The Blog

Here are some highlights on what has changed on Clay.io in the past few days:

Leaderboards and Achievements on Game Pages

You can now view the achievements you’ve earned and all achievements on individual game pages. The leaderboards for the game are also displayed.

See Which Games Have Achievements and Leaderboards

When hovering over games in the marketplace, you can see which have Clay.io high scores and achievements enabled (the icons on the bottom-left).

View All Achievements You’ve Earned

Profile pages now have the option to view all of the achievements a user has earned.

Let us know what you think!

Sometimes it can be hard to tell exactly what a game will be like from the promotional image alone. That’s why we’ve updated the Clay.io Marketplace to have animated GIF previews of games when the game box is moused-over.

We’ve gone in and added these previews to a few games, but it’s up to the developers to do so for the rest of the games.

See this video for how this is done below

Developers: If you want to add an animated GIF preview of your game, head to the “Media” page in the developers dashboard – instructions are listed there!

Let us know what you think!

One of our primary goals since inception has been to help developers with distributing their games. Prior to today we did that through easy packaging of games for the Chrome Web Store, Windows App Store, Firefox Marketplace, Facebook, and of course our own Clay.io marketplace.

Today we’re unveiling our publisher platform, which helps both game developers and game publishers.

Game Search with Filters

The platform gives game publishers an easy solution for adding HTML5 games to their websites. Clay.io has a catalog of over 350 games to choose from, and now an easy way to filter the games and subscribe to a feed of games to add to their site.

The benefit for Publishers is primarily access to games that work on the mobile web. For the traditional web, publishers are able to find plenty of high quality Flash games through tools like Mochi, and while we offer high quality traditional web games as well, the real value is in the mobile web games. There are thousands of game portals that have many Flash games, but given that Flash doesn’t work on mobile devices, these portals are unable to monetize and take advantage of the mobile traffic they’re already receiving. By offering them HTML5 games, they are able to do just that.

Games can be filtered on a variety of metrics: mobile support, categories, resolution, rating, and more. Analytics are provided to show which games are generating revenue and plays for publishers. Advertising revenue is shared between the publisher, developer, and Clay.io, with the game developer getting the majority (varies between 50 and 70%).  Search results can also be saved as a JSON or XML feed, with an additional option to receive game updates via email.

See which games are being played

The benefit for Game Developers is simple: more distribution of your games. You don’t have to do anything to distribute your game like this – if you want to opt out, you can through the developer area under “Distribute” -> “Publishers”.

As always, let us know what you think. You can find more information here: http://clay.io/publisher-tools

Update: Google has added “.io” to the list of gccTLDs – thanks Google for the very quick response!

I will preface this by saying I am not an SEO expert – I am going off of a night’s worth of research on geo targeting in SEO.

When we decided to go with the name Clay.io, we weren’t thinking too much about SEO. It turns out it has had somewhat of an effect as “.io” domains are still considered ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domains) by Google, rather than gccTLDs (Generic Country Code Top Level Domains).

The Problem

It would appear “.io” specifically targets the British Indian Ocean Territory (a series of islands in the Indian Ocean with a whopping population of 3,000) – much like .co.uk would target the United Kingdom. “If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we’ll rely largely on the site’s country domain”. (source)

Google doesn’t do this for all TLDs however:

Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) don’t target specific countries. If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com, .org, or any of the domains listed below, and targets users in a particular geographic location, you can provide us with information that will help us determine how your site appears in our search results. (source)

When it mentions “any of the domains listed below” it includes gccTLDs, an acronym Google seems to have coined.

Current gccTLDs

These are the current gccTLDs that are treated as generic domains.

.as   .bz   .cc   .cd   .co   .dj   .fm   .la   .me   .ms   .nu   .sc   .sr   .tv   .tk   .ws   (source)

I’d argue “.io” in 2013 is more popular than at least 10 of those, so it would seem the list is simply outdated and someone at Google just needs this as a reminder to update it.

Does Google Even Control This?

They appear to have coined the gccTLD acronym, and that list of domains above is only reference by Google, so it would appear so.

How Much Does It Matter?

It’s hard to say because it’s a difficult thing to test. The information I found on the issue ended up contradicting itself, mostly because Google keeps their ranking algorithms a secret, so the “SEO experts” speculate a whole bunch (which I suppose I’m doing as well). The easiest way to prove it matters is simply the fact that gccTLDs exist. Google decided to create a subcategory of ccTLDs for domains that tend to be generic (global).

Even if ccTLDs and gccTLDs were treated exactly the same in terms of ranking, Google does not take into account the Geographic target set in Webmaster Tools. Own a “.io” domain and want to target towards US searchers? It doesn’t work.

I wanted to come up with a good concrete example of the effect, but that’s difficult to do. The reason this all came about is I was a bit perplexed when Socket.IO didn’t show up on the first page of Google search results for “WebSockets”. I think it’s safe to say most developers who use WebSockets associate the term with Socket.IO since it provides easy integration, and some helpful fallbacks. Despite that, it is 19th in the results for “WebSockets”. Again, since I don’t know all the factors, I have no idea how much that would differ if “.io” was a gccTLD – but it appears to have an effect.

Companies Using “.io”

GitHub*, Filepicker, Codepen, Socket.IO (LearnBoost), Sencha*, Pen.io, Redis, Forecast, Intercom, Put.io, Customer.io, Trigger.io, Keen.io, Filecloud, and many more.

The TLD has become common for development related sites, initially because it’s an acronym for Input/Output, but more recently the popularity is probably due to herd behavior. Unlike .tk domains which are free (and actually gccTLDs), .io domains cost anywhere from $50 to $100 per year, so that filters out the junk pretty well.

Take Action

If you know someone who might be able to help with this at Google, I would appreciate it, and I’m sure the founders of other “.io” companies (Filecloud.io, Filepicker.io, Codepen.io, Forecast.io, Intercom.io, etc…) would too.

Another to take action would be to make this appeal more visible to others – tweet, vote up on Hacker News, Reddit, etc…

One final way to possibly draw attention to this would be to rate this Google article as “Not helpful at all”, perhaps that will flag it for Google’s attention.

Thank you!

While many of you were busy with Ludum Dare 26 this past weekend, we were also hard at work – just not on a game.

As a weekend side-project, we developed HTMLGameEngine.com a resource that helps developers choose which game engine is right for them.

Check it out here, rate your favorite game engine, and let us know what you think!

There were tons of great entries to our “Got Game?” HTML5 Game Development Competition for Students, but only three won… We wanted to take some time to highlight some of the games that didn’t win.

For this post we’re highlighting Space Hamster, a game by INTiVA. INTiVA is a team of 6 individuals based in Argentina.

The game’s visuals are stunning – everything from the user interface, to the characters and environmental art. In Space Hamster, the goal is to navigate Hamstrong, the space hamster, to the cookie. Each level progressively gets more difficult and introduces new obstacles.

This is an extremely well-made and polished game that we highly recommend you check out. Beware, you might get a little dizzy if you’re not careful

See the game page chock-full of achievements and screenshots here. Play it here.

We were extremely impressed by the games submitted for the “Got Game?” student HTML5 game development competition! Here are the winners:

1st Place:

No-one Has to Die

2nd Place:

DeadBase

3rd Place:

This is Not Sparta

With 72 games submitted, there were quite a few really amazing games that unfortunately aren’t winners. We’ve had some suggestions that we make this an annual event – which we will certainly consider doing. What we learned this time around is we should have more than 3 prizes.

One last thank you to our sponsors: Mozilla, Github, ImpactJS, Scirra and 3DayStartup! Thanks to everyone who participated, and let us know if there is any way we can help you further your game development careers, whether that be as an indie, or working for a studio!