Friday 21 October 2011

Making money from flash games essay

Quick blog post as it's easy to do - just copy and pasting my essay from Uni. The essay we had to write was a written report on the ways in which games developers can make money through making flash games, discussing how effective they are and the optimum route to take.

So, here is my essay. Enjoy!
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Monetising Flash Games

Adobe Flash professional is a great program for making games suitable for Flash websites and social websites as the games are quicker and cheaper to make and get released than AAA console games. However, making Flash games and making money from them is more complex than console games and there are many routes that you can take, each with their own benefits and flaws. This essay will look at some of these routes, state the good and bad points of using them and sum up the recommended route a developer should take and why.

The first thing to note when making money from Flash games is that, regardless of the route you take, your Flash game will ultimately end up being uploaded to a website that is a hub for Flash games. Websites like Armor Games and Kongregate allow developers to upload their games, users then visit the website and can search through all the games available and play them. Most ways of monetising Flash games comes through various features and/or deals that come through uploading your games to these websites, these ways include, but are not limited to, the following:-
·        Advertisement Revenue
·        Sponsorship
·        Licensing
·        ‘Freemium’ Content
·        Subscription Content
·        Micro-transactions

Advertisement revenue is the most simple and easiest way to monetise your Flash game but it is not necessarily the most effective way. Once your game is uploaded onto a website, you as a developer can choose to allow the website to display adverts in the background of your game – this generates revenue whenever one of these adverts is clicked; the website takes some of it and the rest goes to you.

The main advantage of monetising your games like this is that it is very easy, you can rest easy knowing you don’t need to worry about setting the adverts up, etc, as it will all be done for you. The drawbacks are that money is only generated by clicking on adverts, not just looking at them, and most people won’t do this – you will ultimately need to do more than just sit back and wait for money. The best thing to do is to advertise yourself on the hosting website’s forums and blogs, attracting the users and visitors that use them to go and play your games; be careful though, if your game isn’t up to standard and people spread this around your game is finished.

There are further decisions to make with this though as you need to decide whether it is better or not to upload your games to just one website or many. If you upload your games to one website you will generate a solid user community for your games on that website, the game is easy to update and you know exactly where your money is coming from, on the other hand, you are limiting your audience and as a result it will be harder to get noticed and you will ultimately have less chances of getting money. If you upload your games to many websites you maximise the number of players and in turn maximise your money, however, it is harder to keep track of your games earnings and harder to update the games (as you will have to update your game on every website to ensure everyone is happy).

As a whole however, trying to generate revenue from advertisements alone really isn’t advisable if you are looking to make a major profit on your Flash game. As an example of why this is, looking at the research gathered on the blog of Lost Garden, an online blog that writes articles relating to art and game design, 2 millions users of your Flash game will generate about $650 of revenue which equates to just $0.000325 per user. These numbers alone speak for themselves as to why ad revue should not be used as the only source of income for your Flash games if you are trying to monetise them as efficiently as possible; you should use other methods alongside advertisements.

One such other method is to try and negotiate a sponsorship deal on your Flash game. Effectively what this entails is approaching the gaming websites or other independent sponsors and trying to get money from them to make your game – this money can be the website buying exclusivity of your game (either forever or for a period of time) or including branding of their website in your game, so that the website can be seen no matter where it eventually gets hosted.

The process is normally simple and generally speaking the deal will be made with the website that makes the highest bid for the best terms, not necessarily the one that makes the highest bid. An example of why this is so can be found at an article on the blogging website of games developer Andy Moore where he took a lower deal of $25,000 rather than the highest of $35,000 for his game ‘SteamBirds’ because the terms in the $35,000 deal meant he couldn’t make a sequel when he liked and the sponsor could refuse a sequel being produced, etc.

To further help with getting sponsorship there are actually specific websites that help developers find sponsors that are prepared to back them, for example, the website http://www.Flashgamelicense.com/ allows both developers and sponsors to sign up and allows them to seek each other out specifically.

The advantages of getting sponsorship are that you get money upfront, and normally a fairly reasonable sum, ensuring that your Flash game has made money before it is even released. Getting sponsorship itself is good for advertising and other ways of getting noticed as the fact that a website is prepared to invest in your game shows that it must at least be reasonably good – no one intentionally backs a loser. If the games you make are successful it also prompts the initial sponsor to want to back you again, creating a lasting chain of games development and revenue.

The disadvantages of sponsorship are that entering into sponsorship details can fill you with a false sense of monetary security and belief that your games must be good – even though you have been paid for your work and you have got the money, your game could still fail and you could lose future sponsorship deals and actually make no money through the game itself. Also, depending on the exact terms and conditions, you can limit yourself to a select audience (only visitors of the website you make the deal with). However, there is a way around this potential problem with the option to enter into a licensing deal rather than a sponsorship deal.

Licensing is similar to sponsorship except that is doesn’t limit exclusivity; it merely means a few versions of the game may need to be made. The reason for this is that licensing involves adding extra features, branding, etc, for the website that licenses your game but you are allowed to release the game elsewhere as long as these features aren’t included. As a result of this you will still receive money for promoting the licenser but can still draw in audiences from other sites and make money through them – typically though, due to this, the amount made through these deals are lower than those of sponsorship deals.

The advantages then of licensing are obvious, you gain the bonus of getting a lump sum of money for making your game simply for adding in branding, etc, for your game but with the added benefit that you can still make money from other sites.

As always though, there are some negative points, most directly the fact that in terms of initial money gain it is worse than sponsorship, so if your game doesn’t attract enough money through advertisement revenue, etc, to make up the amount that could have been gained through sponsorship you have ultimately lost out. Secondly, because of the fact that you have made an agreement with one website to effectively make a better version of for them, other websites that get the stripped down version of the game may feel a sense of animosity towards you as ultimately users will not visit their site to play the lesser version when they can play the version with extra features elsewhere.

Extra features themselves are good may to monetise Flash games. Extra features can effectively be grouped as ‘Freemium’ and subscription content, and Micro-transactions; all three are forms of charging users real money to get a boost of some sorts in your Flash game. The boosts are more often than not ways of getting stuff that is already available in your game quicker than what is naturally available – and you as the developer are charging the user for this right.

An example of a game that utilises micro-transactions is the tower defence game ‘Bloons Tower Defence 4’. The game is an addictive tower defence game made by NinjaKiwi that has been released in many forms on many websites and other operating systems and it utilises micro-transactions very well by offering the player the ability to unlock new turrets and upgrades ahead of when they should be able to for a fee.

These forms of transactions are a great source of income as it gives the user a choice – they aren’t forced to pay for anything for they would otherwise be unable to get but can choose to if they so wish. While the number of people who will use this feature may vary, because the amount that you can charge for this content is set by you a lot of money can be made from just a few users – if you have 100000 users and only 1000 choose to pay for boosts, at £1 a time that’s still £1000 from these transactions alone.

Micro-transactions can also be as much of a deterrent and make you lose money as much as they can help you though. Some users may feel that because a person can pay to get an advantage over others it makes the game unbalanced and as a result stop playing the game.

In conclusion there are many different ways in which Flash games can be monetised, the only constant is that before you can make any money you have to make a Flash game and upload it to a website of some kind – from there you can undertake any of the paths detailed in this report to profit as much as possible.

If I was going to monetise the Flash game that I made last year, Matt Defence (a tower defence game), I personally would most likely take the route of adding in micro-transactions – much like Bloons Tower Defence does. I would make it so that you could pay money to unlock new turrets and upgrades ahead of when you would normally be able to – this would benefit those who just wish to play the game as they wish and also allow players who want to progress normally to do so. This route should work efficiently as nothing is forcing players to pay for these features and its nothing they would otherwise be unable to get if they don’t pay.

Overall, there is no ‘optimum route’ to take when monetising Flash games as all of the possible routes have their own set of benefits and drawbacks – sometimes focusing on one method of monetising flash games works better but sometimes trying to get a mix of all of them works better. For example, as reported in an article on GamaSutra, the Flash game ‘Dino Run’ by PixelJam Games utilises micro-transactions and advertising, and made a licensing deal that has profited them $4000, $11,500 and $22,000 respectively. This proves that as long as you are prepared to make a Flash game to a high quality and invest the time and effort in getting your game into the public eye then your game has a great chance of being a success and you can indeed make money from them.
References

Word Count: 1999
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So, anyways, 'til next time - that's all folks!
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