Earn money making flash games

Making money making games? discussion on Kongregate

Making money in the video game business is usually a pretty simple proposition: There may be some middlemen like producers and retailers in there, and the actual payment could be a purchase, subscription or rental, but when you boil it down, the pay-to-play model has defined the business of video games since the days of the arcade.

But the world of free-to-play browser-based Flash and Java games has largely thrown this business arrangement on its head. This is partly because it had to. People have been trained by sites like Hotmail and Google to expect web services -- even good ones -- to be free to use. The New York Times recently abandoned its Times Select online subscription service , possibly after realizing that people weren't willing to pay good money for the kinds of opinions that were available for free on hundreds of blogs.

Can you really make money making Flash Games? For real?

Similarly, any online game site that starts charging money for content risks losing players to the myriad free alternatives. Like most other producers of free web content, Flash developers are increasingly looking to ads to monetize their games. It's a tough balancing act, though, because it doesn't take much overt marketing to turn off a potential player.

Others don't think putting a short message before a web game is a major inconvenience. These types of things have been around for a long time -- people have put their logos, which are basically ads, at the beginning of the game, during the pre-loader. When we created MochiAds, we looked at it and said, 'Is this going to offend people? People are already used to it. MochiAds' system has a leg up on portal sites like Kongregate, Hsu claims, because their ads will stay with the game no matter how many sites it eventually ends up on.

Not everybody's gonna visit major portals anymore -- it's not about Yahoo or MSN or AOL. We're moving beyond the walled garden and people are spreading out to MySpace and Facebook -- everybody has their sort of niche sites.

As these things spread, content spreads. We're trying to educate advertisers that it's not so much about the site they reach, but the people they reach.

This diffuse, multi-site advertising strategy is working well for many Flash developers, Hsu says, with some making thousands of dollars a month from MochiAds.

It's very inspiring for us to get emails saying, 'Hey, I quit my job and I'm making games full time,' and we see from the revenues they're definitely able to do that. The beautiful thing is, not only are they getting ad income now but they're seeing more opportunities, licensing deals, development contracts But Kongregate's Greer thinks that Flash games won't really get out of the gaming ghetto until developers are able to charge for them.

As it stands now, the advertising and sponsorship money involved is just too small. The relatively low ceilings mean the best developers tend to not stick around in the Flash market, Greer says.

But convince players to pay a small fee for the games, and everything changes, Greer says. You can get a really good artist to help you and work for six months. You can do deep multiplayer missions, you can do co-op, you can do all kinds of stuff that isn't really available right now. Despite competition from free games, Greer thinks convincing players to make these small payments for web games isn't out of the question, as long as the content is there to keep people coming back.

His inspiration in this regard is his previous employer, EA's Pogo, which has 1. Flash games, right now, it's something you spend ten or twenty minutes on How do you get players to make that sort of time commitment?

One way is to appeal to their vanity. On Pogo, only paid subscribers get customizable avatars and badges that advertise their achievements to the community.

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One of our investors said 'every successful consumer website has to appeal to one of the seven deadly sins. Even if you don't charge for your content, that pride can also work to your advantage if you've built a community of players that want to advertise their support of the game. Some players have dozens of stars next to their names, telling the world that they've given hundreds of dollars for a game they could have played for free.

More than vanity, though, what really convinces people to donate, Dewsbury says, is a sense that the money will go towards making the game better. If that's not enough, Dewsbury says he's currently developing a change to the donation system that will give players even more reason to voluntarily hand over their cash. While he's coy on the details, Dewsbury says the change will help donators in the game without unbalancing the experience. I would call it meta-game value.

People are more willing to support it if they get extra value back. Though advertising still makes up 80 percent of his revenue from the games, Dewsbury seems less enthusiastic about the future of the ads on the site. I like simple interfaces, so I like ads to be clear and unobtrusive. It's also an image issue -- I think too many ads can push a developer away from a community.