What is Whirled?

Whirled is a complete, self-serve Flash game development platform that enables you to build deep experiences, audience, and revenue. Using Whirled it is possible to create, manage, and monetize virtual items, single and multiplayer games, avatars, furnishings, and much more by selling directly to players. It was created by online indie gaming pioneers Three Rings Design, the developers of Puzzle Pirates, and represents years of micro-transaction learning packaged into a Flash development and billing framework.

Whirled is designed to scale with your ambitions and how you want to grow your business. Whether you want to create a casual single player puzzle experience, a deep multiplayer action game based on micro-transactions, a full blown Flash MMO, or anything in between...we've got you covered. Create what you want at your own pace, price and deploy it however makes sense to you and your community.

Three Rings is known as a strong advocate for open source and in addition to the full platform API set, complete code for all of our Whirled games is available for download from the Whirled wiki. Whatever you want to build on Whirled, this expanding code library will help you get there.

Building Revenue On Whirled

The Whirled billing engine supports over 50 different payment methods from around the world including credit cards, PayPal, mobile/premium SMS, and a large variety of prepaid cards. Three Rings player support is fully integrated as well so you can focus on building your brand and revenue without the headaches and overhead of billing, fraud, or customer service. All net revenue on Whirled is split four ways as per the graphic to the right. There are currently four ways to earn money on Whirled. You can make use of some or all of these methods at your discretion.

1. Games & Virtual Item Sales

By integrating specific Whirled APIs into your game, you can sell games, levels, and/or items. Additionally, you can sell a variety of virtual items such as avatars, toys, pets, and furniture outside of your game. You set the pricing for all of your work and have a variety of options for merchandising it.

2. Affiliate Program

All content in Whirled can be embedded out to other sites, including your own. All embedded content is eligible for the Whirled affiliate program wherein the the affiliate earns 30% of lifetime net revenue on referred players. In other words, for every player you refer you earn 30% of whatever they spend within Whirled over the course of their lifetime on Whirled. In cases where you are both the affiliate and the developer of a given virtual item sale, your combined percentage would therefore be 60%.

3. Game Developer Bonus Pool

Every month, Three Rings will set aside a pool of money to be split among game developers in direct proportion to the number of gameplays their game represents of the overall total on Whirled. For January 2009, the Game Developer Bonus Pool is currently set at $10,000.

4. Contests

Whirled frequently runs contests for Flash creators. Click here to see the current contests.

Examples

Corpse Craft is an example of an original Whirled game that was built from scratch to leverage several powerful Whirled APIs including micro-transactions, multi-player, trophies, and more. QBeez is an example of an existing single player game that was not built for Whirled but has been modified to take advantage of micro-transactions by selling level packs and avatars based on game characters.

Getting Started

Whirled is completely self-serve so you can develop and upload games content at your own pace. Click here for details, APIs, and sample code.