web browser games & their revenue
 

Something I always wondered about: who pays for all those free Flash games?

While I already knew about ad revenue, sponsorship (portals like Kongregate), premium content, microtransactions, I read about the changing trends, I never saw the actual figures: the $$$. People are rarely open about their salaries...

Perhaps I also had a small project, so I wanted to check if it's worthwhile to develop it for web/Flash.

Because I believe in "do your own research first" principle, I googled for some basic info. Those articles may be 2-3 years old, but they still apply, finally certain sums are quoted. You're welcome to point me to something better/more recent.

General comparison:
http://mochiland.com/articles/you-sh...ium-flash-game

Details for a specific game:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2...enue_Deals.php

Tips for wannabe-developers:
http://www.lostgarden.com/2009/07/fl...09-part-1.html
http://www.lostgarden.com/2009/08/fl...09-part-2.html
http://www.stencyl.com/help/view/mak...ff-a-web-game/

Whole microtransaction market generate quite a big heap of money.

Trick is to make it lucrative. There are enormous amount of competitors in this market, so you must made something truly outstanding, evolving and simultaneously stimulating to generate decent cash - or make something simple, boring and unrewarding, but heaps of it. :)

For me, it's quite impossible to individual. Company can afford to make a metric ton of crap "free to play" games, having little income from any but big cash for everything. Person cannot afford to do that due labor/time constraints.

So my opinion: go to mobile market for quick profit with simple games. :)

If you seriously want to make cash, you might want to try JAVA programming for Android and iOS. In order to be popular your game has to be:

1. Free
2. Interesting
3. Beautiful/Pretty/Decent looking
4. Easy to learn
5. Difficult to master
6. Replayable infinitely
7. Contain power ups
8. Contain achievements
9. Run on every device seamlessly

A few examples: Jetpack Joyride, Subway Surfers, Temple Run.

Err... I know nothing about Android market, so can you please explain how can you make cash on free game?

Maybe he thought about freemium?

That's the problem. There is no clear distinction between greatly different business models, names are used interchangeably even on Wikipedia.

I'd say freemium is something with unlockable features/content. Not that different from the old shareware concept, when you were getting a functional product with some features/content not available untill you register it. Think Wolfenstein 3D - fully working, but just one episode, pay if you want all 6.

Now, the confusing term free-to-play is in wide use as it's just a marketing slogan, not really a business model name. Nicknamed pay-to-win by players for a reason: to make any reasonable progress, you need constant investment of money. P2W offers temporary bonuses/perishable items, each of them costs money.

Can you see the difference? While Kingdom Rush is "Freemium", Evony is "Microtransactions-paid Virtual Currency".

The latter model means there is no limit of how much money a gamer can invest in the game. This is because those virtual goods are consumable or time-limited (contrast this with one-time activation of permanent premium content). Games are designed from the ground-up with this in mind: player actions use up energy (want to play more? pay!), construction/training takes several hours (don't want to wait? pay!), best items cost special currency (don't want to grind for weeks? pay!).

Because there's no limit on how much you can put into a single[!] game, some people go overboard; this creates problems similar to addiction to gambling. When it was still marginal, I thought this new phenomenon could be ignored. But regular game project are being changed into pay-to-win because of this dominating trend.

I'm strongly against this "virtual currency" model because of those underlying dangers. I tried to ask MobyGames to clearly group games using this model. Read articles on the subject, like this one: http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/w...a-ghost-story/

I'm not a programmer (although I know the basics of C, Flash and so on), bottom line I'd have to team up with somebody... I got burned out and disenchanted, last time I wanted to make a game was 2-3 years ago...

Pay-to-win is not an appropriate term. I win a lot in free-to-play games, that includes against people that paid for premium content.

That's why I proposed "virtual currency paid with microtransactions".

Most games have some sort of currency, even offline single-player ones, be it Daggerfall or SimCity, so the term "virtual currency" alone is still confusing. "Paid with microtransactions" implies real money being involved.

It is usually possible to have a chance in "pay-to-win" without paid items, however it requires extensive grinding & huge amount of time invested.

Depends. Some of them adopt a nominally F2P model but in fact lock critical features behind cash gates.

It is not the first time I read similar articles. I'm disgusted every single time. So much I hardly ever finish reading. There is two reasons why: first I already know all this stuff. It's far from being new and it's only common sense anyways. Second, this is part of why I'm so disappointed in the gaming industry since about 10 years. And it's only getting worse each passing year.

I don't know about names for this kind of "business". I just call them all scamming schemes because even for those games in which you can actually complete the game without paying, there is always a hefty amount of players who don't care about throwing money at the window and which will always be a step (usually several steps) ahead of you. That's exactly the same than having several castes of people split by wealth, which already happen IRL.

I don't know for you, but I play games for FUN. Being reminded that I don't have enough money to throw away so frivolously and that I'll never be able to be close to the top simply because I don't have that money and that it is completely irrelevant upon skill or dedication or whatever is NOT my idea of FUN...

I've read similar thoughts in one of those articles... that rich kids are rich in games and this shatters the illusion that "in virtual worlds you can become anyone you want!".

I also always played for fun. Competetive play never thrilled me, I knew there always will be some maniac who plays the same game for months to master his "mad skillz", and in order to defeat him I'd have to become him (waste as much life as he did). And now, when they've added pay-to-win aspect to online play...

I'm looking at the moment at one of the context-sensitive web ads that displayed for me. Surprisingly it's a public service announcement by some organization in Poland trying to highlight the dangers of gambling (focusing on young people), especially of the online sort (as we don't have many casinos). I think their action should also mention similar dangers of those "money trap" games. http://nieigraj.com.pl
Yes, it's only common sense, but read the headlines: so many people lack it.