Are you trying to make flash games for a living, but having a hard time making ends meet? Have you made an engaging & fun game, then spent months polishing and tweaking it to perfection before releasing it onto the world? Maybe you got it right and it's a hit – it's been played and enjoyed by literally millions of people! Well time to sit back and watch the pennies roll in, my friend, because that's all you're going to be getting. This may sound alarming, but it's what most flash game developers have experienced using what I call the 'Ad Model' of monetisation.

All this could be yours!

The Ad Model

Over the last few years Flash gaming has enjoyed a massive rise in both the quality and quantity of games on the market. What caused this? The online ad market boomed. It suddenly became (marginally) profitable to build a flash game, throw in some easily-included ads and set it free on the internet. A few well-documented hits made a relatively large amount of money, yet were often made by a single developer working in his spare time over the course of a few months (as previously flash simply couldn't fund an actual team of developers), and this caused a 'gold rush' effect of developers piling into the flash games space. Over time the ad model for flash games has matured into a market where developers can make money from various sources:

• In-Game Ads: in-game ads such as MochiAds, usually shown once while the game is loading
• Around-Game Ads: site ads like Google AdSense shown around the flash game either on the developer's own site, or on a site like Kongregate or Newgrounds which offers revenue share to developers
• Sponsorship: this is where a portal pays the developer to 'tag' their game with the portal's branding (and usually a 'more games' link), effectively paying for traffic delivered to the portal as the game is distributed around the internet. FlashGameLicense was set up to help developers find sponsors for their games, and it has proven to be very effective.
• Licensing: this is where a portal or site pays a developer for a one-off license to use their game; generally they pay a fixed fee to be able to use the game without the sponsor logo, in-game ads, links to the developer's site, etc on their own site; multiple licenses can be sold alongside a sponsorship

Generally speaking you can, and should, use all these options at once as Ada Chen advised in a talk she gave at Casual Connect in 2008. This model is working for some developers, the ones who can efficiently make engaging, short flash games and keep churning them out, but it's really only been a success for very few. Most flash game developers are still relying on other sources than ad-funded games to keep going full-time (for example, making games on contract for third parties).

Not Enough To Go Around

The problem with the ad model is that all the money is coming from one limited pool: advertising. You might find that sponsorship and licensing get you significantly more than in-game ads, but the money from those things comes from that same pool. Portals buy traffic from you (via sponsorship/licensing) with the money they earn from .. advertising! The amount of money in the advertising pool is limited, plus needs to be shared out amongst a whole load of middlemen before it trickles through to developers. No one has explained this better than Dan Cook in his recent Flash Love Letter, Part 1:

Image by Dan Cook, used with permission

A Better Model

Luckily there's a better way to fund game development than scrounging for ad-pennies. It's been proven in almost every form of consumer entertainment ever made, from theatre to music to cinema and yes, even games: ask the consumer of the entertainment to pay you for providing it. That's it. Asking the players to fund game development takes away the dilution effect of trying to get ads to pay everyone's cut, and directly rewards the developer regardless of the size of their 'aggregated traffic-power'. It works for all those other kinds of entertainment, and it certainly works for the rest of the gaming industry.

And it can work for flash games too. Several developers have been successfully charging players for full versions of their free flash games, by integrating a payment processor such as PayPal. This method (often called a "demo", write that down) is so proven that almost no console or PC game doesn't use it. Others have tried splitting out the purchase into smaller bundles using a microtransaction/virtual currency provider, and are charging for decorative things like a fancy hat or small upgrades like level packs and new weapons instead of selling the whole game in one go. In fact recently launched providers such as MochiCoins, GamerSafe and Heyzap have made it easier than ever for flash developers to take payments from players. One advantage of the idea of using virtual items, temporary powerups, or other small purchases is that you aren't putting a cap on how much your biggest fans are able to spend on your game. Generally speaking selling virtual items works best in a persistant-world / MMO style of game, where you can put all kinds of social and economic effects into play to really leverage the idea – just look at this breakdown.

Regardless of how you are charging players, or what they are paying for, the fact that you are charging at all means you are using what I call the 'Premium Flash Game' revenue model.

Premium Games Need To Be Frickin' Sweet

One downside to charging money upfront is that you need to make players fall in love with your game before they will pull out the credit card, and that means spending a lot more time polishing the gameplay and expanding the content before release. The quality level of today's (and yesterday's!) flash games is definitely high enough to convince players to pay – developers just need to focus on expanding the experience; make "long form games" instead of focusing on quick, throw-away games. Again no one's explained this better than Dan Cook, so make sure to read his Flash Love Letter, Part 2 – you can do it right now if you like, we'll pause this part of the internet until you come back.

And Now For Some Examples

Lets have a look at some real-world examples of revenue made by flash developers using the Ad Model, and compare them to ones using the Premium Model. I'm going to use 'Gross eCPM', a term I just made up, as the baseline stat to compare these ad-based apples versus premium oranges. If you aren't familiar with it, eCPM is an advertiser's term and stands for effective cost-per-mille – or how much an advertiser has to pay out per 1,000 impressions of their ad on average. As the payee, you can think of it as how much revenue you made per thousand plays of your ad-enabled game. What I call Gross eCPM is calculated by taking the total amount of plays of a game, and dividing it by the total revenue made from them (whether it be from ads, sponsorship, microtransactions or full game purchases). This handily lets us compare two very different ways of monetising with a single comparative number.

First up let's look at the numbers for some flash games using the traditional Ad Model to generate revenue:

Desktop Tower Defense (play)
One of the original 'break out hits' of modern free flash games, created by a single developer, and supported by ads inside & around the game.

Total Plays: 15 million in the first few months
Gross Revenue: ~$12,000 in that same time frame
Gross eCPM: ~$0.80
[source]

Mytheria (play)
A fairly typical successful flash game, though not a massive hit in terms of plays

Total Plays: 3.7 million plays to date
Gross Revenue: ~$8,200 to date
Gross eCPM: ~$2.22
[source: email interview]

Armor Wars (play)
Another game by the same developer as Mytheria (Diffusion Games), released afterwards to stronger interest from sponsors

Total Plays: 2.2 million plays to date
Gross Revenue: ~$9,300 to date
Gross eCPM: ~$4.23
[source: email interview]

Chronotron (play)
Another game created by a single developer, and supported largely by revenue share on ads on Kongregate.

Total Plays: 7 million at time of this article
Gross Revenue: ~$15,000 in that same time frame
Gross eCPM: ~$2.14
[source]

Now let's have a look at some games using the Premium Model by selling full games:

Fantastic Contraption (play)
A free-to-play flash game, hosted on it's own site plus some portals, with a premium unlock for $10 that let you make your own levels and play other people's custom levels. Included solution-sharing via unique URL that helped it spread virally.

Total Plays: "over 3.5M unique users in the first 3 or so months"
Gross Revenue: "for every unique site visitor, he converts 0.5% to a paid version [at $10]" = ~$175,000
Gross eCPM: ~$50.00
[source]

Now Boarding (play)
A free-to-play flash game hosted on various portals that had an upsell to a downloadable for-sale version (at ~$15)

Total Plays: 4.2M – 6.2M plays (some portals made it impossible to track this, hence the range) over the last year
Gross Revenue: 10,500 sales so far x $15 = ~$155,000
Gross eCPM: ~$25.00-36.90, depending on above
[source: phone interview]

And some games using the Premium Model by using microtransactions:

Twin Shot (play)
A free-to-play flash game by Nitrome with various virtual currency unlocks, including a level pack and cheats

Total Plays: "over 10 million plays"
Gross Revenue: unspecified (but calculations from the eCPM they gave says it would be about $25,000 at the time of the Q&A)
Gross eCPM: ~$2.50 but up to around $5.00 in english speaking territories (based on 60% developer cut of Mochi Coins revenue alone)
[source]

SAS: Zombie Assault 2 (play)
A free-to-play flash game by Ninja Kiwi with various virtual currency unlocks

Total Plays: "about 5.7M plays and 700k plays from the expansion pack" = 6.4M plays
Gross Revenue: ~$22,400
Gross eCPM: ~$3.50 but up to over $11.00 in english speaking territories (based on 60% developer cut of Mochi Coin revenue alone)
[source]

Minions On Ice (play)
A free-to-play multiplayer flash game by the Casual Collective where you could pay to get bonuses and access to extra vehicles quicker than normal

Total Plays: n/a
Gross Revenue: n/a
Gross eCPM: an ARPU of $0.40 was mentioned by the developer, which means $0.40 revenue per unique player. My Gross eCPM counts total plays rather than unique plays, but if we ignore that we would get a Gross eCPM of $400; if we had the 'total plays' number this would be lower – but not all that much lower.
[source]

That's a massive, orders-of-magnitude difference between the revenue rate for ad-funded flash games and premium flash games. And once you start charging the players instead of hoping for ad money, the sky's the limit. Puzzle Pirates, a casual MMO run by Three Rings revealed last year that they make make an ARPU of ~$1.50 per player, per month – which would give a comparative Gross eCPM of ~$1,500. Yep.

Edit: Daniel James (Three Rings CEO) left a comment giving me a much better way to calculate a comparable 'Gross eCPM' for Puzzle Pirates. He says for every 1,000 new visitors to the site they get about 100 who actually download & play, leading to a lifetime value of about $200-$500; so a better 'Gross eCPM' for Puzzle Pirates (over many months) is ~$200-500.

Set Phasers To Premium

I hope this has convinced you, the flash game developer, to seriously consider moving away from the Ad Model and moving into Premium Flash Games. It's the future – embrace it.

PS- Many thanks to all the flash developers who have shared their revenue numbers with the rest of the industry. We too will be doing this as we work on our first game.

This post has also been published on the Mochi Land blog. Thanks Mochi!

We're building a fairly simple game featuring turn-based battles with fantasy units. This is the skeleton of the battle system I've devised – I'd love any feedback or comments anyone has to help me improve it.

Overview

The game is a turn-based tactics game where you start with a small warband of rookie units, then fight battles with them. Doing well in battles can improve your units, and give you money to expand your warband or improve the equipment of your existing units. It will be a single player game.

Battles

Battles take place on fairly small square-based maps (top-down), probably under 20×20 tiles. Your warband will start with about 3-5 members and probably max out around 10, so battles shouldn't be massively long affairs. You win by eliminating the enemy.

Battle System Goals

1. Be simple & easy to understand at first
2. But have emergent complexity
3. Have an element of chance, but not be ruled by it
4. Be fun to play through each battle (tactical choices + challenge)
5. Be rewarding to build up your warband over time (strategic choices)

Units

Each unit is a fantasy-themed warrior with the following stats:

• Speed: squares moved per turn (avg 5)
• Health: Damage taken before being removed from battle (avg 20)
• Strength: Ability with melee weapons (avg 5)
• Agility: Ability with ranged weapons (avg 5)
• Armor: Depends on equipment

Units can also have skills though most will start as rookies with no skills. Skills will give new abilities and are the main vehicle for 'emergent complexity' where combinations of skills will yield new & interesting tactics.

Units' battle power will largely depend on their equipment, particularly as rookies. This can be upgraded between battles. Units will be of a certain type/class that will dictate their skill choices (eg infantry / archer / scout / cavalry).

Attacks

Each turn a unit can move and then attack. Range of melee weapons is adjacent; for ranged weapons it is adjacent + diagonally. When you move into a square next to an enemy (their 'zone of control') your move ends (though you can still attack them), meaning you can't run through to target the weaker/wounded enemy at the back.

When you make a melee attack you add your strength to the strength of your weapon and roll a 1d10:
1-2: miss
3-9: hit
10: critical hit

If you hit you add the roll value (3-10) to your attack strength to get a damage total. The target's armour value is then subtracted from this to get the actual damage sustained. A critical hit means the target's armour value is halved for this attack. Also some weapon types have some special rules, explained below.

Ranged weapons work the same way except you add your agility to the weapon strength, and the enemy can only counter-attack if they are also using a ranged weapon.

Counter-Attacks

If a unit survives an attack they immediately attack the unit that attacked them, using all the normal attack rules. Each unit can only make one counter attack per turn, no matter how many times they are attacked that turn. A unit with only a melee weapon cannot counterattack when attacked by a ranged weapon. A unit with a ranged weapon attacked by a melee unit counterattacks with their knife rather than their ranged weapon.

Equipment

All equipment is of a certain type with basic rules governing it; within each type there are actual items of varying cost & power (eg of type sword: short sword, long sword, fine broadsword, etc)

Armour Types:

1. None: +0 to armour; no penalties.
2. Leather: +1-3 armour; no penalties.
3. Chain: +4-6 armour; slight penalty to speed and medium penalty to agility
4. Plate: +7-10 armour; medium penalty to speed and high penalty to agility
5. Shield: +1-4 bonus to armour; bonus doubled vs 1st attack sustained each turn (shield block)

Weapon Types:

1. Knife: free for all units (eg ranged units), allows basic melee attack with +0 strength
2. Sword: versatile melee weapon; +strength based on quality of sword (eg short sword: +1, long sword: +2, etc); allows 'parry' which adds strength to armour vs 1st attack sustained each turn (vs melee only)
3. Axe: offensive melee weapon; +strength based on quality but higher than comparable swords (double?); bonus vs shields (bonus halved?)
4. Spear: defensive melee weapon; +strength based on quality, similar power as comparable swords; bonus to +strength when counter-attacking; allows 'first-strike' when attacked which lets you deliver your counter-attack before the enemy makes their attack
5. 2-handed sword/axe: same special rule as 1-handed version but higher strength (eg +4); can't use shield
6. Bow: Ranged attack (uses agility; can attack diagonally; melee units can't counterattack); can't use shield

Thoughts

The main goal here is allowing a fairly complex 'emergent' set of tactics from a simple enough system. Things that allow this are the choices of weapon types vs different targets; positioning during battles being important (ganging up is best, but difficult due to zones of control). Your first battle would feature pretty much all of the above.

Later you would add some more complexity with the 'skills' units gain as they level up. For example a scout type of unit could choose 'Evade' which lets them ignore the first zone of control they walk into each turn, and so on.

We're currently putting all this into our game prototype to play around with it; we'll feed back on what we think works in the future. Oh and if you've gotten this far, you must be some sort of hardcore turn-based strategy / RPG nerd, so give us some suggestions we could use to make the battle system better!

The Best of the Best

Make It Big In Games

Top notch articles from Jeff Tunnell about the business of making & selling games. Exceedingly high average quality of posts.  A must-subscribe.

As an Indie game developer that is going to spend your own money to make a game, it is extremely important to decide which market you want to tackle, and that really comes down to what game you want to make. I believe it is incredibly important to only make games that you are passionate about. All game development gets hard, and when the going gets hard, the only thing that will get you through it is passion. Read full post

Lost Garden

Superb writing on art & design in games, with the fantastic bonus of giving away actual art resources you can use in your own games! Infrequent posts but totally worthwhile.

Out of all this discussion about graphics, never lose sight of the big picture. The single most important thing is for you to finish your game. Iterating towards completion is the root of all practical knowledge about game development. Putting a complete game in the hands of player is how you'll learn to make your future games shake the world to its core.

If you are telling yourself "Oh, I can't complete my game because I don't have an artist," be honest with yourself. You are making excuses. Graphics are not an impediment to making a great game. Do what ever it takes to finish your game. Read full post

The Bottom Feeder

Jeff Vogel has been making old-school single player RPGs since 1994 but only started blogging this year. A treasure trove of insight for indie game developers already, and will only get better.

I am going to give full sales results for our game Geneforge 4: Rebellion. I am not the first Indie developer to reveal this sort of information. However, most public sales figures come from projects that were either blockbusters or disastrous. But our games have never landed in either pool. I have been doing this for a living for almost fifteen years. I make good money, but I'm not a rich guy. At the same time, I have been unusually successful in this business, if for nothing else that I HAVE done it for a living for a long time. Read full post

The Forge

Interesting business-themed articles, particularly about charging models for MMOs, microtransactions & virtual goods.

Despite my obvious affection for virtual asset sales in a free-to-play model, I don’t think the decision to go free-to-play or subscription (or one of a myriad of other business models for MMOs) is that simple. It’s not purely about whether you’re reaching a larger audience and I don’t believe it’s a given that you’ll make more money, overall, with the free-to-play model. I think it’s largely dependent on the game you make and the audience that ends up developing for it. Read full post

Untold Entertainment Blog

Covers a variety of topics but what I really love are the rants (example below). Love the epic rants. More please!

You wouldn’t wax philosphical about how you’ll dilute the intellectual property or how the fanbase will criticize you for selling out. You’re running an advertising-based world, and as far as advertising goes, Coke is the holy grail. You will relax your muscles and allow the Coca-Cola corporation to ram its fistfuls of hot, sweaty cash wherever it so chooses. Read full post

game poetry

Great all-rounder blog covering business & technical advice with a slant towards Flash games.

The ultimate question for a sponsor is, “How much traffic will this game drive to my site?” The quality of your game is ultimately only important with regard to its potential distribution/viral spread, and its viral spread is only important with regard to how many clicks this will generate. But the CTR is crucial as well. A game with 1 million plays and a 5% CTR is not as valuable to a sponsor as a game with 600,000 plays and a 10% CTR.

So show your sponsor what kind of CTR your game can drive. Put in some placeholder branding. Show where the links will be. If you’re willing to offer some exclusive content, show the sponsor — make one version with the content unlocked, and another version with it locked and what the link back to the sponsor’s site to play this content will look like. Don’t wait for a sponsor to request these things. Read full post

Worth A Look

MochiLand: Mochi Media run this community blog that showcases top flash games and content written by game developers themselves. Example

DESIGNER NOTES: Writings by one of the designers on Civ 3 and 4 – I particularly like the longer posts. Example

Photon Storm: Focused on flash game development and marketing. Definitely check out the example. Example

8-Bit Rocket: Covers a bit of a wide variety of things (from Atari retro to Flash to Silverlight), perhaps too wide! Example

Flash Truth: Flash games, particularly the business side of things; some great stuff. Example

Emanuele Feronato: Flash games & more. A little too much filler but I found the 'numbers' posts to be excellent. Example

Streaming Colour Dev Blog: Some great posts about (not) making money in the iPhone space. Example

Ludus Novus: Really, really like the column he's writing for GameSetWatch, follow the blog to find out when they are posted. Example

Freelance Flash Games News: A mixed bag of flash gamedev related stuff. Example

Gaming Your Way: Frequent gamedev tips & other nuggets. Example

Made That Cool Game

2D Boy Blog: Creators of World of Goo.

Kloonigames Blog: Creator of Crayon Physics Deluxe

Cliffski's Blog: Creator of Democracy / Kudos

Wolfire Blog: Creators of Lugaru / Overgrowth

Braid Blog: Creator of Braid

Suggest More!

I'm always on the lookout for quality game development blogs, so if you know some I haven't covered please leave a comment! Any that make it into my RSS reader and survive my next RSS-pruning massacre will be added into this post.

Update

Plenty of good gamedev blogs suggested in the comments. Check out these worthy additions to the list:

Michael James Williams: Very focused blog with excellent AS3 tutorials, including a full series showing how to make an avoider game.

Mr Sun Studios: Another blog focused on AS3 game tutorials, with a big backlog of articles.

Trent Polack: Excellent game design blog, in particular check out the game design round table posts.

Iain Lobb: Only just subscribed but it's pretty good so far- a mix of flash and general game design.

Tales of the Rampant Coyote: Excellent blog covering design & development of RPGs of all kind. Nicely focused!

Troy Gilbert: Another good one with plenty of reading in the archives.

That should satisfy your RSS cravings for a while!

Simon Carless on Indie Sales stats

A very in-depth presentation by Simon Carless (chairman of the Independent Games Festival) where he has collated all the sales stats he can find for indie games split across Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, WiiWare, the iPhone, and PC:

- A recent interview (March 2009) revealed that early puzzle title Enigmo has now sold 810,000 units (as cheaply as $0.99 for many of them, though)
- Super Monkey Ball sold 500,000 units as of November 2008 at as high as $9.99 (!!) – MAJOR EXCEPTION due to early adoption
- Even for newer titles on a day by day basis, stats are impressive: iShoot was #1 in the App Store on January 11th 2009 with 17,000 downloads at $2.99 each – in one day – $35,700 to developer.

And here's all his slides as he has kindly uploaded them for our enjoyment.

Ron Carmel of 2D Boy explains what it cost to make World Of Goo

A particularly interesting talk by one of the creators of last year's massive indie hit World Of Goo, where he basically answers the question 'How much money do you need to start an independent game studio?' (Answer: $116,000). They also spill the beans on where all the revenue has come in for World of Goo (Steam vs WiiWare vs others).

Read the full summary now, it's totally worthwhile.

Edit: 2D Boy put their slides from this presentation up on their blog, grab them here.

Stardock CEO on why hardcore PC games are still totally viable

Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock (publisher of Sins of a Solar Empire, among others) gave a talk detailing why hardcore strategy games can still do extremely well. Check out the numbers:

Galactic Civilizations II

• $1.2 million budget (original plus two expansions)
• $500,000 marketing
• $500,000 distribution
• $10 million revenue

"I'll go out on a limb and say a ten-to-one ratio of investment to earnings is good," joked Wardell.

Nice to see the big numbers! Read the full summary here.

Fez and World of Goo developers talk about promoting your game without a budget

Another extremely interesting one, this time with Kyle Gabler (World of Goo) and Phil Fish (Fez) talking about how to drum up hype for a game on the usual marketing budget of the indie game developer (zilch of course!). If you don't know what Fez is (it's only due to be finished sometime this year, after all) have a look at this video:

Some good points in their presentation (#1 being "Don't spend money – just talk. Give interviews, do podcasts, meet people, etc"). Have a look at this summary on GameSpot or this even better one by Untold Entertainment (the World of Goo / Fez talk is about halfway down).

No matter how smart the AI, it's not the same as a human opponent!

As we design our first game we've been forced to look at the differences between how a single player game is played compared to a multiplayer (PvP) one. The goals of the player are often opposing, the rewards for playing are different, and how the player deals with setbacks is different. Since we are building a single player tactics game now but will later be expanding on it to deliver a multiplayer, PvP version this means we have to walk a difficult tightrope. We want the single player game to work and we want the gameplay to transition later on.

The Single Player Tactical Game

Our short term goal is to build a simple tactical turn-based game where you start with a team of rookies, and fight battles against the computer to progress. You can earn new skills for your units, and money to expand the team or buy better equipment in between battles. We also want to keep it as simple as possible so we can get a fully working game published and 'done'.

The Persistent PvP Tactical Game

Our long term goal is to build an exciting PvP tactics game with persistent units. Again you take control of a gang of recruits, poorly equipped and unskilled to begin with. The only way to advance your units is to take on other human players in tactical turn-based battles. As you win (or lose) games your units will gain skills and you will gain money to recruit more units or buy nicer toys for your existing ones.

Different Design Goals

Why is it so hard to make a game 'system' that will work well for both audiences? In both cases you need to keep individual battles tactical, fun, and challenging; you also want the longer term team-building in between battles to have depth and keep the player interested and wanting to play another battle.

In the single player game each battle is basically a puzzle: a tactical challenge where a clever player can easily outwit the computer AI. The difficulty level is  ramped up by giving the computer more and more of an advantage in later battles, be that more units, better units or other ingame factors.  The player is generally able to save & load their game, so if things go awfully wrong and they lose several units in one turn they will just load and try things a different way. You really want to avoid this: you want a game that can be played without constantly saving & reloading in case of mistakes, which effectively removes the challenge. Gregory Weir recently published an excellent column on failure, difficulty, and punishment in games that touches on this; worth a read.

This means removing (or minimising) some of the key things that have the opposite effect in a PvP environment. You need to make the game more arcadey and forgiving, and less nailbiting and random. For example, in the PvP game system when you take out a unit in battle there should be a small chance of permanent damage, be it death or some sort of crippling injury. In a PvP environment this is great fun! You have the fun factor of occasionally wrecking your opponent's best units while even if you are winning a battle you could lose a much-loved and skilled up unit at any time. Add in a community around the battles (like a forum) and you can mock & gloat, or vow revenge! This also only works in a PvP game as there is no mid-battle saving and loading; everything that happens is final.

Another thing that works well in a PvP tactics game but would only lead to frustration in the single player version is randomness. If you are playing against a human player and gain the upper hand in a game without any randomness you have effectively won the battle. It may take a while, but as long as neither player makes any tactical mistakes the game is going to go your way in the end. This makes it no fun for the losing player who is nevertheless forced to play out the game.

Weewar: blue has just ensured victory but the game goes on

A perfect example of this is Weewar, a fun web-based multiplayer clone of the Battle Isle series of games, which unfortunately suffers from this problem. Add in randomness (or at least a way to hide your units and surprise your opponent) and it's worthwhile for the losing player to play on; through either good luck or great skill they may be able to turn the battle around!

Our Approach

What we're going to do is go for a slightly more arcadey system for the single player game, and then add things like randomness and permanent unit removal into the mix when we develop the PvP game. One way of helping people transition between the rulesets would be to have an unlockable 'hardcore' mode available once you beat the single player game; this would enable permanent unit death and disable in-battle saving. Naturally it would be much harder (and more frustrating) – but you would only be playing it if you really like the game and it would both give the game replayability and let players get used to some of the ideas we want in the PvP version.

Itsa Money!

We want to build up this part-time game development gig into a successful business, so we have to think about how to make this profitable from the beginning! Here's how we are going to monetise the games we are working on – if you are a game developer (or thinking of becoming one) this should be very helpful to you too!

Casual Flash Game

The first game we are building is a casual flash game: playable within a browser without a powerful gaming PC and immediately ready to play without a big download. There is a huge, huge market for flash games with literally hundreds of millions of people playing them every day – in fact more people play games online than on consoles! The downside is that while console gamers are used to shelling out giant wads of cash for games (or even measly extra controllers), online punters have gotten used to getting things for free. Despite this there are still opportunities to make some serious cash:

Advertising

Wherever there are eyeballs looking at something, there are brands paying to advertise to them. Online gaming is a natural fit for this. One way of ad-enabling your casual game is to add in-game advertising (companies like MochiAds, GameJacket or CPMStar make this very easy), while another good way is to host the game on your own site and serve ads beside it using Google AdSense. Both ways will make you good money, but only if you can get millions of people to play your game. The most popular games have made tens of thousands of dollars from advertising alone – some of which were games made by a single developer in a couple of months! Have a look at these examples of cash made from ads in casual games:

• Bloons (2 developers) making $30,000 a month
• MochiAds forum thread about revenue totals
• 1 developer, over $4,500 in 1 year
• 1 developer, over $1,700 in 1 month

If you do make a super-popular hit you can make a lot of money this way, however it's not easy and the payout for less popular games is hardly enough to make you quit your day job! Have a read of Ryan of Untold Entertainment's excellent Pimp My Game series of articles where he puts a game he made in 48 hours through the various ways of making money – I think it's up to $17 of sweet, sweet profit so far.

Sponsorship

The most popular gaming sites (called portals) are making money hand over fist from advertising; so much so that they are willing to spend a pretty penny to sponsor games. A game sponsor will generally get their logo and a 'more games' link back to their portal inside your game, and in return will give you an up front cash payment (from $500-1000 for a very simple game to thousands or even 10k+ for something really good). If your game is popular they will get many more visitors, making their portal even more valuable to their advertisers.

Licensing

Portals need the games developers are building, particularly the good games that get players coming back again and again. So much so that many will license your game for their site, paying you a fixed fee to get to host your game (and sell ads around it). Between sponsorship and licensing many casual game developers have reported matching the earnings they see from in-game ads (all three methods can and should be done together). FlashGameSponsorship is a great site that explains in detail how sponsorship and licensing your game to portals can work for you. The same people have also built FlashGameLicense which lets you show off your game and invite sponsorship/licensing offers from game portals; I've heard great things about it and we will be using it when our casual game is ready.

Selling To Customers

The above revenue channels all rely on giving your game away; how about the traditional, proven method of asking gamers to buy your game? Some developers are doing just that. Naturally you need to make a pretty good game to justify the cost to a market of gamers used to getting things for nothing. How about the best-looking arcade game I've ever seen in Flash, RoboKill? They have a demo playable online and you can unlock the full version by paying $10. I'd love to know how successful this has been for RockSolidGames!

Be A Portal

If they are happily paying out large amounts in sponsorship for simple games you can bet your right arm they are making even more money themselves! So you could certainly try hosting other people's games w/ advertising and see how it pays – we may even try it down the line. MochiAds give you access to free games for your site as long as the developer gets to show their in-game MochiAds – this would be an excellent source for games if you wanted to try being a portal without spending too much up front.

Persistant Game World

Our long term plan is to build a multiplayer tactics game with persistent units hosted on our site. This will make for a much more compelling, exciting game – and it also gives us way more ways to earn money from our happy gamers:

Community

The game should be free to play for everyone as you need to grow a community around a multiplayer game or it will never get anywhere (particularly with our generous marketing budget of 2 shillings and an old shoe). You can use ads on the site to get a little bit of revenue, but practically speaking you will not get the millions of players you need to make you those fistfuls of hot, sweaty cash.

Subscriptions

You then offer an enhanced version of the game at a price for people who are really into the game. Enhanced can mean extra functionality, or new races/ingame stuff only available to subscribers, or even just cosmetic bonuses like getting an 'I Rock' badge on their profile.  One thing that is important to us is to totally avoid making players who don't subscribe be unable to compete on a fair playing field in the multiplayer game – we will never make it so you feel you have to pay to be able to do well. That said many online games do exactly that so it certainly is a (slimy) way to encourage subscriptions.

Sell In-Game Thingies

That's right, thingies. One very interesting alternative to subscription-based revenue is to use micro-transactions to directly sell in-game stuff to your players. This can be anything from enhanced items to the ludicrously popular cosmetic stuff- special pirate hats for your players, or a custom badge for your profile. This model of providing the game for free and then selling extras to enthusiasts can really scale up moneywise and there are a lot of examples of it doing extremely well. Just look at Maple Story which made over $30M in 2007 from selling in-game clothes and hair makeovers! We'll be thinking very carefully about this model vs subscriptions when we are getting ready to launch our persistant game.

Alternative Revenue Ideas

Those are the most obvious ways of earning money from your game, but that's not quite the end of the story.

Sell to Other Developers

Once you have a lovely, polished game engine you have the option of licensing this out to other developers for a tidy fee. You could also do this with smaller components, like a map editor or similar. Flex in particular doesn't have much in this space but must have a large amount of prospective customers. We may consider this, depending on just how lovely, extensible and useful our work ends up being!

Blog -> ???? -> Profit

Writing a blog can directly (eg ads) and indirectly (referrals to your game, free PR, getting 'noticed') make money for you. We don't intend to ever directly try and make money from this blog but it will be interesting to see what else comes up!

Sell The Company

You can't really plan for this one or count on it happening, but sometimes small independent game companies get bought out by bigger companies, making their founders filthy rich and smug to boot. I'll let you know if it happens to us!

Have any other ideas about this topic? Post a comment!

Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius

Despite being a Super Genius he never seemed to think his plans quite through. Here's hoping our bomb hits the target even if we sail on over the cliff edge!

1. The Game

We're going to make a turn-based tactics game, focused on multiplayer and with persistant units to allow more long-term growth and strategy.

• Turn-based tactics: battles will take place on a tiled map (top down or isometric) between a smallish amount of units on each side (under 10 in general). No building of new units during the battle – it's a straight up fight between the two sides until one runs away or is wiped out.
• Multiplayer: the best opponents are other people, no question. We'll help make things balanced by matching up games against similar level squads, and to keep things interesting during a battle even when one team gains an advantage a canny, sneaky opponent (or, importantly, a lucky one) should be able to turn things around.
• Persistance: this is the most important one – what makes it more than a casual game you might poke around with once and then forget. You build a new squad by spending a set amount of money on basic units and equipment from a roster, and you earn experience for those units and more money by battling it out versus other squads. This way units can gain skills or better stats, and you can buy them better equipment or hire more units as you see fit. To prevent an infinite feedback loop where squads just get better and better and better, units can also die on the battlefield or pick up permanent injuries that may eventually convince you to give them the boot.

Now if you think this might be a bit much for a team of 2 part-time developers with no previous game development under their belts and a distinct lack of (oh so important) art talent, well we happen to agree! Luckily here's Mr. Plan to the rescue!

2. The Mini-Project

We're going to build a smaller, simpler game over the next 3 months which will lead on nicely to our final goal while letting us learn the ropes. Thanks, Mr. Plan!

It's going to be a flash game that lets you play out the single player version of the above. You build a squad of units from a small roster, equip them with some wooden sticks and whatnot and then lead them to success and riches by playing missions vs the computer! It will be packaged as a casual flash game which we will place on game portals and our own site. It will be entirely free to play but we will be able to make money on it through in-game ads, sponsorship and licensing it to game portals.

In the future we can use this as the starting point for our flash-based battle client for the main game, and with only a little tweaking as a tutorial / single player campaign.

3. ???

4. Profit

Fortunately we won't be resorting to stealing undies – there are plenty of options for making each step of the plan profitable. I'll step through all of these in my next post!