This is part 3 of one mans $100,000 flash games monetization experiment. Here are parts I and II.

Trying out the Game Jacket

If you have read my previous post you know I made a little flash game and sold it to applecartgames.com and agreed on a deal which says game has to stay exclusively on sponsors portal for one week. Well, one week came full couple of days just before Christmas Eve, and I was eager to post my game to free portals and try out GameJacket.

GameJacket API is quite straightforward to implement. You just import and instance GameJacketSDK class and add couple of event listeners, one which is dispatches when security check is passed  (and your game is supposed to run) and when it is failed. Piece of cake. Then you upload it to GameJacket MyZone, type in the game information and wait for approval (which in my case took 24+ hours, but you can get your game approved a lot faster if you harrass them with an e-mail ;)).

When your game is approved you can download a little .swf ( 10kb size! ) which contains a loader which then loads your game from GameJacket servers and displays advertisement which is then supposed to bring you money.

System seems to work OK, even though I had some problems with their pre-loader (it fucked up the game, just displayed an empty game screen), so I just left it disabled. Oh, and sometimes the game didn’t seem to work at all when it was re-scaled to something other than native width/height.

Portal submission HELL

In order to make any money with GameJacket (or any in-game advertisement system), you need to get your game OUT THERE, to the people. That’s where flash game portals come in play, since most of them accept submissions from game developers/people. They get the content, you get the viewers/players. Simple.

Except there is a gazillion portals out there, and I had no idea which ones are worth submitting besides Newgrounds and a few other big ones. So I just bravely grabbed a game submission list from GameJacket forum and began submitting.

First one on the list was Newgrounds. A big scary portal we all are familiar with, and it’s one of those annoying types which require registration before you can submit anything. So I created an account, submitted my game, and after a relatively short approval period I started to receive game plays, wohoo!

After 10 minutes I had received a private message saying: “Nice work stealing that reindeer game off from applecartgames” and a one review saying “Looks like a stupid game“. Reindeer Rattle got average score 1.61 / 5.   Geez, hehe. You can view my shameful NG page here.

Not very encouraging, but I didn’t mind and decided to continue anyway. After submitting the game to 5 or 6 more portals I was already quite tired and pissed off with this submission bullshit. Just when you have finished typing all the info and hit the ’submit’ button, the site doesn’t work, or one third of sites require registration and you have to click e-mail links and shit. There must be a better way to do this. And then I got a brilliant idea.

Outsourcing the dirty work ( a.k.a cheap Indian labour )

Scriptlance is a site for freelancer programmers/writers/artists etc and contractors to find projects and cheap labour and such (you know, RentACoder.com -clone). Most work in there seems to be way underpriced, and people regularly post data entry and article writing jobs, so I thought I’d hire someone to submit my game to GameJackets game submission portal list (contains 350+ portals) and take out all dead portals from the list.

It took less than five hours to find a person willing to do this. Guy from India agreed to do everything I asked for $16 (I hired someone before him for $10, but he canceled the project two hours after accepting it and said he will quit doing freelancing work at all ).

I was very well aware that I probably wouldn’t make anywhere close to $16 from GameJacket with this game, but this is an experiment, so why not to experiment outsourcing too :-)

Four days later he was done with the job and sent me a refreshed portal list, which I have uploaded here. I did some random tests on the list, and GameJacket Top Hosts -list showed a lot new portals, so I don’t believe he cheated too much anyway.

So, how much I made out of this? See yourself:

epic fail!

epic fail!

From December ~20 2008 to  27th January 2009, so far GJ has made me 59 cents. It’s quite ridiculous really. The game sucks yes, and most submissions were done way past Christmas, but still, 59 cents and ~1100 impressions?!? How is that even possible? Did I miss some vital portals from the list where to submit or what?

New games, new ideas

Unfortunately, I’ve been very busy after Christmas, but I am working on two new flash games. First one is puzzle/typing game mix which I’ve developed to prototype stage, and second one is physics game done with box2d library. Typing game would probably make a nice Facebook App, and I’ve read some rather impressive numbers (which most likely are inaccurate and exaggerated) about social media games/apps, so I might try to capitalize on those too.

I have teamed up with a couple of skilled graphic artists, so taking a contract work would be an option too, and most likely most profitable one. That would be a step towards more formal business then, and would require creating a portfolio before anyone would even consider hiring us.

I’d like to hear more feedback from you, reader, about this article serie and also any sort of ideas concerning flash games/money making/contract work, anything I could try. I guarantee even silliest and craziest ideas are considered seriously ;-)

Thank you and stay tuned for part 4 !

Appendix

Flash game portal submission list ( a raw copy, i will upload sorted one later )


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