Accumulate Profit Margin Invest Destroy

This is part 2 of one man’s journey into the sinister world of the online flash game business. In this episode, he goes through the creation of his first game and eventually ends up losing his sponsorship-virginity. Part 1 can be found here.

A modest start ( and getting my toes wet )

I had a plan for my first flash game: it should be simple and lightweight, so it can be completed within 1-2 days. Theme of the game would be Christmas; naturally it would make a perfect Xmas season game. Hopefully, sponsors would like it too. Basically, with this very simple game I wanted to see how hard or easy it is to get a sponsorship, and then maybe pop my in-game advertising cherry with a MochiAds or GameJacket.

Creating the first game

I browsed some random games at Newgrounds for inspiration. After trying a few mouse avoider games, one where you control a triangle which lags a bit behind of mouse cursor and which I thought was kinda cute effect, I had a vision: a bunch of reindeers in a span, following the mouse cursor. It would feature the Santa Claus, collecting some stuff in a snake-game-like fashion.  Because I have a zero-artistic skills, I had to ask my friend to draw me a santa in a sled, some reindeers and some other ingame graphics.

In couple of hours, I had first version of my xmas-game running. It’s a version of the old snake-game, with the mouse as sled-control. The player collects Christmas presents and for every third present a new reindeer is added. The more reindeers you get the faster and more difficult it becomes. The game is very simple, perhaps *too* simple for  a sponsorship, but I thought I’d charm them with an awesome presentation. I added a simple snow effect, bunch of alpha-fading scores and reindeers, lots of xmas-fluff to give a nice, Christmasy vibe and then I’d cap the whole thing with cheesy Christmas music and sound effects.

By the way, it’s a real pain in the ass to find good, public domain Christmas music, which can be used for commercial purposes. I could only find one royalty free 11 seconds long Jingle Bells-loop, and after countless hours of googling, I ended up licensing a xmas-track for 29 bucks. Perhaps a waste of money for this type of small game, but I wanted my game to have decent music and I couldn’t find anyone to do music for me that fast. I think I spend around 7-8 hours for coding and tweaking graphics, and atleast 5+ hours for searching music and sound effects online. When I finally told a friend of mine to test the game, his first question was “where did you find this shitty music?”. Oh well.

One of fellow APMID mates tested the game and came up with a name, Reindeer Rattle. I honestly had absolutely no idea what to expect from this game or how much it was worth. I thought I’d be happy for $200-300. ( actual game link is at the bottom of page, or if you are hasty just click here )

Getting a sponsorship

I was anxious to submit my first game to FlashGameLicense.com. After filling the game info, and uploading the .swf, I still had to wait 24+ something hours to get the game approved by FGL staff. When my game was finally approved, the actual waiting part began. I had no idea how long it would take to find a sponsor from FGL, and if anyone would even be interested in my game. It was already December and you’d think sponsors would want the xmas-games up to their portals asap at this point.

After a day or so, I got some feedback concerning my game. One sponsor was nice enough to tell me about a bug which I had forgotten to fix, and a harsh comment about shortness of the music loop. I made changes to the game and uploaded the new swf. I also received some feedback from fellow developers, mostly positive. After about three days and still no bid, I started to get frustrated. Maybe game was just too simple or sucked so bad nobody wouldn’t want it? I pondered how I could market it better than just by waiting somebody to discover it at the FGL (FlashGameLicense.com). FGL has a nice feature which shows who has viewed your game, and for how long. It also shows if a viewer was a developer or a sponsor. So I simply wrote a message to every sponsor who had played my game for longer than 30 seconds, saying:

Hello,

I noticed you’ve tried my christmas mini-game, Reindeer Rattle. I think it makes an excellent and funny little christmas season game, and maybe you’d be interested in licensing it ? :-)

With Best Regards,

xxxxxx xxxxxxxx

I also e-mailed this to Gimme5Games.com and ArmoredGames. Gimme5Games and some sponsors at the FGL were kind enough to reply me, basically saying “nice game, but we are not interested“. Then, five days after Reindeer Rattle was approved by FGL and couple of days after my messages to sponsors, I finally had a bid! AppleCartGames were offering a $150 for my game. I was happy that I had finally received a bid, but I was also slightly annoyed that it was such a small one.

Now FGL terms state that you should wait at least for 72 hours before accepting a bid, and many other flash game monetization articles out there say you should wait because the first bid rarely is the last one, and you can probably make more money from it. However, it was soon half-way through December already and after Christmas it’s clear that nobody would license my game. I waited five more days (didn’t receive any new bids), sent a message to sponsor about the terms of sponsorship and accepted the bid.

We agreed on following terms:

- Price is $150

- I’ll implement sponsors hiscore api and add his links and logo to my game

- I’ll add my link to the game main menu

- The game stays 7 days exclusively on sponsors site, after that I can sell site-locked secondary licenses to other portals/sponsors

- I can distribute versions of the game to free portals with my own ads ( gamejacket, mochiads etc )

- Sponsor pays 10% commission to FGL

Luckily, sponsors hiscore api was easy and fast to implement in the game. Waiting 7 days didn’t bother me much either because I’d still have some days before xmas-eve to submit game to other portals with GameJacket ads (which I’m really eager to try).  After some e-mail exchanges and sponsor reviewings, I emailed them the unlocked .swf of my game, and soon after that I got an e-mail from PayPal saying “You’ve got a payment”. Wohoo! My first sale! :-D

Some thoughts

It was nice to close a deal so quickly after starting this experiment, even though so far I’ve pocketed only a … well, pocket money. I have yet to try in-game-advertising, and I have yet to experiment with the full potential of FGL. I am going to create another game, a bigger and (hopefully)  more interesting one than Reindeer Rattle, and see how much money I can gain from sponsorships.

Even thought I’ve only tested waters with one very small game, I strongly believe lone hobbyist flash developer[s] can earn nice extra money from their game projects. However, for big bucks this “one day game/submit to FGL/wait fingers crossed” -model is not going to work. I believe you have to hustle to get the most out of your (better) games. Did you know PSN and XBLA revenue share percentages are not set in the stone either? There are also some creative opportunities I am going to experiment with soon. Oh, and multiplayer games looks interesting, so stay tuned.

Any feedback is welcome, but especially I’d like to receive feedback from more experienced flash game developers about sponsorships and prices. Any links containing free royalty free music and sounds are very welcome too! :D

You can play Reindeer Rattle on sponsors website here.