Mochi Media to close on March 31

The Flash gaming platform Mochi Media will be closed by its parent company Shanda Games on March 31 this year.

In a post on the Mochi Blog on Friday, the service's partners were advised to download their data ahead of a complete cessation of all services at the end of this month.

Mochi Media was launched in 2005, but, as the blog post stated, it was unable to remain competitive as the market for Flash games was eroded by the explosion of small and casual games on other platforms.

"Today, there has never been a better time to be an indie game developer in terms of the platforms and audiences one can reach: Flash, iOS, Android, XBLA, PSN, Steam, HTML5, and the list goes on," Josh Larson, the company's CEO, said.

"If Mochi had a more meaningful position today beyond Flash, then there may have been a different path for the company going forward."

The fate of Mochi Media was ultimately in the hands of Shanda Games, the Chinese company that acquired the platform for $80 million in 2010.

Bob Ippolito, one of the company's co-founders, weighed in on the closure on the Mochi forums. Ippolito, who is no longer at the company, questioned Shanda's motives for the move, stating that it was not, "a good decision."

"Nobody at Mochi wanted this to happen, and there were parties interested in acquiring Mochi from [Shanda] (including myself) for more than they'd make by dissolving it. They're simply not interested in making a rational decision here, and they certainly don't care about you all like we do (past and present Mochi employees).

"We've been trying to prevent this from happening for quite some time, but we failed to change their plans."

Thanks TechCrunch.