The First Games Website to Implement Web Monetization

SIMMER.io is the first game portal website to provide a simple UI to for game developers to include the Web Monetization API, a proposed W3C standard.

Web Monetization provides a simple way for creators to get paid for what they post online.

This comes on the heels of an announcement by Mozilla, Creative Commons and Coil.com to provide 100M in grants in order to provide the internet with a better business model via their new project Grant for the Web.

Rocco Balsamo, founder of SIMMER.io says:

The number one question I get from developers is "How do I make money with my games?" We've been hesitant to degrade the SIMMER website experience with ads, but we need to reward our faithful developers for their hard work. Web monetization is a large part of that puzzle.

Balsamo learned about Web Monetization via the JS13k project, a coding competition where HTML5 game developers are required to make a game with a very small footprint (13Kb or less).

Simplifying the process

SIMMER was built with the philosophy that game developers should stick with what they know–game development. They should not need to fiddle with servers, content delivery networks, or confusing upload processes. They should simply export their game from Unity (a leading game engine), and drag that build onto the site. And it should work out of the box with no configuration.

While web monetization is easy to implement for web developers, it takes a little more thought for folks not familiar with web technologies, like game developers.

Sticking with SIMMER's philosophy of "it should just work", we've provided a simple UI for injecting a monetization pointer into developer games without them needing to fiddle with HTML and Javascript.

Game developers can paste a payment pointer into our game editor UI, and their game is monetized without any hassle.

An Open Source Unity Asset

Of course, players need motivation to actually spend money on a subscription to a web monetization provider like Coil, so game developers will need to take the next step and reward players who come to support their creations.

Ben Sharafian from Coil.com explains one possible game flow: Whenever a monetization event occurs, translate the micropayments to an in-game reward or currency.

SIMMER is working on an open source asset for the Unity game engine that detects monetization events from the browser so that developers can translate those transactions into in-game rewards. SIMMER expects to launch the asset on Github and the Unity Asset Store in late October, 2019. It will work on any platform and is not limited to SIMMER.

About SIMMER.io

SIMMER.io is a site for Indie game developers to host their creations in the browser for free. The site has been accepting developer uploads since 2017, and has an audience of nearly 7,000 developers who have posted over 5000 games as of this writing. It's a grassroots operation and has taken no outside funding.

SIMMER.io is based in San Francisco, CA.

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