Greg mentioned that time spent on creating a game does not matter, its the final product that matters.
I do not understand how a person in Greg’s position would publish such a statement. Here is why.
1.PEOPLE SPEND A LOT OF TIME TRYING TO CREATE A GREAT GAME, not many people wake up one day and say “I am going to spend a lot of time to produce a big pile of smelly crap”. The reality is, most attempts to produce something great fails.
2. Kongregate should want as many developers as possible to spend a lot of time to create games. Why? because some people actually succeed in creating a great game after a few tries.
3. Therefore, Kongregate should encourage people to spend a lot of time in “attempting” to create something great. Saying that its the final product that matters does the opposite, evident from how many people were upset.

Correct Response
Trying to defend yourself is another poor business decision, although some degree of defense maybe necessary. Greg and the kongregate team should have said something in this nature.
“We did not intend to be offensive, we understand it is our duty to serve the flash game dev community for all that it has given us, we are sorry for how the statement turned out. We take it back.”
Then maybe defend yourself a little -although its pretty hard to defend yourself if you follow my logic.

From there, i left the company and started my own shop, Untold Entertainment. Again, i took other people’s money to execute their concepts and develop games according to their marching orders. It’s only (comparitively) very recently that i’ve started to seriously look at how the rest of the Flash ecosystem functions. i’ll admit that i was appalled at the concept of giving my stuff away for free to a pile of portals so that they could collect ad revenue on my work. That’s why i deliberately chose a game from our library (Two By Two) that didn’t have a lot of value to me.

And of course, since it didn’t have a lot of value to me, it didn’t have a lot of value to anyone else, so the ad share revenues were a pittance ($90 in a year). All of this wailing and crying is simply me anguishing over the nagging thought that there has to be a better way. And i’m getting a lot of valuable help from folks like you with every petty, vitriolic post i write.

But i’m learning. The strategy i’m taking with Interrupting Cow Trivia is to add a membership system and all manner of hooks that drive players back to this site, where i can control the audience to some degree. i’m all too happy to give that game away for “free” to a million and one portals, because there’s an exchange of value. The portals get a free game, and i get a community. And hopefully, that community will pay some *real* dollars for the enchanced, ad-free game experience.

Don’t worry. i won’t be a crybaby forever. Thanks for your patience.

In ANY industry where the author self publishes you NEVER get paid by the hour, you get paid based on the quality of the final product, or by pre-selling the product to someone who can back you financially.

Using TV as an example, a lot of people get their start doing pro bono work for public broadcast programs. The front the costs to produce the work then sell the product to the local station management.

With movies, people shell out their money to go to film school and build a portfolio. Writers submit short stories to magazines and possibly get a $5 check if they get published.

All the independents start out at the bottom, investing their own time and money to produce works that one day will be regarded as high quality submissions to their respective industries. THEN they get hired to do hourly or contract work for the non-independent companies and finally achieve those reliable wages.

My interpretation of Greg’s quote is in-line with what a lot of people seem to e saying. Nobody asked you to make any specific game for any specific amount of money. Sure they asked you to submit your work and test your mettle… see if you can produce something that will prove to have commercial value and ultimately open some doors for you to get consistent paydays just on your reputation alone.

I don’t really want to point fingers or get into some waste-of-time flame war but I get the feeling you feel personally disrespected. Possibly in some bid for one of your games, something you invested a lot of time in, was gauged to be worth less than you expected?

It really never hurts to question the status-quo, but at the end of the day, the current business model for most flash portals remains the same… as does the perceived value of any given work. If I could offer some friendly advice (from personal experience) it would be to just focus all your energy on positive growth so one day you can go from being an indy flash developer and become a household name that gets paid for their work no matter how bad it is *cough*Kevin Costner*cough*.

(seriously, though, keeping up with this thread has been a full-time job for a day and a half now)

I do think there is a rift which is growing between professional flash game developers, the service providers and the hobbyist community. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing for either party either, but in some ways it’s a shame… It also doesn’t need to be discussed right now in this comment thread.

Backing away real slowly before that tourist starts buying black market organs harvested from BABIES…
-TF

Audacious! Rise up, Flash developers! Construct a barricade! This shall not stand!

If you want to be reliably paid by the hour with no potential upsides for creating an amazing game in a short amount of time, then independent development really isn’t for you. This mindset is far better suited for working at a larger company or *possibly* even taking on contract work, both of which are respectable options for a game developer reliant on steady income.

i agree that you’re well within your rights to blow your paycheck on hookers, blow, or making Flash games. Go nuts. When i called it “ARTIFICIAL” money, i wasn’t being clear enough. i was trying to call out all of those Flash developers who say things like “i totally made $6k on my Flash game! And i’m a hobbyist! The game cost me nothing to make – i just spent my evenings and weekends on it!” It’s that tendency of people to think of their hobby time as “free” time that leads me to call it “artificial” money. An hour is an hour is an hour, and time is money. Even if your time is worth minimum wage or sweatshop money, a game costs something more than blood/sweat/tears to build.

Bruce Chia shared his numbers at Casual Connect (thanks, Bruce!) for his Dream-Build-Play winner Carneyvale: Showtime. His team netted $15k, which i thought was halfway decent. But i asked him if he broke even, and he said “not even close”. They won an extra $14k through the XNA contest, but they had EIGHT developers on the project. That’s $3625 per developer. Let’s be generous and pay them minumum wage, which in the USA is now $7.25. That gives each developer three and a half months to work on the game. Is that reasonable? Not sure.

It’s a similar deal with Pixel Jam’s (Dino Run) “success” story. Check this post out for more assinine ranting:

http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2009/02/14/earn-money-making-flash-games/

Then let’s say the tourist decides to make a ham sandwich. He goes into his fridge, and sees that there’s no mustard. So he looks through the phone book to find some kind of mustard delivery service, but all of the phone book real estate is taken up by mustache trimming services. So he walks out of the kitchen, but slips on a wad of cat yak that his tabby regurgitated the night before. Now he’s lying there, in pain, his spine is bent into a “G” shape, and … well, my analogy starts to fall apart a bit at that point. But you get the idea.

Professional artists (painter type) don’t get upset by the baker who sells the watercolors he does on weekends for $2 at his garage sale.

Across 5 games and just shy of a year I posted 42k paid impressions on mochiads. I have a game on Whirled which has had another 2k plays per mochibot. 10,000 guys like me would be… 44 million views globally? That’s ephemera against the number of global flash gameplays. It’s very hard for me to accept that I’m a valid target of your huge laser toting robot, when my games aren’t even the ones being played! :)

With Mochiads, the primary benefit to me is leaderboards and distribution (and believe me, I’m aware those are huge benefits), but chances are none of my various monetization accounts will pay out this year or next. It is however, pretty cool (to me) that several thousand people have played my games compared to the 4 who played what I produced in 5 years or so of screwing around with DirectX.

Anyway, what’s sparking this comment is your last section. In particular:

“You’re using your own or your parents’ money – ARTIFICIAL money – to train gamers that games are invaluable – that they do not cost money to play. ”

It’s my money, and I’ll do what I want with it, thanks. I don’t think my money is any more artificial than yours just because it comes from my paycheck. If anything, the artificial money I have is sitting in my Mochi account.

I understand that in the past few weeks there have been some changes in the Flash gaming space which the pros need to sort out, and I’ve stayed on the sidelines. But the suggestion that professionals are unable to compete with amateurs (point 7 in the starting summary) is either silly or wrong, I’m not sure which.

-TF

*- For the record, I’m 31, have a good non-IT job, and don’t live with my parents. And because I enjoy my job, and it pays well enough for me to get by, I no longer harbor the aspiration of becomming a professional game developer in any sense of the word. Still, what you guys do is pretty cool.

But i return to the same theme over and over again: i complain about not making money on games, but i do not ASK for money for my games. Let’s revisit this issue when i actually ask players to pay. If everyone clams up at that point, i’ll actually have something to gripe about. But i think (hope?) things won’t go that way.

It’s so refreshing to read a “Actually, we’re not all smoking gold cigars, and this is why” post, rather than the usual “Ads are great! With my 40 games + sponsorship I’ve made $300 this year alone! PS I’m 13″.

i just posted an article about Flash microtransactions being a game-changer. But in my experience at the Casual Connect conference, it looked like partnering with a payment provider to sell direct was a non-starter due to prohibitive setup and monthly fees. How did Rock Solid and Colin do it? Did they roll their own? i’d love to find someone who could build this kind of solution for us at Untold Entertainment. i have no idea what kind of timing and price are involved.

i remember when my wife took up stained glass as a hobby. Like all hobbyists, there was this glimmer of “hey, this is fun. i wonder if i can make money from this?” Stained glass is, of course, a ridiculously labour-intensive craft. There were very, very few people we could find who were doing it professionally. The one pro stained glass team we did run into offered only three designs. Same three designs. Customer could pick colours, but designs stayed the same. i asked them why, and they said that those three designs were the very fastest to bang out, and anything more involved would lose them money. People didn’t want to pay for what stained glass actually cost. They needed to be efficient: get in, get out, get paid.

i reflected that this seemed a little soulless for a craft that’s all about precision and beauty, light and sparkle. But that seems to be the way of things when you’re talking about making money from a hobby.

http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2009/07/29/flash-microtransactions-this-changes-everything/

Give nothing away. Build you own portal, buy advertising a sell products.

Thanks for a very enjoyable thread Ryan and Greg!

I really agree that consumers need to be the main revenue source for developers/portals/et al; advertising should just be an extra. This is Dan Cook’s main point in his Flash Love Letter (pt 1): http://lostgarden.com/2009/07/flash-love-letter-2009-part-1.html

Microtransactions is one way to allow this consumer spend to trickle through and it’s definitely going to work for some games, but I’m certain that compelling enough games should charge consumers directly: therefore avoiding the 30-40% cut of current microtransaction enablers. Examples of this working are Colin’s Fantastic Contraption and Rock Solid Arcade’s Robokill

I have also a number of other things to consider as alternatives for making money in the coming months for Flash developers. I would very much appreciate your thoughts and feedback.
http://www.gamedevigner.com/2009/07/29/5-reasons-why-flash-will-take-over-gaming/

You ask what i expect Greg/Kongregate to do with their sponsorship dollars. i have no opinion – although perhaps one good investment would be in psych and behavioural studies, the results of which you can share with your devs so that they can start making better games. Or save your money, and compile that sort of research that’s floating around out there to build a really kickass resource. i spoke with one company at the conference who plans to do this in the coming months.

But in the end, i don’t think the burden is on the portals. The more i read and fret and meditate, the closer i come to the conclusion that the burden of funding game development should be on the consumer. Like i say, i’ve paid for games all my life. i won’t likely buy The Secret of Monkey Island on the iPhone for $7.99, only because i bought it for $69.99 for my Amiga 500 back in 1990 when it was released, and i’ll be damned if that Ron Gilbert character is going to bilk another red cent from me.

But there’s a lot of other stuff i WILL pay for, and i hope it’s not just a generational thing. i hope i’m not the last of a dying breed of gamers who know the value of a good piece of entertainment. My theory – my hope – is that microtransactions will save the hobbyist industry. More on that in tomorrow’s post. Come on back!

You truly speak for my frustrations within the flash gaming industry. It’s unbelievable how those who DON’T MAKE FLASH GAMES are making disturbingly more money than those who do. What I would really like to see is people asking for royalties on all revenue generated from their work. It’s standard practice for the music and film industry, so why not for us? Sponsorships are nice, but they could potentially be a fraction of what the title actually earns, given the quality and popularity of the game.

My only comment is that those who submit to Newgrounds mostly do so under the idea that they won’t get paid. It’s more of a community than a distribution zone. Oddly enough, in my opinion Newgrounds has done the most of all the flash portals I’ve seen to help kick some more cash back to the developer. Like giving the developers a cut of the ad revenue generated by their user pages, and being the first to allow in-game ads.

j/k. The thread is you reference is long, but worth a read. Greg, judging by your prep notes from Gamasutra and your clarifications in the thread, i think that what you *meant* to say during your session either came out poorly, or was transcribed poorly. (Like i said, i didn’t actually make your session – i read some articles after the fact.) When you said “no one asked you to make this game”, and later specified that you were talking about a fee-for-service relationship vs. an independent development project, you smooved it over like butter.

i maintain, though, that there’s gotta be a way to get more cash in the pockets of more developers. While at Casual Connect, i asked the question i always ask: when will the millions of dollars in teevee ad spend finally pour over to Internatz advertising? i wondered what will happen when and if CPM rates climb to double- and triple-digits. Will the rev share split stay the same, or will portals and ad injectors try to grab a bigger piece of the pie at that point? It’s easy to be generous with the split when you’re giving up pennies on the dollar.

I applaud the rant style (I always enjoy a good rant), but I think the target was misguided. You make a number of comparisons to television shows and movies, but these aren’t equivalent to indy Flash games. They’re much more comparable to major titles produced by established game companies (Epic, Maxis, Relic, etc.). What’s the difference? There’s a producer involved – someone who pays up front to make the game/show/movie happen (i.e. the person who “asks someone to make this [insert media]“). That’s why they can be paid by the hour regardless of how good the final product is. But that’s not the situation with indy games at all (with a few exceptions in which a major portal or company will commission or fund a game up front).

As has been mentioned in above comments, indy game development is much more comparable to indy bands, street artists, freelance writers, student films, etc. These are all examples of risk taken by the individual in pursuit of a love or dream with the hope of making some money and fame along the way. Some are huge successes, most never see the light of day. It’s a simple example of supply and demand, with the supply side being very high. It’s hard to stand above the crowd, but if you pull it off (which happily is done through talent rather than who you know like in the acting and music industries) it can lead to a lot of success, and money well above a reasonable hourly rate. And as you point out, the barrier to entry for Flash game development is rather low, as is the baseline quality-level.

There are many of us who aren’t willing or able to take that kind of risk, to live game to game hoping that you can continue to put out quality entertainment. I’ve made a small game myself and haven’t gotten a single bid on it on FlashGameLicense (granted, it’s nothing great, but it was a risk I knew going into the process that I wouldn’t get a dime for sponsorship). Note that Greg isn’t saying you shouldn’t try to make money off of it at all. He’s trying to establish realistic expectations of your endeavor in terms of sponsorship money.

My question for you is: what do you expect Greg and the other people in charge of sponsorships at major portals to do? Yes, he’d love to throw money at every decent game that comes out, but that’s not an option. So he has to choose the best and most promising games to bid on, and then the open market determines the price of the game. Of course you should put ads in your game, of course you should enter contests and see if you can provide a compelling microtransaction system. But you also have to have realistic expectations going into the process when you know how many thousands of games are on the market and how incredibly fickle and short-attention-spanned the target audience can be. And I think that’s what Greg was saying. He is speaking from his experience with developers who don’t understand what their game is worth to the market but only look at what it is worth to them, and then either miss out on deals or think they’ve been robbed when they got a fair market value. Perhaps it came across wrong (obviously it did for some people), but I assure you Greg’s, and Kongregate’s, goal is never to screw over or lessen the value of our developers.

I do understand your frustration with users thinking Flash gaming should be free, but that’s why both games and portals and starting to introduce micro-transactions and subscriptions. There’s a different revenue model here than in other traditional games, and I think you may do better by embracing and running with it rather than fighting it and trying to turn Flash gaming into retail gaming (the success of free-to-play MMOs shows the power of microtransactions and subscriptions). Of course, some games do break that mold (Colin Northway’s Fantastic Contraption, as he mentioned above, did manage to have success charging to play), and if you wish to follow that route and can make a compelling-enough game, then more power to you. Keep in mind the portal is 100% behind you in trying to train gamers that it’s okay to spend money on Flash games – we’re very much united in that goal for obvious reasons. But from the portal’s perspective there is a finite amount of money to go around for sponsorships, and this money can either be clumped up in large amounts for very few people or spread out among more people, and at the moment it favors us, and favors all but the creme de la creme of developers, to spread it out a bit. Whether that’s ideal in your mind really depends on your talent as a developer I suppose. :)

I already made lots of posts about this little controversy in the Mochi forums, so I’ll just post a link rather than repeating them all here: https://www.mochimedia.com/community/forum/topic/fatal-flaws-in-flash-game-design-and-development

Though i WILL say that until i started looking into iPhone games, i had never heard of TouchArcade before. i HAD heard of JayIsGames. i wonder if a more well-known site that wasn’t so iPhone- or Mac-focused would do some damage to flat sales charts?

And by the way, kudos to you and your accomplishments on your game. i know it’s been said before, but i had to add my accolades. You’re an inspiration :)

The iPhone’s problem is a problem of content discovery. People find games for the iPhone through around a dozen top-sellers lists. This is an incredibly unsophisticated way to search for games you might want to play or buy. So as a game producer it’s a toss-up if your game’s audience will find it. And god help you if your game doesn’t appeal to an extremely broad audience. Then you’re just dead (since you will never be a top-seller and you will never appear on a list).

The internet has this content discovery problem solved ten times over. You know how much time I spent plying my obviously considerable marketing skills? Zero hours. I didn’t do a single day of marketing. A friend of mine wrote a blog post and it went from there. I have been succesful because of the many ways people discover games on the internet.

StumbleUpon and JayIsGames are my biggest single referrers. But countless little blogs and review sites, people sending eachother emails, forums, posts on facebook and twitter, and, yes, portals all conspired to drive traffic to me.

Yes, people can pass around iPhone games the same way. But for whatever reason they don’t make a dent in sales. I have heard that even the biggest iPhone game site TouchArcade doesn’t drive many sales.

The great quote from Robert Stephens “Advertising is a Tax for being Unremarkable” has a ring of truth online. But it’s not true on the iPhone. Where Apple deciding to feature you is life and death.

There’s one thing i’ve never understood about iPhone developers and the old refrain “iPhone is so competetive! There are hundreds of thousands of games in the store!” Someone like you comes along, suggesting the same sort of thing, and yet you compete on the INTERNET. Far more noise online, i imagine, than in the App Store. Far more games to compete against, including shareware that dates back to Win 3.1 days.

You’re obviously very skilled at promoting your stuff online. Why not just do the same kind of marketing for an iPhone version of your game? (Promote online, exist on phone) What’s the diff?

I think this model reflects both of our views in that anyone can produce the product and the product is final… not just an idea or first step. With that in mind, how are they getting paid so much more? I would be interested in being able to compare the ad rates for each…

When I made Fantastic Contraption one of the things that attracted me to Flash was how awful flash games are. High-school students hacking code in their parents basement are not making amazing games. In ten years they will, but for now they are not. So they are not the hardest group in the world to out-compete.

And portals aren’t the only way to get traffic. The internet is way way less gate-keeper-driven than any other video game distribution channel. Including the awful, terrifying, iPhone market.

Not sure i would have figured out that i can create a test store if you hadn’t clued me in, but i realize you just quasi-launched a week ago.

So i can implement the whole MochiCoins system fakey-stylez, and then just request that you flip the switch to hook me into the money river? Is that how it works? (Pending approval, of course.)

Once you’re ready for that just shoot us an email or use the feedback widget on the top-right of the site to get ahold of us and we’ll review the game and get it approved, although sometimes there’s a round or two of changes before approval if we see something implemented incorrectly. Our approval process does need some work, we’re still mostly in private beta mode with the developer experience for the product.

Mochi’s primary reason for staying private beta during this phase is to gain the trust of gamers, so we can’t have open season on microtransactions. We have to make sure the games all work and are of a quality that they would want to pay for. We also do front-line support for all of these games, so for our own sanity we only approve games that work correctly. We did the same thing with MochiAds for nearly a year.

If you need anything more real-time you can grab me on Google Talk “bob at mochimedia.com” with the obvious substitutions.

I definitely agree that the reason people weren’t making money is because they weren’t asking the game players for it. Developers have traditionally tried to milk it out of the advertisers/portals/sponsors instead of just selling direct to the people actually playing the games.

That’s why i wrote an article a few weeks back asking people to show me their Flash games that i could purchase. But i only had two recommendations. i think one issue (and perhaps Bob will agree) is that Flash developers don’t get paid for their work simply because they don’t ask for money.

i don’t see why books and screenplays wouldn’t match up w/ flash games. as long as we are talking about the indie games and comparing them to the hobbyist who decide they would like to write a book or movie in their free time. all three are done out of passion and without an initial buyer.

I think you are looking at the large filmmakers who would be considered AAA developers in the gaming industry. We need to focus on what can be done w/ little to no budget. What can be seen as a hobby or night job. In those cases, anyone can make an indie game. Anyone can write a book. Anyone can make a screenplay. All 3 can take an incredible amount of time and yet all 3 have a good percent chance of not making money.

i am chomping at the bit to have my application approved for MochiCoins. i’ll be comparing your service and two competitors: HeyZap and GamerSafe. Here’s what i can offer so far: both Mochi and Gamersafe require applications and approvals. HeyZap does not. And the HeyZap integration is so easy, i’m not sure i even had to keep my eyes open during the process. Looking forward to comparing/contrasting the services in a future article. My plan is to incorporate all three systems into our game, terms of use permitting. (As i misstyped that, i noticed that “terms of use” is one finger-flub away from “terms of sue”. Coincidence?)

The only thing I disagree with in your article is “the vast majority of profits are going straight into other companies’ pockets” — that is largely true of portals, but not of Mochi. We have never released any service where less than 50% goes to the game developer. Our services have either been entirely free, or 50%+ goes to the developer.

In a past life Jameson and I used to get paid HOURLY RATES to work on advergames (or worse things), we thought that model sucked so we started Mochi to try and change things. Four years and change later we’re still rolling our Katmari around, but I’m pretty sure we’ve made a difference and it’s our evil plan to turn some of you Flash indie devs into millionaires. I don’t really think we’re that far away anymore.

i’m could be out to lunch on how teevee works, but aren’t pilots commissioned? And unpublished books and screenplays aren’t a great example to use. With free Flash games, we’re talking about a filmmaker who writes a screenplay, and then foots the bill to cast, shoot, edit and score the movie, and then HANDS the finished movie over to a distributor (or multiple distributors) for free, and does not receive a cut of the ticket sales.

To me, that makes sense. Advert games make a hell of a lot more guaranteed money than indie games. You are asked to make something specific for a brand experience and are paid a flat rate. Indie games, on the other hand, need to be sold after the fact (since no one asked them to make “THIS SPECIFIC” game) which makes them much harder to make money on.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GregMcClanahan/20090723/2561/Fatal_Flaws_in_Flash_Game_Design_and_Development.php

At Casual Connect, there was a lot of squawk about building a brand. i think you *can* compete with the AAAs on brand, and i think some of the keys are polish, story, characters, and humour. Your game may only have three screens with graphics (keep your eye on Interrupting Cow Trivia), but if those three screens look as good or better than the hundreds of screens in a AAA title, i think you’re playing with the big boys at that point, as far as brand perception is concerned.

“Build brands” was the best advice i heard at that conference, and it’s something we’re already trying to do. But you’re right – if we agree that indies CAN compete with AAA companies, we also have to agree that indies are entitled to some sort of compensation for providing so much value. Free just ain’t gonna cut it.

It’s funny you mention the Rev Rant movie clip about “donate”…he did another one which focused on not giving Indies a break because they’re Indies. Something along the lines of “treat them like every other AAA game company”.

I don’t mind that, but then what AAA company would ever agree to a donation revenue model?

(Somewhere in an EA office building a year or so ago..)
“Hey Mr. Wright, you’ve been working on Spore now for like 8 years right?”
“Yes sir Mr. EA boss.”
“And you’re confident in the product and vision right?”
“Yes sir Mr. EA boss.”
“Then you don’t mind if we let players download it for free and donate what they think it’s worth.”
“Go to hell Mr. EA boss.”