Don’t you know Transformice, the mouse MMO with 70 million players? We didn’t know it either.
Transformice is an indie game that is also available on Steam, but there it only has about 1,200 players active at the same time.
In principle, it is a platformer where you play as a mouse searching for cheese. Within two minutes, you need to reach the fragrant piece and bring it back. But that’s not easy at all, as you are not alone. Hundreds of players are also trying to reach the goal. This leads to chaos.
Who is the fastest mouse?
Each of the five million maps in the game offers different challenges that you must master to reach the cheese. These include obstacles that you need to overcome, shortcuts that must be found, and somehow you should outsmart your fellow players to be the first to reach the cheese.
After that, it gets even more fun, as you need to bring the cheese back and are pursued by other players trying to take the good piece from you.
The Shaman helps… or not
Additionally, one player plays as the Shaman, who has special powers and can create objects that place more obstacles in the way of some mice while helping others to reach the goal faster. He can also transform mice, for example into planks, to allow other mice to cross a chasm.
The more mice a Shaman saves, the faster he levels up and can unlock new abilities through his skill tree, providing him with more options in further rounds. Seven official game modes, 200 official maps, dozens of player-created game modes, and over 5 million player-created maps provide plenty of variety.
A fantastic start
Transformice was programmed by a small indie team in three weeks and has reached about 70 million players over the past six years. During the developer conference GDC 2017, developer Melanie Christin spoke about this immense success. In the video, Christin explains that one night in the house where she was staying, she heard noises coming from the walls while lying in bed. She imagined that mice were crawling over each other to overcome obstacles and reach a piece of cheese. This gave rise to the idea for the game.
In May 2010, the game launched and was only promoted with a link through a small French forum, reaching a few hundred players. The website SomethingAwful took notice of the game and reported on it.
The reaction was surprising, the server crashed under the influx of players. There was no money for additional servers, so the team had to rely on inexpensive advertising and donations from fans. The game reached around 80,000 unique visitors per day, allowing the developers to earn about $11,000 by the end of 2010.
A bumpy development
The success enabled the team to establish a development studio and quickly double the player numbers through full-time jobs. But then Google banned the company from the Adsense program, leading to massive financial problems. Through some contacts, this ban was lifted. The ban occurred because the ad banner was the wrong size, which the team had overlooked in the fine print. In 2012, after a business model overhaul, the first major success was achieved with revenues of $250,000 per month.
2013 again turned out to be a disappointing year, as the developers realized they had grown too quickly. There followed some restructuring, and in 2014, the situation improved again. In 2015, the game was released on Steam, which went chaotically and was associated with credit card fraud. In 2016, events followed that did not go too well. The team repeatedly had to make adjustments, especially regarding the monetization of the game.
In retrospect, Melanie Christin explains that the team was too small at the beginning but then grew too quickly, they had known too little, especially regarding monetization, and they had neglected the mobile sector.
Developing games is a constant learning process that continues to evolve because the market and many conditions are constantly changing – for example, Adobe’s Flash, which is slowly being replaced by HTML5, which the team also has to respond to. Yet all of this does not stop the developers from wanting to continue to bring innovative games to the market.
