Freelance Flash Games News

Picture this: You’ve just gotten your game sponsored, and a nice, (hopefully) fat check is rolling into your bank account. Finally, you’re getting paid for all your hard work. It’s a good place to be, but why should the money stop there?

The Problem with a Typical Sponsorship

Before I go bashing sponsorships, let me clarify: I love the sponsorship model (even enough to make a whole book about sponsorships).

Sponsorships are a great, quick source of money. You build a game, sponsors bid on it, and hopefully you get paid enough to compensate for all the time you spent making it.

That being said, let’s get down to the problem the traditional sponsorship formula presents for professional game developers (i.e the model in which a portal pays you a set amount of cash to have their logo, and their logo only, in your game. No ads. No microtransactions. Nada). In order to make a living off your games this way, you have to consistently create new games. You are only paid for the finished work you produce. Once that work has been sold, you aren’t going to make any more money off it. This means it’s back to the development process, back to creating more games.

This formula works for some game development studios, but it doesn’t have much stability. If the sponsorship market is rough for a couple months, if the competition gets fiercer, if you have to wait a few months until your game sells, if you get sick for a month and can’t work on games, you’re out of luck. You better hope you have a pile of cash saved up for times like this.

Another problem the typical sponsorship formula presents is lack of independence. You are letting portals take ownership of your games. When players think of your awesome game, they probably aren’t thinking of you, but where they played it. That’s great for the portal, but it isn’t exactly helping your brand.

How to Keep the Money Rolling In

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So you want to keep making money from your game after you’ve released it?

Then prepare to put in some more work, but you can usually have your cake and eat it too. Sponsors are usually willing to negotiate with you on allowing the following options:

1. Adding Microtransactions to Your Game

If you haven’t heard of microtransactions yet, they’re small, in-game purchases which allow players to enhance their gaming experience. Things like extra-levels, item packages, and bonuses can all be sold as microtransactions.

The reason microtransactions are gaining is popularity is that they’re easy to add, non-intrusive to the player (the player doesn’t have to buy anything to have fun playing your game), and can make you a considerable amount of cash if you do them right.

GamerSafe is one of the major players in the microtransactions market right now, and can be easily integrated into your games. If you’re looking for some ideas to get you started, check out this post.

2. Putting Ads in Your Game

Ads are an easy way to make some extra cash from your games. You just put a few lines of code into your game and BOOM! You’ve got ads running while your game loads.

Ads probably won’t make you as much money as microtransactions, but they’re simple to add and will still be making you money months (or even years) after you’ve released your game. Our favorite ad system for ease of use and earnings potential is MochiAds.

3. Sending Players Back to Your Website

Just because you’ve gotten your game sponsored doesn’t mean you can’t advertise your own (developer) site in the game). Throw up a nice splash screen when you’re game loads to convince players to visit your site.

Once you’ve got a player on your site, you can monetize then by showing them ads on your page, getting them to sign up as a fan on your mailing list (bonus: this will let you keep them updated on all the cool games you’ve been working on), or by giving them the option to donate to you. Which brings me to my next tip…

4. Adding a Donation Button

Players appreciate a game developer who provide them with a great experience, and some will even go out of their way to reward game developers for it. But only if you give them the option. By adding a “Support Us” or “Donate” button within your game, you can give players the option to send you money. Don’t expect to make a fortune, but it’s an easy and non-intrusive way to let players show their love.

Photo Credits

Phillip Taylor

photosteve101

If you liked my post about planning the design for a casino game, you’re going to like this one. In it, I’ll be talking about how to sell your game once you finish it.

Firstly, let’s talk about the preliminaries before we get to how you’ll actually sell your game. Before you can do that, you need to understand the different strategies for making money with it:

• Sell it to a casino website. Casino websites can be very lucrative, and many of them will pay good money to have site-locked casino games on them. This option can come with a good deal of upfront money, but your game will have to be high quality for casino sites to buy it. You’ll be expected to put special API’s and micro-transactions into your game, but the good news is that you won’t have to do any marketing. We won’t be talking about this model in this post, but it’s good to understand how it works.
• Custom build it for a casino website. Similar to the above option, custom building a game will require you to utilize special API’s and options which the casino that hired you wants. It can be tedious, but the pay is typically quite high.
• Use it on your own web portal. In this model, you will keep all the advertising and microtransactions money spent on your game, but ALL the marketing effort falls upon you. If the game is a flop, or if traffic doesn’t come to your site, you won’t see much cash for your efforts.
• Get it a primary sponsorship. In this model, you will sell branding in your game to a game portal in exchange for a set amount of money. If you decide to take this route, the game portal will help you market your game, but a good deal of the games success will depend on you and how you market it.

Essentially, your choices boil down to two options:

1. Make your game for someone else, and let them keep the in-game microtransactions and advertising money that comes from the game.
2. Release the game with either your portal or another portal’s branding, and keep the microtransactions money.

Let’s talk about the first option. If you’re going to be selling your game to a casino site, why bother making it before you know what they want? Instead, go to them directly. This will save you the trouble of making a game, then finding out that nobody wants to buy it. For example, many casino sites have recently shifted towards mobile development and don’t want to spend money on a browser game when most of their players are looking to play great mobile games.

Casino sites generally have large marketing budgets, and they’d probably be happy to have a custom-built game on their site. It provides them with more money and keeps their players on their site. If this is the option you want to take, I’d recommend reaching out to casino website owners. A simple Google search will find you a number of casino websites, and from there it’s just a matter of coming up with a good email template, sending the email. Then you just sit back and wait for them to reply.

Next, we’ll talk about releasing the game through your portal or another portal. This method will net you less money upfront, but you’ve got a shot at making a lot of money via microtransactions (people tend to spend a LOT of money when they gamble). However, the money isn’t going to come easily. Just because you’ve got a casino game doesn’t mean people are going to play it. Here’s why:

1. People want to trust that they will be safe spending money online
2. People want a sense of competition. They aren’t going to feel this if nobody is playing the game.

For the above mentioned reasons, casino games are typically trickier to make money from on your own. Casinos already have an established system of players looking to play an exciting range of online games. The players continually come back, unlike the typical Flash game player who plays a game for a little while before throwing it away for a new one.

To sum it all up, casino games can be a great way to make money as a developer, but only if done right. You’ve got to mitigate the risks with the rewards in order to come out on top. If you do it all right though, you’ll have a money-making hit on your hands.

Interested in selling your mobiles games? In this interview, I talk with Chris Hughes from game broker site FGL about how they plan to help you sell your mobile games to publishers.

1. Right now revenue streams for a Flash game developer consist mainly of contracts, advertising networks, or per-game and in-game sales. How does FGL plan to add sponsorships into that mix?

The plan is not to move the web sponsorship model to mobile. Rather, the idea is that FGL will connect games with publishers.

Publishers can make bids on games, much like sponsors do, but the reason they want the games is slightly different. In the web sponsorship model, sponsors want games in order to drive traffic to their site. On their site they monetize players through ads and other means. With mobile publishing, the goal is usually to monetize players in the game itself. So publishers are interested in bidding on games that will give them a return on their investment by monetizing players through the game; not by pushing the players to a destination. Since this is the case, revenue share plays a bigger part in these deals than they do in the sponsorship model. That said, we are actually hoping to prove to publishers that a version of the sponsorship model will work on mobile.

How this would work is that a publisher would invest in several games and cross promote them with each other. This way, they could move traffic to games that monetize better than others. Like web sponsorships, it would have the benefits of an ad spend, but with the added benefits of being associated with great games and never having to worry about a campaign ending.

From the developer’s perspective, this means they have the ability to get some up front money for their games AND have someone invested in their game who will focus on marketing and publishing of the game (and in many cases this is the biggest advantage).

2. Android game have been supported for some time now on FGL. What kind of response have they received from sponsors?

We actually haven’t supported them for that long.  However, we’ve already seen a bit of interest.  Usually, a publisher is interested in both Android and iOS.  We support licensing for both, and we encourage developers to support both.

The reason we chose to allow developers to upload Android files, and not yet iOS files, is solely because of the restrictions of Apple, and lack of restrictions by Android.  We will eventually add iOS game uploading, but it is going to take three times the work, or more, to support that on our end.  So we figured we’d go with the easier solution to build things up at first.

The good thing is most publishers have both Android and iOS devices to test games with.  So if you plan to support both, they find playing the Android version sufficient to place a bid even if they are bidding for iOS rights.  Also, interestingly, most publishers are using the web version to judge the game.  For example, we have a game currently up that has a bid for ~$50k with 70% of the mobile rev going to the developer… but the mobile version isn’t even made yet!  They are basing their bid on the quality of the Flash version of the game.  I should note here, though, that the developer in this case has already made successful mobile games before, so the publishers are more confident that the mobile version will be just as high quality and fun as the Flash version.

3. In regards to iOS and Android, do you see one operating system overtaking the other as the top player in the mobile games industry?

There are thousands of articles on this all over the web.  From FGL’s perspective, we will support both, and more, as long as there is a viable market.

4. What advice would you give to a developer looking to make money from mobile games?

While planning and developing your game: your primary concern should be gameplay, but a very close second should be your monetization plan.  The most successful developers treat the business model of the game as a fundamental part of the game design.  Every new feature you add to the game should be checked against the business model, and vice versa. When your game is nearly complete, or complete, your concern should be how to best publish the game.  These days, it is very hard to self publish and be successful if you aren’t a well known developer.

I’d also suggest a developer to utilize FGL at all points in the game development process.  We have systems set up to help test games and get early feedback, and we have a great community that also gives feedback.  Then, when the game is nearly done, FGL can help to hook you up with a publisher to get you both a great deal and a great partner for your game.

5. Where do you see the future of Flash going? Is it dying, shifting, growing?

Similarly to the question on Android vs iOS, we’re always going to strive to support all relevant technologies.  That said,  I don’t think Flash is dying, but it is definitely shifting.

For the web, there is without a doubt no real alternative to Flash for distributing a game.  There are some great technologies out there, like Unity and HTML5, but we’ve seen almost no traction from them, so far, in replacing Flash when it comes to the viral spread of a web game.  The mobile arena is much different, of course, and Adobe has already “killed” Flash runtime themselves there.  But we’ve seen some really great games using AIR and as AIR gets more efficient we could see that as a very viable way to create a game easily for both the web and mobile.  Alternatively, as the Unity swf export feature gets better we will see that as a great way to hit both markets easily.

What’s hard about talking about where Flash is going is that there are too many moving parts to pin what the question is even asking.  Flash player?  Flash IDE? Flash to AIR conversion?  Actionscript?  To me, those are all more “Where is Adobe going?” questions, and they have a road-map laid out on their site you can check out.

What I think developers are actually interested in is: “What language and technology should I be working with?”  The answer to that depends on many factors, and would require a post unto itself to answer (for example, are you focusing on mobile only, are you interested in contract work or working with custom IP, how framerate dependent is your game, etc…)

A lot is changing lately in the Flash game development world. Flash was banned from the iPhone, mobile games are increasing in popularity, and new tools and technologies now exist that are great for making games. With all these changes going on, I wondered “Where is the future of Flash going?”

So I sent out an email to authors/game developers/brothers Jeff Fulton and Steve Fulton of 8 Bit Rocket, and they agreed to let me pick their brains for a bit about the future of Flash and where it’s headed.

Without further ado, here is the interview:

Before we get started, can you guys tell everyone a little bit about yourselves?

We started making professional Flash games for Mattel Toys in 2000 and had created a few java games for the Barbie and Hot Wheels web sites between 1997 and 2000.

In 2005, well before the indie Flash game boom, I created a game called Retro Blaster and tried to get it sponsored. No one accepted it.  We created the 8bitrocket.com site in late 2006 to promote AS3 game development and champion Tile sheet Blitting, which was virtually unheard of then.   It was the technique that made Retro Blaster able to push out 1000’s of objects onto the screen with virtally no slow down (and that was the AS2 version of blitting).  Between 2006 and 2010 we made well over 100 indie games and many went up on Mochi, while many sat on hard drives never to be completed or released.  We wrote the Essential Guide To Flash games in 2009 (released in 2010 on Friends of Ed).

When HTML5 and especially the Canvas started to get implemented in browsers, we wrote the HTML5 Canvas book for O’Reilly. We are currently working on the second edition.  8bitrocket.com was a pretty popular indie Flash gaming blog for a number of years (2008-2010), I think we were down to a 65K Alexa ranking at one point (for what it was worth), but after the books were published we needed to start making a living off of contract work and the blog has shifted focus and lost most of its readership. We both now are partners in Productostudios.com where we do all manner of contract work and release our own games for the mobile markets.

Let’s start off by talking about browser-based Flash games, the games that reside on portals like Newgrounds and Kongregate. What sort of future do you see in store for Flash in the browser world?

Jeff: Flash and browser-based games are not going to go away anytime soon.  There has been a shift to much higher quality games in the last few years, so the competition for sponsorship is more fierce than ever. We don’t release games into this market, or cover them much any more, so I cannot comment too much more, but I do see these sites moving to a combo of free Flash games and HTML5 games (so they can target the mobile browsers).  Some of them already have cracked the HTML5 market.

Steve: Every indication we have from customers is that they want to move to HTML5, and this includes converting Flash apps to HTML5.   We have done some work in that area, but the situation is still confusing for customers because HTML5 is limited to modern browsers but Flash is still ubiquitous on the web and works in older browsers.  They want both.

Interesting Steve, you do work with, and have published books on, both Flash games and HTML5 Canvas. If a developer had to pick just one of those languages to learn, which of those would you recommend?

Steve: Wow, tough question.  I would say that it depends on what your job focus will be.  If you are going to work on the web or mobile web, then HTML5 is the way to go.  Almost every customer we talk to plans to move into HTML5 in some way, specifically to target the mobile web.

If you plan to “weaponize” web sites as apps, HTML5 is a good choice too.  However, while you can use HTML5 for mobile apps , when you start moving towards apps with heavy animation, custom video, masking, 3D, etc. Flash looks a like a better platform to learn.  Still, there is a place for both, so focus on the one you know the least about, get up to speed, and kick ass in whatever you do.

Jeff: Steve is pretty right on for the HTML5 v Flash question. I’d add the HTML5 needs to be adopted as a standard across all browsers with fixed sound support, better video support and a great IDE that allows for timeline-based content to be created and exported before it will touch the ease of use of Flash. That being said, mobile web sites can be created without Flash using the currently available jquery libraries and plethora of mobile frameworks.  They can then be packaged up with Phonegap or the equivalent and morphed into native apps.

Let’s keep talking about mobile. Do you see a future for Flash in the mobile arena when there are other, arguably better, language options out there for mobile?

Steve: There are “other” ways to make apps for mobile devices, and we have used several of them.  However, at this point. We believe Flash CS6.0 offers us the most coverage across devices with good performance, and the ability to work with lots of legacy Flash content we and our customers have developed.

Jeff: The mobile Flash browser is dead and will never be resurrected.  Flash as a tool is certainly NOT dead.  In fact, we use CS6 for almost EVERYTHING. Sometimes those games are exported as SWFs for clients, some times for AIR to various platforms (including awesome performance on newer mobile devices), and sometimes we export the Flash assets and build native apps or use a cross-platform tool like Corona, or HTML5.

There is no better tool for designers to create or prototype a game or app in than Flash, especially given that the Flash version of an app  has uses beyond being just an export medium for import into other development environments.   Plus, I love AS3, always have, always will.  I love vector graphics and the timeline and the seamless integration that has taken 15 years to build into an awesome tool.  Anyone who counts Adobe out is going to be in for a rude awakening.

There is no other tool like it and there probably never will be.

Jeff, it sounds like Flash CS6 is the jack-of-all-trades sort of program. As phone processors get faster and apps are able to become more complex, do you see Flash being replaced by lower level code like Objective C? Or do you think Flash will be able to keep pace for mobile development?

Jeff: As for performance, nothing can touch native development for pure speed, but Unity comes close for 3D games, and Air works really well for 2D and hopefully Stage 3D when it is fully implemented.

Any last thoughts?

Jeff: If you are a Flash developer and want to make a native mobile app, CS6 is a great tool.  If you are an HTML developer and want to make a web site that will work across most browsers (especially newer mobile smart phones), a combination of HTML4/5, CSS2/3, jQuery, and other mobile frameworks are the way to go.  If you are interested in pure speed and or 3D then Native is the best avenue to explore. If you don’t know Flash, but want to create great native cross-platform apps apps, you can use standards based HTML technologies and package up with PhoneGap, or use Corona, Unity, or another multip-platform tool.

Personally, given the ability for Air to be exported to so many platforms and the lack of a good IDE or Sound support in Mobile Browsers for HTML5. I would choose Flash to Air rather than HTML5 to PhoneGap (etc).

This post is for the regular readers: the RSS and newsletter subscribers who are the heart of this blog.

I tried to control it, you hated seeing it, and until recently, there was nothing I could do about it.

What I’m talking about… is comment spam.

Don't you just love it?

As most of my regular readers will note, I haven’t been too active in regards to posting the past few months. I still enjoy programming and Flash game development a good deal, but between family obligations and work commitments I just haven’t had time to give Freelance Flash Games the attention it deserves.

Without my attention to moderate comments, the comments side of Freelance Flash Games basically disappeared. I tried to set aside some time to go through the comments, but with so many spammers out there flooding me with comments, I just couldn’t keep up.

How I Conquered Comment Spam

I’ve tried various plugins in the past to conquer comment spam (such as WP-SpamFree), but they just weren’t cutting it anymore. So I gave Akismet a try.

I’ve been using it for about a week now and it is honestly the best plugin I’ve ever used for moderating comments. It cut my comment moderation time down from an hour a week to about 2 minutes a week.

P.S. This isn’t a sponsored post. I just thought I’d share something with you guys that has been working for me. If you run a blog, give it a try (it’s free if you sign up for the personal plan and drag the slider down to $0).

Notes For the Reader

On another note, I have some interesting interviews lined up for you from my friends over at 8bitrocket and FGL about the future of Flash games (and another interview in store about FGL’s mobile sponsorship platform).

I want to hear from you though. What do you want to hear about on Freelance Flash Games?

Let me know in the new and improved comments (or send me an email if the comments don’t work).

Photo Credit: a2gemma