$100,000 Flash Game Experiment - part 1
“When drugs and gambling doesn’t pay off anymore, it’s time to look into the online gaming market”.
This is an introduction part of a one man’s journey in to the sinister world of online flash/casual gaming business.
In case you haven’t noticed, the web is blooming of flash games. Wherever you go, hundreds of popup ads are inviting you immediatly to portals to play thousands of free online flash games. Puzzle games, platform jumparounds, space shooters, physics simulations, every genre and everytype of games, and even weird shitty ones you’d think nobody would ever bother playing. The amount of games (and the way they are advertised) vaguely reminds of an early days of internet porn in World Wide Web.
With such an amount of games and portals, there has to be a substantial amount of money in this business, right? We all know “real” computer/console game business is a huge market, but most flash games look like Super Nintendo games from early 90’s and are probably developed by a 1-2 guys within a week.
I am curious. How do game portals make money? How much traffic do they get? Do they develop games themselves or do they buy them from a lone developer? What is the lifetime of an average flash game? How much money can he make? I started googling.
Biggest online game portals such as Kongregate are actual startup companies with a lot of money invested in them. Portals make their money from advertisement deals. According to Ada Chen, product marketing manager of Mochi Media, In-game ads have a click rate of up to 5 percent, while most Internet banner ads have click rates of less than 1 percent. She cites Bloons, created by NinjaKiwi, which she says rakes in $30,000 or more a month through various ad revenue streams.
Wow, $30,000/month from a stupid, simple shoot-balloons-with-arrows -game?! Now that’s something. I couldn’t find much information or numbers about traffic and money Kongregate or Miniclip get, but I assume they are doing better than fine.
What about flash game developers? It didn’t take long figure out that developers are at the very bottom of the food chain, and it didn’t surprise me a one bit. At the moment there seems to be two ways developers can make any money from their games; by getting a sponsorship from a portal, and/or using some in-game advertisement system such as MochiAds or GameJacket. Both pays some small ad revanue to developer everytime game is played. At the moment of writing GameJacket seems to have fixed CPM rate of $0.50 ( CPM = cost per mille, 50 cents for every thousand plays), and MochiAds CPM depends where the traffic is coming from.
GameJacket also promises to pay $1000 advance of your ad revanue if your game is good quality, and unpublished. If your game never earns $1000, you can still keep the money and if you make more, you’ll get paid as you normally would. Doesn’t sound so bad.
However, atleast for me finding a sponsorship and earning a nice fixed lump of cash sounds a lot more lucrative. Many articles say sponsorship prices range from $100 all the way up to $10,000 or more. FlashGameSponsorship lists some previous sponsorship prices, i.e. Asteroids Revenge III netted $4300 from CrazyMonkeyGames , Mole Hunter 2 $300 from GameGarage, and so on. Sponsorship prices and quality of games seems to vary a lot. However, this is rather encouraging. If relatively simple Asteroids -clone can bring home $4300, quality games with nicer graphics and more complex ideas should do a lot better, right?
Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, all this got me excited. I want to get into flash game business. I am a programmer, and have a little flash/actionscript development experience, i surely can code these games! I also like money, and goals. So I decided to set myself a new goal: Make 100k USD within 1 year from flash games! I would have picked $1 Million goal, but apparently some guy already has a 1 million usd flash game project. Wise man once said, when drugs and gambling doesn’t pay off anymore, it’s time to look into the online gaming market.
In next part[s] of this serie, I’ll telling you what I did, how did it go, and if I made any money. Stay tuned.
December 4th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Just do it, man!
I hope you will post progress reports with some fancy graphical plots. Then I can pull some fancy TA on it while waiting for more updates.
December 8th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
I just started a little (one man) company that develop casual flash games. I quit my job and hope to earn money only from games. So, good luck! (to me and to you) :)
December 8th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Good luck!
I think there are quite a few Flash dev’s out there looking to make a living from game development (myself included).
I’ll look forward to seeing how you get on.
December 8th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
You should definitely have a look at the Whirled microtransaction system and contest:
http://www.whirled.com/#landing-gamecontest
December 8th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Well, I have made that kind of money from my games, so I know it can be done, but I’ve never had a steady income stream enough to tempt me from my fullt-time job, just wild fluctuations that sometimes pay off. In my experience, the simpler and even ‘dumber’ the game (in some ways), the better.
Good luck with your plan.
December 9th, 2008 at 7:26 am
How do game portals make money? Too many of them do it by running Google ads and stealing every Flash game SWF they can get their greedy little hands on. Yes, there seem to be a lot of Flash games on the web. Look a little closer, and you’ll see that many sites are offering the SAME games, all stolen from the same places.
December 9th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Ergg, a lot of game portals don’t make money. What’s more, they turn people off flash games by accepting and publishing rubbish. (Not saying my games are great, but they were a labor of love).
I’d like to see more sites like orisinal.com.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:19 am
Your post gave me the motivation to develop a little flash game concept… Who knows, some cash may roll in…
Thanks.
March 5th, 2009 at 3:39 am
“If relatively simple Asteroids -clone can bring home $4300, quality games with nicer graphics and more complex ideas should do a lot better, right?”
Asteroids Revenge III is more than a simple Asteroids -clone
You will fail. you are too greedy.Great games are made by developers with passion for games, not money
September 18th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
I guess this is not really a form of “greed” in all means. The author merely wants to share his knowledge and impart on some of us who also aspires to venture on game developing.