API to access 6,000 Flash-based casual games.

It’s a good deal for developers, too, because it’s a way to distribute games to a far wider audience than they otherwise might reach. They can upload their games directly into the site. Heyzap takes a cut, the game developers or publishers get a cut, and so does Mochi Media, which embeds ads into the games.

Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila founded the San Francisco company. It has funding from Y Combinator. The company expects to look for money later. It will face some serious competition on the web from the likes of Wild Tangent, Oberon Media, Addicting Games, Games2Win, GameCurry, and the aforementioned Kongregate. NeoEdge does something similar with widgets, but NeoEdge focuses mainly on downloadable games.

Akhund previous founded Clickpass and sold that a few months ago to Synthasite.

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About the Author, Dean Takahashi

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Justin
    The 5 million minutes sounds impressive - I wonder what comparables are? I don't know if other game providers publish this number.

    Actually just saw that Zynga's Facebook Texas Hold'em App displays number of users online - right now it's at 100,000 . Don't know if that's the average or not, let's be conservative and say the average is 60,000. That's 60,000 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 2.6 billion minutes per month. 500 times Heyzap on just one game.

    Not to take anything away from Heyzap, it's a great start. It just shows how huge games are overall.
  • Oracle
    5 mil min a month is really a tiny number. this is generated by less than 295,000 UV max assuming each session is played by a different user. Quite odd the company doesn't think through its PR strategy as anyone who understands anything about this industry would tell you, NOT SO impressive at all,
  • John Singh
    Heyzap is only 1 month into launch.

    Kongregate only register 600k monthly uniques on compete.com. If Heyzap is getting 295k in just 1 month that is really impressive.
  • I included heyzap into my flash gamesite enzogames.blogspot.com but I'm a little concerned visitors won't pay it any attention, because the widget is very small and easily overlooked. It would be nice to expand the heyzap widget if you click on it. Oh well.