Making Money From Your Game page 2

Tidenburg,

That money goal is absolutely within the sponsorship price range. The amount of time you spend on the game is not as relevant as the game itself (what it does, how it looks)… at least to the potential sponsors.

If the game is fun, looks good (very important) and has all that stuff you say you could probably get more then £600 if you shop it around a bit.

ummm I never said $100K to anyone. They took my best month and multiplied it out! What I would like to say, and hopefully not ruffle Emily’s feathers too much, is that ~90% of the revenue from Desktop TD was generated on my own site and not on portals. And I think that is because the back end to DTD has proven to be quite sticky. The portals did the job of advertising nicely tho :)

I suggest add http://blitzgamer.com/index.php?DEVELOPERS
for list of sponsors.
this topic a realy huge help for me

@AdamSchroeder
I mever found terms for mochiads…

Anyhow, I don’t think that’s how they do it. Maybe who they pay it to has to be 18 though…

I mever found terms for mochiads…

Here they are.

BY USING ALL OR ANY PORTION OF THE SERVICE OR BY CREATING A USER ACCOUNT WITH MOCHI MEDIA, YOU REPRESENT THAT YOU ARE AT LEAST 18 YEARS OF AGE…

Well, I’ve made money from Flash development almost entirely through sponsorship (getting someone to put their splash logo and links in the game). Since January of last year, I’ve made a little under $7,000 total. Which is nuts now that I look back on it.

Two things to always try to do:
1) Always show your game to more than one site. Let them compete over it. Maybe one site will give you $500. Tell someone else that, and maybe they’ll try to beat it, and offer $600. It goes up from there. I’ve had a game go from an original offer of $500 to a final price of $1,500.
2) Meet people in the industry. Talk to guys who own sites, get to know them. Figure out who you like and who’s an asshole. Figure out who’s got a big site, and who’s got a smaller site. Talk to people who lots of Flash gamers recognize. This way you might get lucky and get yourself into projects with people who are “high up” and will get your name out there.

Good luck guys, it’s a pretty interesting business.

Hello from FlowPlay!

We’re a new company looking for Flash games either for sponsorship or for nonexclusive licensing. In either case, we pay a very competitive yearly licensing fee for any game that we use on our website. Just send us a URL or SWF to derrick@flowplay.com

@ facelesscoward && @AdamSchroeder

Your right. How did I miss that? Anyway, it’s ok. They don’t ask for a nam at signup, so poof – the account is now my dad’s. LOL.

@Derrickm

Just for the record, what is a “yearly licencing fee”? Does that mean you pay every year, depending on how many its it gets (because that seems kind of unpractical)?

These are interesting times to be a game developer. :)

Google Entering Video Game Ad Market

BTW
I’m nearing the completion and final sponsorship of Asteroids Revenge III – Crash to survive. I’ll have a bit more to say about that process once everything is finalized. This one is a “significant” (to put it lightly) improvement over the first 2. :)

I was going to post about that Google in-game ads thing, but you beat me to it. :)

The company didn’t give a timeline for availability of “AdSense for Games,” apart from Schaffer describing it as “soon.”

That was from the link. I’m not quite sure how soon “soon” is in business, but it is probably faster to wait for a mochiads invite.

I actually have a MochiAds account. Took them about a year to get back to me… lol but i haven’t done much with it…

How are the rates? Are they about the same as in kong?

The rates that MochiAd’s pay are always changing and different people get different results. I’ve been getting about $.40 per 1000 impressions.

I’m certain that “AdSense for Games” will not be available to the indie developer anytime soon. However it appears that MochiAds is already working with google on some level.
Link

Hey guys,

Sorry to bump this up to the top again, but thought I’d throw in my two cents with our experiences with Papa Louie. We just did a talk about the game and a bit about our distribution and revenue, so I thought I’d share in case anyone was interested.

First of all, we had to take into account the length of development time and what we thought the game was worth — for us, it didn’t make sense to go with a sponsorship because the earnings were low and a one-time affair, and once certain sponsors distribute the game around the web for free it’s a bit tough to get any other income from the game. So we went with a couple approaches all at once:

1. Release on our own website with MochiAds and Google AdSense surrounding.
For this, we did a “media blitz” where we sent out a mini press release / link to a ton of blogs, portals, review sites, news aggregators, etc. As the link spread around, many sites and portals would frame our game page, which would increase our earnings on the Google Adsense in the surrounding pages (but killed us on bandwidth for awhile). Because of all this linking and framing, we managed to drive an average of 50,000 hits per day to the game page over the first few months. The MochiAds also performed very well, especially that first week when we had a spike in traffic.

2. License to Miniclip for non-exclusive license with flat fee.
We emailed Miniclip directly and asked if they would be interested in the game, and mentioned up-front that we needed it to be non-exclusive as we were releasing elsewhere as well. They’ll negotiate flat fees for games if they’re interested, and the fee is greater than you would get with a sponsorship (plus, you’ve still got control to take it elsewhere!)

3. License to Shockwave for non-exclusive ad-revenue share.
We also contacted Shockwave to see if they would be interested in a non-exclusive license. With Shockwave, they offer ad revenue share rather than flat fees. It brings in some decent continuing income, especially with their volume of traffic.

4. License/submit to Kongregate for ad-revenue share.
We also submitted the game to Kongregate for ad-revenue share, and obviously went with the non-exclusive settings since we were already spreading the game around.

For our next game, we’re planning to do the same, but will also at a certain point release the game into the wild with MochiAds interstitials to see how that will compare to keeping it stuck on our own site.

Hope this is helpful!

I don’t believe that anyone can really make a ton of money off of flash games except super elite game makers.

make about $8 a day on jelly blocks in mochiads and google adsense

kind of dying down though

YAY! Mochiads invite! Finally.

And what henry said; I kind of agree. But then; the most I’ve ever gotten for a game is 350$. (still about 20$/hour, very nice pay for someone my age).

Actually, I make quite a decent living from making Flash games.

How big are your games?

Do you spend, say, 10 hours on a game, or 100, or 1000?

Probably most often between 40-200, with the bigger ones being 300+.

To offer my experiences with sponsorship:

If you’ve got it set up with MochiAds (you could look into getting signed up in a parent’s name), some ads on your own site, a sponsorship and some Kong winnings here and there, you can make a fair bit. Not enough to live on, but easily enough to afford a few extra things (I love my two new 22" monitors, thanks Orb :) ).

For which sponsor to go for, I’d suggest Kongregate. Not only are they quick, friendly and not out to cheat you financially, but, and it may not sound important, but their logo looks good. I was a bit put off by previous sponsors who sent me a pixelated or badly working logo to put in my game.

You should remember that, although you need to spend time on games, time isn’t everything. The idea behind the game is really what counts, the time you work on it merely helps the idea along.

The amount you’ll get per game will increase each time. Strangely, I’ve had my earnings almost exactly double for each game I’ve had sponsored (let’s hope it continues like that, eh?).

@Kalinium

What you said about time – it’s true. But the time you spend usually reflects the worth of the idea. Me, I spend more tijme on a good idea then on a bearable one.

And what you said about an increase in pay – that I haven’t seen yet. But maybe in the future, hopefully…

@ arcadecoder

You see, I spend 2 – 20 hours on a game normally, with a record of about 40$.

@ everyone

Anothe

by the way, how many hits do you guys get on average?

$40/hour I think is a very nice rate for a sponsored game. I doubt you would be able to get that on a really big game if you go the sponsor route. Although you could certainly exceed that by far if you market the game yourself and its successful.

I think I’m only going to end up at $20-$25/hour for the time I put into Asteroids Revenge 3 (its sponsored by CrazyMonkeyGames.com and should be released soon). I’ve spent A LOT of time on that game. Its not an hourly rate I would be happy with in most cases… but making games is FUN and I’m hoping it will lead to other interesting opportunities if it is successful.

Without a doubt you make more money with a good idea executed simply and sponsored for a smaller amount of money. I could totally see getting $500 for a game that takes 10-12 hours to make.

I think you would have an incredibly hard time getting a sponsor to pay 10K for a game that took 200-240 hours to produce.

As you said yrudoy $20/hour is a fortune for your age. When I was 16 I made $5/hour putting sandpaper into packages for 20 hours a week. The time you spend building games is a direct investment into your skills for the future. You are in a nice position. :)