We’re running a lot of game jams in the city. In addition to TOJam, we’ve had Clam Jam, library jam, and the ongoing Game Prototype Challenge led by Jason P. Kaplan, which runs almost monthly. So a lot of small games and prototypes are getting made, but how are they selling? Are they even being sold? Who knows about them, or their creators? If you’re living outside of Toronto, how many Toronto game devs can you name?

Stop Building, Start Selling

i can’t remember who to credit this idea to, but recently someone suggested that instead of running game jams, Toronto should have a marketing jam. The need for us to get better at business was never more clear to me than when Jason announced the release of his first indie game, Flew the Coop, on iOS. i asked him “what’s your marketing plan?”, and he just kind of shrugged sheepishly.

i know where he’s coming from. The rule of thumb i’ve heard is that for every dollar you spend on game development, you need to spend a dollar on marketing. To begin with, very few indie devs actually bother putting a dollar value to their time. “What was your budget on that game?” “Nothing! It was all sweat equity!” Well, fine … but it costs you a certain amount of money to LIVE and EAT, Mr. Clever. From there, you can find out your annual cost of living. Factor in the number of hours you work in a week, on average, and you can determine your hourly rate. Multiply that by the number of hours you sunk into your game, and that’s the game’s budget.

Let’s say your game took $5000 to make. That’s $5k in sweat equity – “free” money – because you didn’t actually have to produce cold hard cash for development. But if the marketing rule of thumb is to be believed, you now have to cook up five thousand real, actual dollars to market the game … Facebook and iAds don’t accept a service barter. Cooking up that marketing cash is often beyond the ability or appetite of small indie devs. The result is that they release their games, hoping they will somehow magically catch like wildfire through word of mouth because they’re so good, and they’ll be the talk of the town. If you’ve spent even an hour reading articles on the success rates of iOS developers, you’ll know that there are thousands of devs out there still waiting for their ships to come in.

The Holy Grail of 3-Figure Sales

The challenge, then, is to come up with marketing plans that don’t cost any money. You’ve already seen what i’ve done to promote my game portals with The World’s Most Meager Marketing Budget – a miniscule $100 pot and a LOT of sweat equity. My pal Matt Rix, the successful developer of Trainyard for the iPhone, set up a great David vs. Goliath battle when he asked the Reddit community to help him dethrone Angry Birds in the App Store. Zero marketing money paired with a good story (and a GREAT game) rocketed him to the top of the charts.

i took a look at Jason’s Flew the Coop and thought “if this was my game, how would i market it with zero dollars?” The game is a Canabalt clone that pits you as a baby chicken running away from a farm, bouncing on the backs of animals and avoiding the inappropriate grasping of farmers. The first thing that came to mind is the involvement PETA had with Super Meat Boy, where they created a parody game called Super Tofu Boy. So i tweeted PETA about Flew the Coop:

Make a Suggestion, Win a Free Game!

So! Maybe i’m not the free marketing master i thought i was. Or maybe i’m just not trying hard enough because it’s not my game. But have a promo code for a FREE COPY OF FLEW THE COOP for the reader who can cook up the best free marketing idea for the game by next Wednesday June 22 2011.

Can you really market a game with no money? Or are those who have done it just incredibly, incredibly lucky? Post your best idea in the comments section below, and let’s see what Jason can do for Flew the Coop on a … ahem … wing and a prayer.

Further Reading:

• Indie Gamedevs: You’re (Probably) Doing it Wrong

No-Fail Sugar Cookies

• 6 cups flour
• 3 tsp. baking powder
• 2 cups butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp. vanilla or almond extract
• 1 tsp. salt
• fresh brains, to taste

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla, and mix well. Mix dry ingredients and add gradually to butter mixture. Mix until flour is completely integrated and the dough comes together.

Chill for 1 to 2 hours, or press dough between parchment paper and place in the fridge. By the time you’re finished doing this, the initial batch of rolled dough will be chilled enough to work with. Fry brains and strain them of excess juices. Dry brains on a plate, and crumble over cookies immediately after removing them from the oven. Leftover brain juices may be used in unwholesome ritual ceremonies.

Roll dough to desired thickness and cut into bunny shapes. Bake on an ungreased baking sheet at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Yields one small army of zombunnies.

Poured Fondant Cookie Icing

• 1 – 1 1/2 cups icing sugar, as needed
• 1 tbsp corn syrup
• 1 1/2 tbsp water

Mix ingredients as needed until the icing is runny enough to pour, but thick enough to set. Apply to cooled cookies with an icing bag or jam knife. Plastic baggies with holes snipped out of their corners make inexpensive icing bags, and allow for easy clean-up*.

Visit ZombieGameWorld.com for more fun stuff!

One of the most popular series of articles i’ve ever written was called Pimp My Game. It was an experiment in game monetization, back before i’d ever released a game of my own. i wanted to know how much money i could earn distributing a game, so that i’d know the amount of money i could invest in development in order to break even, at the very least.

The results were … abysmal. The Pimp My Game feature predates a number of tools and tricks that have made it far more possible for Flash game developers to earn money on their creations – most notably Flash Game License and microtransactions (GamerSafe/HeyZap/Mochi Coins).

Even with those services, it struck me that the amount of money required to develop a game of significant scope and scale to catch the attention of the average portal-goer, versus the relative risk of not landing a large enough sponsorship or earning cash back through scant ad rev share, was not a racket i really wanted to be in. Untold Entertainment makes custom games as a service for a number of clients, and i feel we’re paid appropriately for our efforts. i’ve never developed a game for a client on the off chance that they’d pay money for it.

i’ve been told numerous times, not least of all by the Flash Game License operators themselves, that game sponsorships can get up into five figures, with $20 000 being thrown around most often by people trying to impress me. Who’s paying these sponsorships? The buyers are mostly game portal owners.

The Cake is a Lie

What’s a game portal? It’s a websites that aggregate games and sandbags them with assloads of ads.

So a portal can pay out $20k to sponsor a game. What’s in it for the portal? Usually, portals require the game developers to incorporate the hyperlinked portal logo in the game pre-roll, and possibly other promotional hooks – a “more games” button on the title screen leading back to the portal, portal-specific high scores – that sort of thing. The idea is that players play these free Flash games, which are distributed far and wide to tens of thousands of sites, and the players may purposely (or inadvertently) click somewhere in the game to be brought to the sponsoring portal. Sponsors will often pay extra cash for exclusivity rights.

And how does the portal make enough money to pay a sponsorship? Unless i’m missing something, the most significant source of revenue for a game portal is advertising. There are some smaller, secondary streams – for example, Mochimedia kicks 10% of Mochi Coins sales to the portal when players spend Mochi Coins in games hosted on those portals, and Mochi also cuts the portal in for a small percentage of Mochiads revenue, but there we’re talking about fractions of fractions of pennies. The bread and butter of any games portal is advertising.

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em …

At this point i began eyeing the portals themselves with keen interest. $20 000 for a sponsorship? Again, unless i’m missing something, that must mean that at some point, a portal earns more than $20k in advertising. And game portal advertising revenue is passive income, that elusive majestic money creature that i’m constantly persuing. You just have to throw up a portal, stick some games on there, surround the games with ads, and kick back while waves of money roll over you like a stinky cash tsunami. “Beautiful”, i thought. “Let’s do this thing.”

Here are the steps i followed to set up my first portal, WordGameWorld.com:

1. Register the domain name – $10
2. Pay for hosting. i’m paying $33/mo to a company called 1&1 to host a VPS (Virtual Private Server), which is essentially like having my own (underpowered) web server computer. i originally started renting the VPS so that we could power Interruping Cow Trivia using the multiplayer ElectroServer software. You can probably get away with paying a regular web host less than $10/mo to host a portal.
3. Install WordPress, which is very popular free blog software. The Untold Entertainment blog you’re reading now runs on WordPress.
4. Purchase a WPArcade theme and plugin. These guys license a WordPress theme (skin) that makes your site look like a game portal. The plugin they provide enables you to enter the game distribution rss feed address from MochiMedia and, with the click of a button, inject ten thousand free Flash games into your portal site.
5. Set up a Google Adsense account. This was the trickiest step – at first, Google denied my registration because WordGameWorld.com had zero traffic. WordGameWorld.com was live for a long time with no advertising, until i got a hot tip from a Twitter friend that once Adsense approved one of my sites, i could use Adsense ads on other sites that i owned. i leveraged the traffic on UntoldEntertainment.com to get my account approved, and then placed the ads around the WPArcade WordPress theme using their tool.

Step 4: Proft?

At this point, i had contractors come in to widen my front door in anticipation of the deluge of cash that would no doubt come blasting into my living room from men with money guns, all owing to this most brilliant idea of mine. It wasn’t long before i figured out that setting up a game portal is easy … driving traffic to it ain’t.

For the remainder of this series, i’ll document my madcap methods i used to try to drive traffic to my game portals. My journey takes me from dating services for gay nerds, to bikini-clad women in Brazil, to the very bowels of The Internatz itself … all in the name of making money off the backs of the free Flash game developers that i never want to become. i promise it will be lurid, sleazy, and informative. But mostly lurid.

i mentioned last week that we launched a free games portal called WordGameWorld.com. Here’s how that whole process works. i spend a few bucks buying a domain name, a hosting account, and a WordPress theme. Then i go to MochiMedia.com and started cherry-picking games from their list of thousands, at no cost. If i see a game that i like, i can just take it and put it on the site. Then i put ads on the site. Step 4: profit.

i didn’t have to pay for the content. The content is, theoretically, paid for by advertisers whose ads are injected into the games via the MochiMedia service. But as we’ve seen before, in a hit-driven business like Flash games, a non-hit is also a non-earner.

If you’re producing content essentially for free, with the hope of possibly earning fractions of pennies on advertising rev share, and perhaps a sponsorship or two for a few thousands bucks (when perhaps you sunk more than a few thousand bucks in labour into the content), i have a startling revelation for you: content is NOT king. Content is peasant. Content is plebian. Content is serf. The exploiters of content are closer to the crown than you’ll ever be.

Look Who’s Talking

There’s a lyric from a John Lennon song that frequently comes to mind whenever i hear someone chant the “content is king” mantra:

Keep ‘em doped with religion and sex and teevee
And they think they’re so clever and classless and free
But they’re still f*cking peasants as far’s I can see

i’ve been paying more and more attention to who is saying “content is king” and how they are saying it. The people pulling the strings, who are actually in a position to monetize content, say it more often and in a much different tone of voice than the content producers:

Content monetizers: (knowing that their livelihood depends on people constantly producing content that they can exploit) Content is king!

Content producers: (wondering why the hell they’re not gaining any ground, despite being told on a daily basis by the content monetizers that content is king) … Content is king?

The Content Food Chain

i’ve developed a hierarchical chart to illustrate who’s actually in control here, and how the money flows.

Content Consumers

i hope we can all agree that consumers are at the bottom of the chart. Yes, technically they should be at the top, because they make the decisions and vote with their money and rah rah consumers blah blah blah, but who are you kidding? When i got into the ad-supported web world, working in the interactive department of a teevee broadcaster, we talked a lot about eyeballs – how many unique sets of ocular orbs were looking at our web pages. Not people, not consumers, but their actual eyeballs. We had reduced consumers as a commodity to their component parts! It wasn’t “how many human beings visited our pages”, but “how many eyeballs did we get”? “How do we get more eyeballs on this?” It’s a tiny bit ghastly. Consumers, you’re at the bottom of my chart.

Content Creators

Next up are the content creators. We content creators subjugate consumers. If we’re business-minded, we want to build games that get a lot of those eyeballs, so that we can command higher sponsorship deals and earn more fractions of pennies on advertising revenue share. Some of us want millions of eyeballs on our content just so that we can feel good about ourselves. As i’ve mentioned before, that drive tends to go away when you become a more advanced life-form with a mortgage and kids to feed.

Pickaxe Salesmen

In an offshoot segment of the chart are the pickaxe salesmen. In any Yukon gold rush, there are the people doing all the work and panning for the gold (game developers), and there are the shop owners selling ropes and pickaxes and whiskey. They are the tool providers. FDT, SmartFox Server, ElectroServer, and to an extent ActiveDen (who are, themselves, content aggregators) all make their money selling content producers the promise of becoming rich and famous through their gold-panning content creation efforts.

Content Aggregators

One step above content creators are the content aggregators. In the Flash games industry, these are the portals that pull all the games together in one place – Kongregate, NewGrounds, Big Fish, AddictingGames, King, Gimme5, WordGameWorld, etc etc. In publishing, they are the magazines that assemble and bind the individual articles. In the teevee world, they are the broadcasters who fill their programming hours with shows. Content aggregators treat content as a commodity to be shoveled into their wrappers, especially in the Flash games world, where you can set up an RSS interavenous drip to have free Flash games automatically pumped into your site with zero effort or cost. These people have a vested interest in repeating the “content is king” mantra – their livelihood depends on content producers believing it. Their goal is to get the best content possible for the lowest price imaginable, always.

Advertisers

Advertisers hold us all in thrall. They foot the bill for all of this stuff. Magazines and teevee shows are merely vehicles to sell advertising. That’s what games portals are as well: extended banner and video ads punctuated by the occasional match-3 game. Without advertising money, this whole ecosystem dies … which is why new monetization methods like microtransactions are given so much gravity. Like the United States weaning themselves off oil dependency, it’s in the best interests of content producers and aggregators to develop new sources of energy (money).

Aggregator Aggregators

Above the advertisers are the aggregator aggregators: those who aggregate the aggregators. i can’t think of any examples in the Flash games world, but i’m talking about cable providers in the teevee world. These are the people who pull together the aggregators – the teevee channels – into one big package of aggregators, and charge a fee for access. i don’t *think* one of these has emerged in our industry quite yet, but correct me if i’m wrong.

Lord Jesus

Floating high above all of these and seated at the right hand of God is Jesus, who is awesome.

Do You Feel Like a King?

And there it is. With so many strata of folks making money from the lowly piece of content you produce, it’s clear that just as players are a commodity to you as a game developer, your content is a commodity traded in bulk to a higher power skimming off the top. Those higher powers, in turn, are a commodity to someone higher up the food chain.

Clearly, “king” is not an appropriate word to describe the games you’re producing. i’ve never known anyone to trade in large sacks of kings. Perhaps “content is lynchpin” is more fitting: yank the content out from this structure, and the whole thing comes crashing down. But the same thing happens when you pull advertising: you’re removing the wealthy benefactor, the rich uncle, who fuels the whole operation.

i’ll stick to my original claim: content is peasant. Kings can’t be kings without someone farming their crops, cooking their meals, and buffing their toenails. Whose toenails are you buffing? Because if you’re creating Flash games, selling them for a song, and scraping fractions of pennies on advertising revenue share, news flash: you ain’t the king. You’re somebody else’s bucket of eyeballs. You’re responsible for producing a pinch of salt in a barrelful, and it’s the people shipping the salt who are really in bidness.

i’m not saying any of this to upset the applecart, or to suggest that Flash game developers storm the castle and steal the crown. i just want to put it out there, so that the next time someone who makes money off your back tells you “content is king”, you can sock him in the snoot.

To recap:

1. Jesus is king.
2. Rogers cable answers only to Jesus.
3. You’re getting screwed.

If you’re a Flash game developer, you’re in at the ground floor of a new service: payment systems for Flash games. These systems make it easier for game developers to charge money both for their games, and for things within their games. Here’s how it works:

1. Player pays real money to buy fake money through one of these systems.
2. Player spends fake money on virtual stuff. As a game dev, you can technically charge for whatever you like: level packs, hats, extended versions/director’s cuts, etc etc. The sky’s the limit.

It’s So Workable, It Just Might Work

i’ve been following the microtransaction model for a number of years. It’s been crazy popular in places like Korea for a good long time, and it was amusing to see the initial resistance and resentment in North America to the idea. Panels at the Game Developers Conference were filled with folks nibbling their fingernails and asking “Will it really work over here?” and “Won’t players be angry with us?”, with at least a few devs boldly insisting that micropayments are strictly a Southeast Asian cultural anomaly, and the system won’t work here. Meanwhile, in the other room at the Worlds in Motion (virtual worlds) summit, early North American pioneers of those systems were running panels titled “Can You Believe We’re Making All This Money?” and “Who Wants a House? Cuz I’ve Got a Bunch of Em”.

Of course, virtual currency systems do work here, as evidenced by Microsoft’s successes with its GamerPoints (AKA “BillyBucks”), enabling the creators of Rock Band and others to pocket obscene amounts of cash in dribs and drabs for virtual whatsits. Microsoft’s new fall Xbox 360 seems to exist only to take more money from people in the form of digital doodads for their avatars. Proprietary systems have been rolled out in numerous other games and portals, including Three Rings (OOO) Puzzle Pirates with its dual-currency system, and the WildTangent game portal, where players can spend virtual coins to “rent” games. But no one has thought to capitalize on the literal kerfillions of players in the Flash casual games space. Until now.

There are three companies i’m aware of who are rolling out virtual payment systems for Flash games: MochiMedia, GamerSafe and HeyZap. Please let me know if there are others. They all work roughly the same way: pay real money for fake money, and spend fake money for fake things in fake games for real thrills. One of the key take-aways for me from GDC 07, by the folks running the “Seriously. My Pants Are Woven From Hundred Dollar Bills” panel, was this: do whatever it takes to enable your players to give you money.

What they meant was that you should provide as many payment methods as possible if you want to take as much money as possible from your players. This came up in the context of the myriad wild and wooly ways that Europeans pay for things online. (The French, for example, pay by cheque. True story.) The speakers advocated pay-by-phone, PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, SMS, and a number of crazy payment methods i’d never even heard of. (Pay with your own hair? What the heck is that about?)

Untold Entertainment Enters the Fray

So here we are, poised to release a few games in the no-longer-free-to-play ecosystem. These are early days, and i have no idea which microtransaction system will take the biggest piece of the pie: MochiCoins, GamerSafe or HeyZap. And frankly, i don’t care. Why should i have to choose between them? Here’s what i want to do:

ME: Hey Player! Wouldn’t this game be more fun if your character was wearing SexyPants??

BUTTON: Hell yes!

ME: Great! A pair of SexyPants will cost you 95 cents.

BUTTON: Pay via HeyZap!
BUTTON: Pay with GamerGold!
BUTTON: Pay with MochiCoins!

Sounds good, right? i’m not shutting anyone out. i’m not preventing the GamerGold folks from buying SexyPants. i don’t particularly care which system the player supports – i just want to take his money.

However

The scenario i described above can’t happen at present, because MochiMedia has written into their terms of service that devs shall not hook multiple transaction systems into their games. GamerSafe and HeyZap have not made this stipulation. So i can have a game that either allows MochiCoin payments exclusively, or i can have a game that allows for GamerSafe and HeyZap payments. And that, in my professional opinion, stinks.

This type of exlusivity is NOT analgous to going into a restaurant and ordering a Coke, and the waitress says “Is Pepsi okay?” because the restaurant has an exclusive arrangement with PepsiCo. No – this is much more like eating your meal (Coke or Pepsi nothwithstanding), and trying to pay with your VISA card, but the restaurant only takes MasterCard and American Express. If i walk into a store and they don’t make it convenient for me to pay with a commonly accepted system, i walk out of that store and i don’t come back … but not before i punch someone right in the face, because that’s how angry it makes me.

Three Facts About Payment System Exclusivity

MochiMedia’s exclusivity clause is not good for developers. We want to lower the barrier to entry for our players, especially since getting people to buy goods in the formerly-free-to-play space is already an uphill battle.

MochiMedia’s exclusivity clause is not good for players. It’s forcing players to wait until a clear winner emerges in the Flash virtual goods space. Why would i sink my money into GamerGold only to find that every single game supports HeyZap or MochiCoins? i’d better play it safe and let early adopters figure it out for me. When a leader emerges, i’ll start spending my money.

No, Mochi’s exclusivity clause is only good for Mochi. It’s a clear attempt to be the only game in town, and to monopolize this service in its infancy. And we all know what happens with monopolies, don’t we? You end up rolling a “3″ and landing on Park Place with a hotel, and then you get reamed up the pucker.

Thankfully, it’s still early enough in the make your voice heard about how this stuff will work. If you think Mochi should play nicely with others, why not toss them an email here?

team@mochimedia.com

Or, if you think they’re making the right decision, give them a call and let them know:

(415) 680-3740

Or, you can just voice your opinions in a comment on this blog and bathe me in sweet, delicious Internet traffic.

For my part, i believe they’re hurting players and devs right out of the gate in an early, unnecessary bid for domination. Given the choice, i’d rather support two systems than one – HeyZap and GamerSafe. Ideally, i want to support all three, along with any other system that enters the space. So i’m making a public appeal to you, Team Mochi, to rethink your policy. i’ll even use your first and last names here so that your Google vanity searches will bring you to this article.

On George Garrick! On Jameson Hsu! on Bob Ippolito! On Vixen!
On Comet! On Cupid! On Justin Wong! On Eric Boyd!
To the top of the porch! To the top of the stair!
Renounce this proviso, and please grow a pair!

But i’ve been to Casual Connect, and i have seen the future of online gaming, and it’s microtransactions. Go ahead and close the browser now, if you like. You haven’t seen what i’ve seen, man. i was there. And although many of you are probably skeptical about a system that’ll have you paying twenty-five cents to a preteen for a badly-drawn sword jpeg, i’m here to posit that there’s a side of this you may not have considered. And if you’re a casual downloadable portal owner, i’ll tell you why you should be shaking in your hitherto cash-stuffed boots.

A Quick Primer

First, some terms and definitions.

• Flash game A video game created with a tool called Adobe Flash. These games are playable in the browser using the ubiquitous Flash Player plugin, the second-to-latest iteration of which has a >90% install base.
• Casual game A piece of interactive entertainment marketed outside the “core” video game demographic. Casual games typically have smaller development budgets, and break up the gameplay experience into more easily digestible chunks, setting them apart from more demanding “enthusiast” game titles
• Casual downloadable game These titles can be created with any tool, but are typically written in the C++ language by “real” programmers. File sizes are usually much larger than Flash game file sizes, and the games are often not playable in the browser. “Casual downloadable” can also describe the monetization method for these games.
• Portal A website that hosts games from a number of different developers. Some portals deal exclusively in casual downloadable games, while others solely have collections of Flash games. One of the most successful portals (at present) is Big Fish Games, which hosts both.
• Demo A handicapped version of a game for the purpose of convincing the player to purchase the full version. Demos can be time-limited (play for up to an hour free), or feature-limited (play with only Character X, or play only the first five levels). Demos can either exist within the larger game file, or they can be entirely separate files.
• Try and Buy (or Try-Before-You-Buy) A monetization model where the player samples the demo version of a game, and is enticed to pay a one-time fee to purchase the full version. Demos or trial versions can be downloadable, but more and more, developers are creating Flash demos that can be played in the browser.
• Subscription A monetization model where the player pays a regular (often monthly) fee for the privilege of playing the game, or to have access to features that free players cannot experience
• Free-to-play A game model where a significant selection of gameplay – even the entire game – does not cost the player any money. Some Free-to-play games are ad-supported, while others use subscriptions and microtransactions to fund further development. Still others are completely free to play with no strings attached for the player.
• Microtransactions A monetization model where the player buys incremental upgrades to the game experience that can cost as low as pennies, or even fractions of pennies.

Thanks But No Thanks

Before i went to Casual Connect 09, i had it in for Flash microtransactions. i had heard the announcement that Mochi Media was in closed beta on a microtransaction system for Flash games, and i just rolled my eyes, imagining the horrendous state of affairs that would erupt when the army of basement-dwelling Flash teens, fat from their $1000 sponsorship deals on games like Set Your Grandma on Fire and Zombie Asskicker 4: the Killening, started charging five and ten cents a pop for in-game items like “cartoonish weapon of implausible proportions” and “extra health”. No thanks.

And i knew that the microtransaction press was going to be packed with success stories about how Joe Coder made fifty million dollars in two weeks selling special in-game hats for his game, Ninja Kittens. But as soon as i give it a try, i’ll net thirty cents in a year’s worth of schlepping. No thanks.

And i knew that associating games with one-cent transactions would eventually drive down the value of absolutely everything, to the point where a developer charging five cents instead of one cent for a virtual crocheted tank cozy would be tarred and feathered by the broke-ass (but entitled) players rallying around these games. No thanks.

But let me put a more optimistic spin on things. Let’s take a look at where we are now, and where we could be very, very soon.

The Story So Far

Right now, i very much doubt i can make money on my original Flash games. i took an admittedly mediocre game from our library and ran it through the ad injection model in the Pulitzer prize-winning series Pimp My Game (which did not actually win a Pulitzer prize, so i’m thinking of withdrawing that press release). The game’s made about $90 in a year.

So i looked across the fence where the grass is clearly greener, and i saw the casual downloadable market. These people were charging actual, real-live dollars for their games. The developers were getting a share of actual cash money that numbered in the more-than-90′s, and i wanted a piece. But i recognized that the development times were longer, the budgets were bigger, and the risk was greater. That’s when we started work on Kahoots™, our fun crime-themed puzzle game.

Kahoots is a further (longer, riskier, more expensive) step in our quest to establish a baseline for development. i’ve been hunting this mythical baseline for two years now: it’s the average amount of money that i can make from an online game. Establishing a baseline will enable us to work within a reasonable budget, and then, hopefully, we can turn a reasonable profit.

i wasn’t one to leave my free-to-play Flash roots buried, so we got cracking on Interrupting Cow Trivia a few months ago. ICT is yet another experiment in game monetization. The development costs are still large, but the model is different. ICT will show an ad to the player before he jumps into a game room. The free player can answer X questions before being booted back out to the lobby, where he’ll have to watch another ad to re-join. Free players will also be limited to certain trivia content packs, which will be unlocked in regular rotation. For example, the Music Trivia pack will be free to play on Mondays and Saturdays. (That’s a little trick i borrowed from Three Rings of Puzzle Pirates fame. Thanks, OOO!)

Paid Interruping Cow Trivia players won’t see any ads, and they can play from any trivia pack any day of the week. They’ll also have advance access to new trivia packs. As we build more features into the game, we’ll cook up further carrots-on-sticks to incent free players. So be sure to give the game a shot while it’s in alpha and completely free!

PLEASE Make Money from my Efforts! PLEEEEEASE!!!

Going into the Casual Connect conference, i knew i needed a way to charge people money to play Interrupting Cow Trivia, and to purchase Kahoots on our own site. i knew that this was a good idea, because we would get a larger cut of the profits than if we sent Kahoots to a casual downloadable portal. i haven’t partnered with one of these guys yet, but rumour has it that the split is around 65/35 in favour of the portal. This is somewhat upsetting. The portals haven’t spent a single dime on the development of Kahoots™, and offering a completed, quality game for sale on their site is a zero risk proposition, yet somehow i still have do do a song and dance for them to convince them the game is great, all for the privilege of giving them the lion’s share of the proceeds.

But they have the lion’s share of the traffic, right? Big Fish Games is essentially Wal Mart, and if you don’t sell there, you don’t sell anywhere. (Or so i thought – more on that in a bit.) One big problem these days is that a few months ago, Amazon got into the casual games business and started charging $9.99 for its wares, down from the status quo of $20. This sparked a price war that saw Big Fish reduce its prices to $7.99, with a $2.99 price point for their special toolbar promotion.

So who knows where prices will end up? My prediction is that they’ll sink down to the App Store dumps, where everything will be at 99 cents, and a number of casual downloadable devs will go bankrupt because they’ll be a month from releasing their latest big-budget opus. That, or they won’t be able to adjust quickly enough to the Flash way of doing things, where we can bang out a complete game in under a week (see our game Bloat., and fear us.)

The Transaction Faction

So knowing i’d need to charge people on my site, i started meeting with the droves of online transaction companies at the show. These are the companies who have already done the legwork to enable credit card, debit card, pay-by-phone, SMS, cheque, money order, secret password, cost-per-action and wooden nickel transactions to your visitors seemlessly, in exchange for a cut and a few cents on the dollar. The VISA bill says “You were charged $x by Untold Entertainment for Kahoots”. Nice.

But i quickly learned that it would be very difficult, as a small developer, to have a relationship with these guys. GlobalCollect, for example, charges a monthly user fee of around $700. Plimus charges a big set-up fee, and takes a sizable chunk of the proceeds based on the volume of cash you move through their system. The price comes down according to volume. They asked me how many sales i intended to make. i shrugged and said “Dunno. Million … ish.” i have no idea. i’ve never done it before. If Kahoots sells five copies, i’ll be pleased with putting smiles on the faces of five people. (while my homeless family shivers in a makeshift cave made from egg crates and refrigerator boxes in a forgotten alleyway somewhere in Toronto)

It was whispered to me at the conference that if i had engineering chops, i could get an authorize.net account with an SSL certificate and roll my own payment solution. i don’t have engineering chops, unfortunately. And anyway, it’s the kind of thing where i’d like to see how it works out before i sit down and figure out exactly what to build to save myself some money.

And all the while, i saw companies like HeyZap, MochiMedia and GamerSafe, all offering Flash-integrated online wallets for virtual cash, glad-handing the conference delegates and preaching the gospel of Flash game microtransactions. (i’m not actually sure GamerSafe was there phyiscally, but they were there in spirit)

And that’s when i had a brainwave.

“Micro” is a Possibility, Not a Requirement

A microtransaction system is great because it allows for tiny transactions. The player is more likely to spend tiny amounts of money, but tiny amounts of money add up to significant amounts of money. If you’ve ever bought more than seven vials of heroin in a single afternoon to drown out the pain of your failed existence, you’ll know how those singular transactions start to really add up. And then developers can pull all kinds of nonsense like in Tencent QQ in Korea, where they went hog-wild pioneering this stuff. In Korea’s Cyworld, you can dress up your room, or buy things to send to your friend, but those things – those VIRTUAL ITEMS – expire. You give your friend some wallpaper that has a two-week time limit on it. Insane.

But here’s (finally) my point: a microtransaction system enables you to charge tiny amounts of money, but it doesn’t require you to. There’s no reason why i can’t decide on, say, a $7.99 price point for Kahoots (as Big Fish Games would), and then charge that to my players as a one-time fee at the end of the demo. Correct me if i’m wrong, providers, but i can do that – right?

And if i can do THAT, let’s look at how a Flash system stacks up against the casual downloadable market:

Casual Downloadable Games

• (Potentially) large exe download
• Play on desktop
• Trial type is limited (for example, i believe Big Fish forces your game into a 1-hour trial. What if that’s not the best trial type for my game?)
• Deal must be negotiated separately with individual portals/publishers via dog-and-pony show convincing them the game will sell well

Flash Games

• (Potentially) much smaller download, with opportunity for progressive download (files are pulled into the game as needed, and can be loaded in the background while player does other stuff)
• Play in the browser with a plugin that >90% of people are running
• Trial type is whatever the heck i want it to be
• No deals to negotiate – just use a service like Flash Game Distribution to fire that sucker out the Internet cannon

And i’d love to have someone chip in some data on this, but my hunch is that the amount of traffic going to the oodles of Flash game portals trumps the traffic going to the casual downloadable portals. i could be wrong there. Who’s got numbers for daddy?

Fear the Coming Flood, Fish

So if you’re Big Fish Games right now, you oughta see this coming. And if you didn’t, you do now. And you might re-consider your current strategy of offering $400 to Flash developers for unlimited licenses of their games.

But … if you’re Big Fish, you also offer a distinct advantage over the oodles of portals (say that with a strange British accent and it almost rhymes). The whole reason why Big Fish Games built up that audience in the first place is that it built a brand. Building a brand was one of the cornerstone take-aways at the Casual Connect conference. Big Fish Games built a great site with an excellent customer experience. They were consistent, like McDonald’s. They defined their target hockey mom demographic, and tailored the Big Fish experience to that type of customer. They only stocked games that they knew would sell well to that customer. And then, they raked in mountains of dough and jumped in them like piles of fall leaves, giggling wildly.

Steam did the same thing. They built from an established brand, so the going was a little easier from a customer loyalty point-of-view. But they try to stock games that appeal to their audience, first-person shooter fans. Everything on Steam is dark and gritty and shooty, and they’re doing very well. Lately, some colleagues and i have thought that Steam would be very well-served to create a parallel girly portal on their service, plastered with pink unicorns and fairies and vaginas and stuff.

Start Building

So if you’re still reading this, and you haven’t already picked an under-served audience and drawn up a sitemap for your new Flash game portal, you need to get on that pronto. GamerSafe is already pledging a 10% cut of microtransaction proceeds to portals, and MochiMedia has hinted that they’ll do something similar. And if enough Flash devs figure out that in addition to nickel-and-diming people for hats n’ guns, you can also sell your games for a one-off price just like the big boys do on casual downloadable portals, there could be a lot of cash floating around the Internatz by this time next year.

i’d just like to grab a little of that cash to tuck away for a rainy day. The rest, i’ll shred up and use to wallpaper my private jet like a supersonic piñata. ¡Olé!

It was my first time at the conference. With a tight economy, i hadn’t planned to go, until my colleague Kala from Alien Concepts here in Toronto clued me in to the fact that the Canadian feds were comping $550 passes to the show. Can’t beat that.

If you weren’t able to attend, let’s save you five hundred bucks. Here are the things everyone couldn’t shaddup about.

Social Gaming

These are games tied to social networks like MySpace and Twitter – but mostly Facebook, with its oft-cited 250 million active member install base. That’s ACTIVE members. Facebook defines an active member as someone who’s logged in at least once in the past thirty days.

Tired of seeing endless messages in the stream like “So-and-so from your grade ten biology class who you friended just to be polite just gifted a virtual tchotchke to that girl you had a crush on from cadet camp who’s really let herself go since her skiing accident”? Expect to see a LOT more noise along those lines in the near future, as game developers harness the power of social media spam to get the word out about their (usually) microtransaction-based social games.

Microtransactions

MochiMedia unveiled their new MochiCoins system to compete with a few others in the increasingly crowded payment provision space. MochiCoins uses a digital wallet that players can fill with fake cash (using their real cash, via credit cards and various other means). Then, players spend their coins on bonus content and digital bric-a-brac in any of the (soon-to-be) bajillions of Flash games that implement the system. A number of these types solutions have been released for Flash developers, (HeyZap, GamerSafe) and the whole thing is well worth a separate article.

Payment Providers Aplenty

i couldn’t walk a few feet through the conference hall without slamming into a payment provider booth. These are joints that set you up with online transaction pages so that you can charge real money for your digital crap, and there are SCADS of them. The companies take a cut of whatever sales you rack up. Their percentage depends on how much crap you sell. They don’t give you a lot of love if you’re a small studio like Untold Entertainment, because they don’t stand to make a lot of money on you in the very near future. Forget about treating people well when they’re small to foster a strong relationship when the company grows. Most of these companies are all about making money NOW, baby! Yeah! Oh, garçon! More cocaine, please.

The Long Tail

Please stop using this term. It makes my left eye twitch.

Building Strong Brands and Innovating

The call for innovation rings out loud and true at many conference, i’m sure – even gatherings of paperclip manufacturers and vacuum cleaner salesman. Innovation is a good thing, and no one can disagree with you if you stand on a stage and thump the podium, driving home your plea for differentiation. What most speakers don’t do, however, is tell the audience how to innovate. Why give away great ideas at a show when you can execute them yourself? So you wind up with a bunch of panels and lectures with everyone on stage stressing the need to innovate, everyone in the audience agreeing, and nothing getting accomplished. One only has to look at the throngs of hidden object or match-3 games on portals, or the flagrant farm game rip-offs on Facebook, to know that there are those who innovate, and there are those who clone. I know which side of that equation i’d like to be on.

But a word about strong brands: i got a lot of strange looks when i told people the name of our newest game, Interrupting Cow Trivia. That’s because it’s a stupid name. But it’s stupid by design. We went through a pile of name ideas before settling on ICT that were even crazier – Welfare-Dependant Antelope Trivia and Obsessive-Compulsive Aardvark Trivia are two that come to mind before we settled on Interrupting Cow Trivia, which is a little more familiar to people because of the knock-knock joke.

Sideline! I’m amazed that some people aren’t familiar with the joke. Here it is:

- Knock, knock!
- Who’s there?
- Interrupting cow,
- Interrupting c…
- MOO!

Hilarity.

The whole strategy behind picking a nutzoid name for that game is (hopefully) obvious. If we named the thing Super IQ Trivia or Brain Buster Knowledge-O-Matic Trivia or Thinky-Pants Trivia, you’d probably forget the title pretty quickly, and the game would be lost amid piles of generically-named trivia products. We haven’t said much about the graphic style of the game, but it also doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a rather different look for a trivia game. Just one more way we’re hoping to create a jarring, disruptive presence online and stick out in people’s brainheads.

Throw Mama from the Train

One of the distinct advantages of the casual games business is that it’s like Gigantipus, an enormous sea squid slowly converting non-gamers to gaming addicts with its terrifying robo-tentacles and face-melting eyeball beams. The portal owners and portal game developers have long boasted to the core console side of the business that they’ve landed the coveted female demographic, creating games and services that appeal to 35-year-old (and up) soccer moms. Their words, not mine. “Soccer moms.” i wondered how many non-North American audience members understood the term (in Canada, it’s usually “hockey moms”). These are usually high-strung, type-A personality women who drive their kids to soccer practice in SUVs, inhaling coffee and getting a little too involved in the competitive and social aspects of their kids’ lives.
This past week at Casual Connect, many of the speakers dreamed of reaching a demographic beyond soccer moms. It all had an air of world domination, but in a good way … in a way that makes everyone’s eyes bug out and go bloodshot as they try to match just three more gems.

Untrends

Here are a few things that weren’t spoken of very often, which surprised me.

Augmented Reality

I expect this to be the buzzword at Casual Connect 2009. Augmented reality is bleeding edge visual technology where (generally) graphics are overlayed on a device’s video camera display, often using awareness of the user’s position and direction. The classic example is a user pointing his smartphone around a mall, and in the video camera image on the phone he sees little graphic fly-outs popping out of the stores saying “50% off fattening cinnamon buns here!” and “more crap you don’t need but are gonna purchase anyway over here!” It’s a lot like the shopping mall scene in Minority Report, except that the user actually requests this noise using a device he paid six hundred dollars for.
Here’s a very cool example of Augmented Reality in games:

The Futility of Ad-Supported Free-to-Play

Many of the panels were well-represented by companies like MochiMedia and AdMob protecting their interests and squawking about the amazing distribution potential, customer engagement and accessibility that ad support lends to their games. Of course, what they weren’t saying is that the eCMP rate is utter trash, and that precious few developers can ever hope to make an honest wage solely by injecting ads. It seems to do alright business for the likes of MochiMedia, though, who threw a swanky open-bar party at the Fairmont hotel.

Check out our Pimp My Game series if you haven’t already. It chaffs me that i’ve cooked up a cool eighty dollars in a YEAR by running one of my games through multiple monetization schemes, including MochiAds, Flash Game License and Kongregate. My new plan was to make up the difference by drinking a few thousand dollars worth of booze at the MochiMedia party. But since i don’t drink, it’d have to be Coca-Cola, and i’m not sure i could manage it. But i was tempted to give it a shot – that’s what matters. Watch yourselves, Mochi.

(i rag on the MochiMedia people a lot, but i finally had the chance to meet a few of them and they were lovely people. But even a shark has a gleaming smile before it chews your hip bones out of your body)

The Embarrassing Number of Rip-Offs in Casual Gaming

This was touched on a few times in the panels i attended, but nowhere did anyone apologize for the flagrant and downright embarrassing amount of copying going on in casual gaming. Dave Rorhl (a nice guy in his own right) with a straight face, and without apology, discussed the Facebook hit game Farm-Something, and his own company Playdom’s utter knock-off Farm-Something-Else, with a passing nod to Zynga’s Farm-Whatever. Dave just left Zynga a short time ago. He also discussed Playdom’s Also a Mafia Game, an “homage” to the inexplicably popular shopping list-inspired Facebook hit A Mafia Game. No batting of eyes. Not a single red-faced, navel-gazing mutter of explanation or justification.

Here at Untold Entertainment, our games are not completely unique either. Kahoots™ uses a fairly well-known math mechanic, and Interrupting Cow Trivia is inspired by Internet Relay Chat-style trivia bots. There’s nothing wrong with taking what works and spinning it in your own game. But these farm and hidden object games are the online equivalent to the toy section at the dollar store, where you can pick up a few “G.I. Jon” action figures, and something called a “Slunky”.

Why farming, Dave? Why not take what works and set it somewhere else, like outer space or a toy factory or at a summer camp or at the mall? I think we can all aspire to something better.

P.S. … Moo.

Newgrounds is an American Flash Portal created by the people, for the people … and by “people”, i mean mostly adolescent boys and similarly-minded men who revel in exploitative content created in Flash. This content includes pornographic, copyright-infringing, gratuitously violent and often morally insensitive (see the site’s various Virginia Tech massacre-inspired content) web games and animations.

The site frustratingly caters to the lowest common denominator, when the site’s founder Tom Fulp has actually turned out a very strong game with Castle Crashers, the sophomore follow-up to Alien Hominid, which was the first Flash game to appear on a major home video game console. i wasn’t such a big fan of Alien Hominid, and was actually pretty surprised that the ESRB would give it a Teen rating, what with all the decapitation. But to each his own, i suppose. Maybe the graphics were just too darn cute?

Submit!

The Newgrounds submission process is very painless – moreso than MochiAds or Kongregate. You fill out a form with a bunch of options to indicate authorship (the site encourages “collabs” – collaborations between site members), and credits for any audio you’ve used from the site’s audio repository. There’s also a section where you can self-rate your content. This is more in the spirit of reassuring viewers or players of all the dirty stuff they’re going to see, because there are no actual measures taken on the site to caution minors about viewing that content. So kids are free to watch, for example, the Teletubbies parody “Pojo Gets Wit a Ho”, or the action packed “Space Slut Slim”. Ssssuper.

The fact is that most of the Newgrounds content that is inappropriate for minors is actually created by the minors for whom the content is inappropriate.

The site does draw the line at uploading *real* pics of people having sex, a measure which it’s clear to point out is only “due to new laws.” Newgrounds also discourages users from uploading child pornography. It’s good to know that a site that hosts “Dirty C*nt”, “Donkey vs. Bitch”, and “Suicide Can Be Fun” draws that moral line somewhere.

So when it came to uploading Two By Two to Newgrounds, i didn’t expect much love for a light puzzle game that kicks off – unironically – with a Bible verse, on a site where animated debauchery reigns. In order to actually make money from posting your content to Newgrounds, you have to implement their advertising API. i believe i could have uploaded the MochiAds-enabled version of Two By Two, but Pimp My Game is all about putting different monetization methods through their paces. So off i went.

API API Joy Joy

Integrating the Newgrounds API was very painless in AS3. There are only three lines of code, which you place at the beginning of the movie, and then Bob’s your uncle. (This is to say that once you press the “Submit” button, a man named Robert actually marries your mother’s sister.)

The most time-consuming part of the NG API integration is setting up custom events. These are trigger points that you define on the Newgrounds site and activate with a single line of code for each event. Once these hooks are in, you can visit the site and see a report on how often each custom even was called. (This is all in theory – i never did figure out exactly where on the site i could view the data for these events.)

There are all kinds of things you could conceivably track in your game – anything from “Passed level x with y lives” to “pressed the Quit button during level x”. It’s all stuff that can help you to better understand the users’ experience with your game. For example, if you realize that 50% of your players are running out of time and dying in level two, perhaps you can re-jig level two and update the game?

The Newgrounds custom events are a nice idea, but if you’re going to pimp your game, you’re better off tracking events with a third party – Google Analytics, for example. That way, it won’t matter where your game is hosted – you can track events from anywhere on the Internatz. As you’ll see during our numbers round-up below, the time i spent setting up these custom events was not worth the exposure i received on Newgrounds.

The final step to rigging up your game with Newgrounds ads is to pass staff approval, where i assume a real live person scans your game for content that miscellaneous advertisers may not enjoy (ie “Tits in the Forest” or “Murder the Government”, both currently playing on Newgrounds.) A Newgrounds inspector apparently gave Two By Two the thumbs-up.

The Result

i’ve given Newgrounds more time than any other featured Pimp My Game monetization method. The game was uploaded in on December 21st 2008, and the date stamp on this article puts us near the end of April – a full four months to let the masses pour over the game and bathe it in hot sweaty ad rev-share cash.

597 plays, with an average score of 2.75/5.00. 38% of players rated the game. It’s worthwhile to note that all of these numbers were charted within the first three days of the game appearing on the site; the game has since dropped completely out of view, and has experienced four solid months of complete radio silence. One way to get extra love for your game on Newgrounds is to promote it within the site forums. But frankly, i’m above baselessly begging people to play Two By Two and talking about it ad nauseum to other people on the Internatz. Wink.

The game garnered three written reviews, which i repost here for your spiritual edification:

Score: 10 “Good!” Great game man , this one is going in my favs!

Score: 5 “Meh.” its not too great and very boring

Score: 3 “Only one level???” To be quite honest I thought this game was weak. I aint being harsh on you but puzzle games are not something that attracts alot of people unless it is very good and unique…. but overall this game is not that great. I am sorry for sounding very harsh but this aint gnna do well.

i’m not sure why, even with a meagre 500-odd plays, there were zero ad impressions for the game. Does the Newgrounds API even work? Do the Custom Events work? Are we using any of this stuff properly? Maybe Tom can pop on here and explain.

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at the overall numbers for Two By Two which, thanks entirely to MochiAds, have climbed steadily (and pathetically).

The Graph

With its forty hour TOJam development period, Two By Two has earned me an hourly wage of 56 cents – not counting the hours spent integrating APIs, creating thumbnails for each portal and uploading the game to their exacting and non-standardized standards.

Keep in mind that this is seventy virtual dollars that i’ve earned. Each different site has a payout cap – MochiAds doesn’t pay until you hit $100. So although my readers in Bangladesh must be idolizing me for the amazing wad of cash they imagine i’m rolling around in, bear in mind that i haven’t seen a penny of actual money yet. The MochiAds numbers come in at around $0.30/day … by my calculations, i should see a cheque from them after Tuesday August 4th of this year, roughly foour months from now.

Epilogue

Newgrounds is a site that caters mostly to young boys gettin’ their kicks, with tits n’ guns as their favourite subject matter. Kids’ shows are a favourite target; a conspicuous amount of the Newgrounds games and animations are of the “Kill Barney” variety. This is likely a rite of passage for the age group – putting aside childish things and adopting more “mature” forms of entertainment which include sex and violence. This denouncement of kid content is carried out very literally by having a character violently murder Elmo, or sodomize Thomas the Tank Engine.

It’s not my world. i don’t need to assert my adulthood by creating or watching this kind of content. i get all the sex and violence i need at home: first, by having sex with my wife and creating children, and second, by having said children stomp on my scrotum during independent play time. i need money to feed that family, and to pay for our mortgage, and to afford ice packs to soothe my swooning groin. That’s what Pimp My Game is all about – determining whether i can generate respectable income making original games.

i don’t have time to sit around designing a 7-part animated series about action heroes raping beloved childhood icons. The rewards on Newgrounds are community “glory” and no actual profit.

Newgrounds is not for me. And i’m not even sure it’s a decent also-ran in our growing list of monetization schemes. It’s a portal where content of a certain ilk will get noticed and talked about, while the creators of sanitized casual games should save their efforts for other sites.

Keep watching this feature for more info on monetizing your Flash games! If you missed the other articles, catch the rest of Pimp My Game here!

So there’s a real need to fill in that pricing gap – the gap between “too much game” (i’m not likely to stick with Mystery Case Files long enough to get my ten dollars worth) and “not enough game” (the average length of time i’ll spend on a free online Flash game is two and a half seconds).

The (cr)App Store

The iPhone App Store fills in that gap admirably. While you still have a glut of free, mostly poor-quality games and apps, there’s a spectrum of higher-quality entertainment up for grabs between that $0.99-$9.99 range. More than ten dollars for an iPhone game is largely unheard of. But there’s a lot of debate currently raging among developers about what some are calling the “race to 99 cents”. They’re accusing most developers of devaluing their work, or gaming the system to get more attention for their app, forcing everyone else in turn to keep cutting the price of their apps until everything levels out at 99 cents, the lowest possible price to charge for content on the App Store.

• Craig Hockenberry’s open boo-hoo letter to Steve Jobs
• appcubby – Financial Realities of the App Store
• Apple 2.0 – Trouble in the (99 cent) App Store
• TUAW – Developers! Join the App Store Movement

Lengthy discussion follows many of these posts. And it was in reading these discussions that i formed my first impression of these strange beings, these “Mac people”, who i have been avoiding for so long.

Once Bitten, Mac Shy

i am a PC person. i’ve owned PCs for most of my life. i worked in a PC-only dev shop for over seven years. Every machine i’ve owned since i was 10 has been a PC. Because at 10 years old, i owned an Amiga.

The Amiga systems were better than the x86 PCs of the time. They were better for artists and musicians. They had better music and video capabilities. Images, animations and movies all played better on Amiga systems. Sounds like a certain fruit-branded platform we know today, doesn’t it?

The problem with the Amiga platform is that everybody bought PCs, and the Amiga became more and more niche, until eventually all the hot software came out for IBM PCs and “clones”, and Amiga owners were left to seek each other out in weird underground support/software swap groups that met in the catacombs beneath ancient churches. i hear they had their own secret handshake and blood rites.

It was a lot like the BETAMax/VHS battle before it – you can argue til you’re fit to pop about which technology is best, and there may even be a clear winner … but the only thing that matters is what the majority of people buy. After i sunk $1000 into my Amiga 500 to buy a hard drive with a few MB of space on it, i saw the platform die a painful death soon after. Since then, i decided never to go with the “better” product, but always to side with the masses. Sometimes it hurts to be practical.

Yo Mama Uses a Mac

Sure, i make cracks about Macs just like the next non-Mac-owning guy. “i’m getting a Mac.” “Oh? i could’ve sworn you were straight”, and “Mac is so intuitive! To eject a disk – just drag the icon into the TRASH CAN”, etc etc. i bought into the stereotypes that 1. Macs were for creative (read:gay) people, and 2. that despite the company’s claims that the platform was super-easy to use, it wasn’t.

Well, it turns out i was actually right on both accounts. i started watching the developer videos for the iPhone SDK, and the parade of “creative” types reminded me of my stint in community theatre. Mac definitely, definitely attracts more gay dudes. As Seinfeld would say, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

My Mac is also nowhere near as easy to use as Apple would have us neophytes believe. You don’t have to spend much time with Xcode, Interface Builder, Keychain, and the iPhone Simulator before your screen is an absolute zoo of windows, modules and toolbars. Not only are the modules not integrated into a single system – within each module, there’s a laundry list of pallettes that float on your desktop and don’t reliably dock to anything, making it completely confusing to understand which program you’re actually working in. Of course, this is just my experience with Xcode, which is free – i haven’t tried any other Apple software, so i’m willing to reserve judgment.

Impeccable Attention to Not Bursting into Flames

Where i’ve been really impressed with my Mac experience is in the hardware department. i have a MacBook – an older model, white Apple laptop – that cost me around $1200 CDN after i bullied FutureShop into matching BestBuy’s Boxing Week price. (Pro tip: they really back down on the warranty they try to sell you when you open up a web browser in their computer department and surf over to the pages and pages of Futureshop bashing on EhMac.ca).

My first laptop, my only laptop, is a beastly Dell XPS that i used $3k in corporate bursary money to purchase. It dents easily, and plaques and stickers are always falling off of it. It comes armed to the teeth with Dell bloatware, and it heats up to searing, kill-a-baby temperatures. It’s not a good machine at all, despite what CNet reviews would have you believe. (After buying some Dell monitors based on CNet reviews, i slowly came to the realization that Dell must sponsor reviews on the CNet site. i have since sworn off Dell altogether.)

Dell must have done their marketing correctly, because people all over the place ask me how i like the XPS laptop – even when they can’t see the logo on the back of it, which mystifies me. It’s weird. It’s kind of like having this disease, and everyone oohs and aahs over it. “Oooh – the mumps! i’ve heard good things! How do you like them?”

Meanwhile, the MacBook is quiet and happy. The battery life is generous, and seems to outperform the XPS battery by a longshot. It coos at me when i start it up, and it’s gently stroking my thigh as i write this blog post. Something’s a little fishy about that last feature, but i’ll let it slide.

Drink the Apple-Flavoured Kool-Aid

One of Apple’s slogans is “Think Different”, and my early iPhone development experience has been just that – different. There’s definitely a different class of people posting on those message boards i posted above. They’re smarter. It’s obvious. These folks are a far cry from the teenagers hacking Flash and tossing out a mountain of free content from their moms’ basements – the Basement Battalion. The Flash community has its champions, but by and large, there’s a lot of desperate-seeming “me-tooism” and people doing their very best to learn Flash Actionscript so they can launch their sequel to Booby-Shooter 5000 on AddictingGames.com.

i dunno. Maybe i haven’t been around the Apple dev community long enough to have discovered the dregs. But i will say that through all of the Apple dev boards i’ve read, there seems to be this weird devotion to Apple. It unnerves me a little … “Apple” is spoken of with reverence, as if the devs are talking about a benevolent father figure instead of a corporation, who scolds them when they misbehave and who rewards them with technological goodies when they are nice. It’s a teensy bit Big Brother-ish, from an outsider’s perspective. A little cultish. i hope i don’t end up dead in a cot somewhere wearing new Reeboks with a mouthful of Kool-Aid in a bid to join Steve Jobs at the mothership.

Well … if the mothership is taking me to a planet where the market is crazy for independent games, and small shops are praised as a guiding light in interactive entertainment, i might just take a tiny sip.

The folks attracted by our Client Services ball are generally patient, eager, and willing to pay fair market value for excellent work. On the flip side, they’re not always game-savvy (which is why they come to us), but they do have very specific ideas about what they’d like us to build. Many of the client games on our site arose from client concepts. So this customer provides us with financial freedom, but not a lot of creative freedom.

The Original Development ball is being juggled for the benefit of game-players. This crowd is impatient, impulsive, and (in the casual games space) not generally willing to pay for our work. This customer needs to be encouraged, coerced, enticed, or downright hoodwinked into purchasing our product. i’m not a big fan of coercion or hoodwinking, so we’ll have to stick to enticement and encouragement. This group is very game-savvy, and has a fairly good idea of what will and won’t make for a great game experience. We have complete creative freedom with this customer. But there’s a very big problem with the financials.

Bargain Basement

Increasingly, we find ourselves competing with free. Literal armies of hobbyists, most often the proverbial teens in their moms’ basements, grab a cracked copy of Flash and go to town, creating games and cartoons and submitting them to portals like Kongregate and Newgrounds. They don’t get paid for their work, or are paid peanuts by “sponsors” who pony up between $25 and $2000. This kind of cash seems like a real steal to a 17-year-old, who can’t believe he’s getting paid for creating “Fart Boob Slayer 69: The Ass Fart Boobs Chronicles”. They don’t often do the simple math, dividing the money earned by the hours spent, to realize that a menial job at a carwash is more lucrative. Most of these creators don’t see a penny on their work, uploading stuff for free in the hopes of garnering high views and 5-star ratings from community members.

That’s all fine and good. But once your mom finally sells the house to vacation in Moosejaw and kicks you to the curb, you eventually realize that 5-star ratings from other 17-year-olds don’t put food on the table. Money does. And as long as you’re competing with free, ain’t no money.

When Fun is Not Fun

The other problem is that the demands of the average casual Flash game player on sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds is impossibly high. There’s an unwritten rule about how much lasting enjoyment a free game needs to provide, and if it falls short of that benchmark, the game is ignored. What’s more, the bar is raised periodically by creators who sink an inordinate amount of time into their games, offering hundreds of levels, multiplayer modes, user-creation tools, and other goodies, all for free. Any game falling short of the perceived benchmark is “not a good game”.

If a game provides two minutes of enjoyment, rather than the golden five-minute benchmark, it is poorly received.

If it has a fun mechanic, but lacks levels, it’s no good.

If it has levels, but not enough of them, it languishes in obscurity.

If it has enough levels, but no high scores, it’s dismissed as pointless.

And so on.

It takes a lot of trial, error, and experimentation to find the right game balance to meet this invisible benchmark, which is slowly creeping up all the time. And if your game doesn’t make the grade, you’ve wasted your effort: even in the land of Free, casual games are a hit-driven business.

It’s for all these reasons that iPhone development, for us, appears as a shimmering oasis in a desert of unprofitability.

iSalvation?

We’re brand new to the platform. We’ve never developed a mobile title, or a Mac app. We’re not even a Mac shop – we run Windows PCs exclusively. The barrier to entry for us goes like this:

1. Buy a development Mac
2. Buy a device (iPhone or iPod Touch)
3. Sign up to be an Apple developer (free)
4. Apply for special developer status ($99 non-renewable, with a hefty wait time of two months or more)
5. Learn xcode, the development tool, and Objective-C, the programming language
6. Build games
7. Deploy games
8. Market games
9. Return to “Build games”, and repeat

This is a simplified flow, of course. Along the way are various snags, like the lack of community support (due to the newness of the platform), the approval process (there’s an outside chance that Apple will reject your game or app, after it’s completed and submitted), learning Objective-C (a difficult, weird language in my opinion), obtaining certificates to deploy to the iPod/iPhone (easily the most convoluted process i’ve seen in a lifetime of developing), and finally figuring out a way to stand out among the 10000 apps (and growing) that customers can buy.

Bring it.

Despite these potential pitfalls, we’re up to the challenge. Software for the devices can be found and purchased in ONE PLACE, rather than all over Hell’s http half-acre. Apps can be self-published and self-priced, rather than adhering to a casual game publisher’s arbitrary $20 price point. And while some accuse Apple of devaluing games and apps just like they did with music at 99 cents a song (apparently the sweet spot for App Store offerings is also $.99 – read all about it in Trouble in the (99 cent) AppStore), we’d still be happy to make 70 cents on the dollar for a game with such a focussed demographic and great ditribution, as opposed to our as-yet failed adventures in online free game self publishing (see Pimp My Game).

The very best part in my mind is the barrier to entry. For a non-Mac shop terrified by the oddities in Objective-C, it’s a daunting prospect … but then i imagine how much more daunting it must be to the Basement Army of Flash teens, and i suddenly find myself sleeping a little easier, and walking with more of a spring in my step.

Proviso: that’s not something i’ve ever actually done.

Curiously, you can’t upload the same MochiAds-enabled file to participate. You have to embed a different piece of code into a “clean” version of your game, otherwise you find this message in your inbox:

Dear Ryan Henson Creighton,

The MochiAds Quality Assurance team has reviewed “Two by Two” for distribution and found aspects of the game which do not meet the MochiAds Program Policies.

Reason:

Stuck at “Loading” screen. Loader apparently not compatible with version control (and not necessary, version control guarantees the content is fully loaded when it begins). See https://www.mochiads.com/community/forum/topic/old-news-but___/47191#47191 for the latest tips for using version control

Please visit the link below to review the reasoning from our QA team.

https://www.mochiads.com/dev/game_hosting/two-by-two

Kind regards,

The MochiAds Team
support THE_AT_SYMBOL mochiads.com

Drat. i understand the problem – i just don’t have time to fuss with it at the moment, because we are closing up shop for vacation next week.

HOWEVER …

There IS some breaking news in the Pimp My Game saga that’s just too good to ignore:

WE BROKE THE ONE DOLLAR MARK!!!

That’s right – one more brick in the million-mile road to fabulous self-publishing riches has been laid as Two By Two – a game created in a single weekend and used for this experiment because i can’t stand giving up something of actual value for free to portal owners – has not only broken the one dollar mark, but has smashed past the ten dollar mark, becoming the highest-earning game that this company has ever produced. Except for -well, except for every other game this company has produced.

How did we do it? Simple. MindJolt.

PLEASE Take My Game For Free

MindJolt is a Flash game portal that will only post your game if its moderators decide the game is good enough to be given to them with a limitless, free license and no strings attached. This is not unlike “accepting” Jesus as your personal saviour.

“Eternal life with the Almighty and salvation from second death and everlasting suffering in the lake of fire? Alright, i guess i’ll accept. But don’t say i never did anything for you, Jesus.”

So MindJolt, deigned to accept Two By Two into their stable of games. Pomposity aside, however, successful portals that handle new releases this way are actually better for self-publishing game developers. Unlike the typical fustercluck Flash portal where anyone can submit a game at any time, and your title gets lost in the morass of “Punch the Monkey” and “Touch Me Durrty” virtual girl simulators, MindJolt predictably metes one new game every day. Your game appears in their prominent “Newest Games” section at the top of the site, where each day it drops further and further down until it’s kicked out into the prison yard and left to fend for itself against the other games, where it’s likely to get shanked in the ribs by a FancyPants Adventure sequel, or forced to become Peggle’s bitch.

The effect is subtle, but see if you can spot the where the gameplays jumped four hundred thousand percent from a high estimate of five plays per day, to a spike of just over twenty thousand plays. (If you can’t spot it, get a friend to help you.)

Are We Rich Yet?

So what effect did this peak have on our MochiAds rev share split? Peep the digits:

i’ve decided to add a new graphic to the Pimp My Game series that i like to call the “McWage Infographic”. Although Two By Two was built in the TOJam pressure cooker over a single weekend, a good 40 hours of work went into the game (along with a large bag of BBQ Fritos and 4 litres of Pepsi). From now on, i’ll be dividing the money we’ve amassed by 40 development hours to determine the hourly wage i’ve earned on the game. i’ll use this metric to determine whether or not it’s feasible to stick with this method of game monetization, or whether one should instead find a job bulldozing chicken guano from under enormous industrial coops.

Follow the rest of our Pimp My Game shenanigans from the main article section here.

Introduction
Part 1: Armor Games
Part 2: Kongregate
Part 3: MochiAds
………./\……….Update: MindJolt

First things first: the MochiAds user agreement keeps me from linking to the site or using the service’s logo, both of which i’m doing in spades here. But since the purpose of this article is to review and critique the service, i claim these usages under Canada’s Fair Dealing provision. And with that, we begin.

MochiAds has a very simple premise: embed a few lines of code in your Flash game, and it will pull an ad down from the server into your game. Then MochiAds splits the advertising revenue with you, the game designer. The soon-to-be fabulously wealthy game designer.

You decide where the ads will appear. You can throw them up before gameplay, after gameplay, or during level breaks – or all three, if you’re greedy … or if you’ve only made eighty cents on your game and you need to see your penny proceeds jump into the triple-digits like someone i know. *cough* me *cough*

MochiAds is the subject of many modern Internatz urban legends about making money through game design. Time and again, i’ve heard people say “then you just throw some ads in there, and buhZZAM!! Instant hundreds. That’s why i wanted to put MochiAds to the test, to see if there was any truth to the rumour that it’s a viable way to monetize your Flash games.

The Process

There’s really not much to report on here. As with the Kongregate service, there are really only a few lines of code to integrate before your game is MochiAds-ready. The site requires you to sign up for an account, agree to a big page of legalese (see above), and upload your MochiAds-enabled game to their servers. The idea here, i gather, is that MochiAds becomes your distribution partner by offering its slate of ad-enabled games to website publishers. Publishers can just swing by and grab games to add to their sites, which benefits MochiAds and the game designer. Right?

It benefits both of us, right? Like, we both get something out of it?

Hello?

Giving It Your .001%

It’s at this point in the process that i began to feel like a bit of a tool. In the MochiAds Developer agreement, Mochi reserves the right to change the agreement at any time, and to notify their developers by email (alright), or by posting the change on their website (not alright). i was trying to imagine a world where i’d wake up one morning and think “Hmm … i wonder if the MochiAds agreement has changed today?” And then i visit the website, and voila – MochiAds owns my soul.

The agreement goes on to state:

The net amount of each User Revenue Share shall be determined in Mochi’s sole discretion based on various factors

So let me break this deal down for you: you give MochiAds your game for free. Mochi then throws your game in a zip file for any portal owner to boogie on down and snatch to spice up his site. Mochi earns money from the ads they inject into your game, and you earn … whatever Mochi feels like giving you. Honest – that’s how it works. Mochi also reserves the right not to show its work, obscuring the math that goes into your cut. It amounts to working for someone for free, AND for a bad cause.

Quel deal!, as i imagine the French might someday say.

Onus vs. Own Us

According to the friendly folks on the MochiAds forums, the best way to really drive revenue from a MochiAds-enabled game is to get it on one of the “big” Flash game portals. There are differing opinions as to which portals belong to this elite group, but your intrepid reporter made sure to submit his game to all of them. The catch here is that certain portals won’t take just any game. In some cases, you have to submit your game to the site and wait for them to approve and post it.

In my mind, this is as demeaning as those logo competitions i hear about, where a firm tries to save money on a graphic designer by offering some paltry amount – usually $500 – for the best logo submission. Of course, i can blow $500 just making the connecting call to my overseas love chat operator (i like it when they say all those sexy words in Dutch), so it’s never been an appealing proposition. Besides – who spends $500 on their permanent corporate identity? Don’t get me started.

Self-awareness check: i do realize that my company logo looks like it was scrawled by a grade schooler doing his science fair project on cooties

Or better yet, submitting your game to these exclusive portals is like begging someone to let you work for them for free, a plea i reserve only for professional monster truck drivers.

The Result

Unlike my original experiment with Kongregate, i decided to put Two By Two up on the service and let it stew for a while before pronouncing judgment. As of this writing, the game has been on the service for over a month. It’s quick and easy to see the money my game has earned using Mochi’s robust suite of tracking tools, including their draggable line graph, rss feed earnings update, and milestone tracker.

For each calendar month that Two By Two has been on the service, i’ve seen 1 penny. At this rate, i can retire when i’m eighty million years old.

The Graph

Let’s take another look at our graph and see how much money the game is earning, shall we?

Epilogue

There is hope on the horizon. MindJolt Games, one of the elite portals i mentioned, has accepted Two By Two to its service (which, to me, is the equivalent of accepting help from a rescue helicopter when you go mountain climbing and get stuck in a crevasse for four days and are forced to eat your own arms). i hear tell around these here parts that MindJolt’s “New Games” list traffic alone is enough to propel a MochiAds-enabled game into the dollar-earning stratosphere.

Two By Two goes live on MindJolt July 30th 2008.

Keep watching this feature for more info on monetizing your Flash games!

Introduction
Part 1: Armor Games
Part 2: Kongregate
Part 3: MochiAds
………./\……….Update: MindJolt

This is a website hailing itself as “the Youtube of video games”. Upload your game to the site to participate in their revenue share split – as the developer, you earn a portion of the advertisting money. Kongregate also has weekly and monthly contests to attract new games on a regular basis. The site offers a bigger portion of the revenue pie to developers who integrate their more “hooky” features like high scores and statistics, as well as making your game exclusive to their site.

i first heard about Kongregate at Game Developers’ Conference 2007. The founder, Jim Greer, spoke on a panel or two about how he was going to revolutionize the Internet by creating the “Youtube of Games”. You might be tempted to say that massive flash portals like Miniclip or AddictingGames have already laid claim to that title, but one thing sets Kongregate apart: the ability to upload content to the site is in the hands of the masses, in exchange for an automatic, built-in share of the advertising revenue pie.

Power to the People

Kongregate’s premise is simple and direct: you upload a Flash game to the site. In exchange for the free content, Kongregate will give you a cut of the ad revenues. The more you incorporate the site’s unique player-hooking features, the more revenue percentage they’re willing to part with.

It breaks down like this:

25% of ad revenue – default
+ 10% – incorporating Kongregate’s APIs (there are currently two: High Scores and Statistics)
+ 15% – making your game Kongregate-exclusive (you can still host the game on your personal site)

So developers can earn between 25 and 50% of ad revenues. Since the name of the experiment is Pimp My Game, i automatically had to kiss that exclusivity bonus goodbye. But it was time to see if integrating the APIs was worth my while, or if it would only add aggravation to the upload process.

It’s Apparent It’s a Parent

When your game is played on Kongregate, it’s presented in a special wrapper that houses your game, a high scores page, and a communal chat room common to all games. Within the chat room, you can make friends, ask for help with the games you’re playing, or see what your pals are playing and hop over to those games. Based on flagrant disregard for proper spelling and grammar and reckless abuse of acronyms, i would put the Kongregate player base at an average of twelve years old, and very, very male. Clearly, a Biblically-themed flip n’ match game is what these players crave.

The parent Flash movie that houses your game can easily be tapped into by typing on your keyboard thusly:

_root.kongregateServices.connect();

From there, you can access the High Scores and Statistics APIs.

The whole point of statistics is to record every significant action a player performs in your game so that they can be checked against the site’s Badges. Badges (of which we don’t need none, particularly of the stinkin’ variety) are Kongregate’s homage to Achievements on the XBox Live service, or Sizzling Hits of Solid Crack on EA’s Pogo.com. The twist is that you don’t actually set these badges up yourself. This is to prevent someone from launching a popular game that just hands thousands of easy points to players. *cough* Avatar *cough*

You have only to integrate Statistics into your game and report on things like Zombies Killed, Levels Defeated, Potions Earned, Sweaters Knitted, etc etc. Once your game has garnered enough plays and positive reviews, Kongregate staff may shine on you and build Badges for your game, utilizing the Statistics you set up back at Upload Time. If they don’t decide to build any Badges, you guessed it: integrating the API helped earn you that rev share bonus, but it was otherwise pointless.

On the up side, Statistics are extremely easy to integrate:

_root.kongregateStats.submit(“sweatersKnitted”,1);

That’s it. Just pass some custom stat name to the container movie. The second parameter keeps track of how the stat should be tallied – additive, replacement, replace if maximum, etc. Simple. The only other step is to create identically-named Statistics entries on the Upload page. The site instructions weren’t very clear about where and how this happens, but it becomes obvious when you take a leap of faith and click the “UPLOAD” button.

At this point, i was absolutely loving all the effort that Kongregate put into making the process dead-simple for its content providers. And then i hit the High Scores Wall.

Not ‘API. Not ‘API at all.

You can do two things with Kongregate’s High Scores API: fire a score to the container clip, or request a list of scores and display them in-game. i thought i’d go whole-hog and display scores in-game in addition to sending them to the container, so i started building a new score board for Two by Two.

The disadvantage of the Kongregate wrapper is that High Scores are split across successive pages if you submit different scores for different gameplay modes. This meant that Two By Two’s scores would be split across Easy, Medium and Hard score pages. The in-game board i was building would therefore not be redundant: it could display all three modes on the same screen, next to each user name.

i spent a few hours building and testing the new score board, and at long last it was time to upload my first game to Kongregate.

Failure to Launch

When i had entered all of my game’s information, uploaded a thumbnail and registered all of the game Statistics, i clicked the “Upload” button. Kongregate.com had a think. Then it threw an error. The worst kind of error: an error that’s worded something like this:

We’re sorry, an error has occurred.

The comma splice just adds insult to injury. What’s a 12 year old developer supposed to do with a message like that? The error kept popping up every time i tried to upload my swf.

i hit the reasonably active message boards and poked around. One user said that he tried uploading from another computer and he didn’t get the error. Was that really the solution? i transferred the game over to my laptop and gave it a try. Lo and behold – it worked. Sheesh. i wonder what i would have done without that extra machine? Probably abandoned Kongregate.

Scores of Problems

Uploading my game to a test page was like opening Pandora’s Box – Pandora’s Box of Crappy Programming Problems. Kongregate’s High Scores API was working just fine. i could submit a score through the wrapper and it would show up. But when i tried to pull down the high scores list into the game to display it on my shiny new scoreboard, i got nothin’.

i spent a few days posting to the board and waiting for a response. i could have sworn i’d seen a post where people said you could trace actions out to the Kongregate chat window to test your game. When i finally got a response, i learned that server reports could be seen in the chat window, but i was on my own if i wanted to actually trace information out of my game. The eventual solution was to enable debugging in my game file, and to upload the swf file and the debugging swd file along with it.

Unfortunately, Kongregate started throwing me more Mystery Errors whenever i’d upload a swd file, so my process went like this:

1. Make a change to my game file.
2. Upload the swf and the swd
3. Check five checkboxes.
4. Crash the site.
5. Go back to the upload page and re-upload the swf.
6. Check five checkboxes.
7. Test the game. No worky.
8. Repeat.

It got so that i would STARE at Kongregate’s sample High Scores code, eyes straining to see any subtle difference that i was missing, or maybe to deign the Secrets of the Code by having a pure heart and wishing on the morning star.

Eventually, i wrote a test file. It had buttons to submit scores, and a button to refresh the scoreboard. i pared it down to its barest essentials and … nothing.

All the while, my posts languished on the Kongregate message boards. i had written a few different messages appealing to the site staff for help, but nothing came through. In their defense, the middle of the week saw a hack attack where the top games’ thumbnails were replaced with pics of Michael Jackson and Tom Cruise, and the boards filled up with messages screaming about PIRATE HAT CATS. The site operators and moderators had their hands full. (But judging by the time it took them to clean up their boards, they didn’t have efficient moderation tools.)

Toward the end of the week, days later, i finally received my answer from Kongregate staff:

Sorry about this, we had to temporarily disable this functionality as the query was occasionally killing our servers. We should be re-enabling this service soon.

Dotcom silicon valley sons of bitches.

Off i went, undoing all the work i had done to integrate Kongregate’s high scores system at their behest. Finally, i had a functional game that was ready to upload to the service.

Win Jim Greer’s Money

Once you decide to forego Kongregate’s busted High Scores API and publish your friggin’ game already, page three of the upload page is a delight: Where do we Send the Cheque? Site founder Jim Greer churned up a ton of money from angel investors, and he’s not whistling Dixie: every game that’s uploaded to Kongregate is entered into Weekly and Monthly popularity contests to win even more cash. The best part is that these prizes are doled out based on how highly Kongregate players rate your game, so if you’re a people who knows people, you could sleaze your way into a cool hundred bucks by emailing a million of your friends. Kongregate, of course, is okay with this.

One weekly prize could put Two by Two well over my initial Pimp My Game estimates, but i know it’s not going to happen. Aside from being far too short, as Armor Games already pointed out, Two by Two does not contain any zombies, boobies, shooting, techno music, dinosaurs, or any other touchpoint of the twelve year old zeitgeist. i think realistically, the most i can hope for is a fluke week where every other entry is lacklustre. Reach for the stars!

King Kong?

Within moments of uploading my game, seven people played it and i received my first comment. Kongregate member Carados called it “decent”. A brief assessment of a brief game. How fitting!

i announced to the players in the chat channel that i had just uploaded a new game. One player said “Which game?” Another player replied “Two by Two.” Kongregate’s integration tools were working.

Despite the hiccups with the disabled High Scores functionality, i enjoyed the process of uploading my game to Kongregate. The APIs couldn’t be easier to integrate. The site was clearly laid out, the upload process was straightforward, and the site got down to business right away by asking me where to mail the cheque. i wondered how much of this was just empty promises.

i clicked the intriguing “My Ad Revenue Report” on my Kongregate profile page. Within half an hour of uploading the game, and at the time of this writing, Two by Two hard earned its very first revenue: two cents.

The Rundown

time spent: ~ 8 hours (your mileage will definitely vary)
result: successful upload to the service – immediate game ratings, comments and revenue balance
cash earned to date: $0.02

The Graph

Let’s take another look at our graph and see how much money the game is earning, shall we?

Kongregate starts paying out at $25.00. YOU can help that happy day arrive.

Play Two by Two on Kongregate.com.

Keep watching this feature for more info on monetizing your Flash games!

Introduction
Part 1: Armor Games
Part 2: Kongregate
Part 3: MochiAds
………./\……….Update: MindJolt

Armor Games is a Flash portal that will sponsor games on a case-by-case basis, with a game’s worth being determined by the site’s moderators. The site owners appear to be very efficient at pimping out games themselves; the Armor Games splash screen seems to pop up in every conceivable corner of the Internatz.

Pimping Technique

To get the ball rolling with Armor Games, i visited the Sponsorship section of their site, where the site operators invited me to send an email to Sponsorship {at} ArmorGames.com.

So away i went, and sent them the following message:

Hello. i am interested in a sponsorship for my puzzle game, Two by Two. Please let me know what you think.

http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/04/26/two-by-two/

Thanks!

- Ryan

Within 48 hours, i received this response:

re: Game appraisal: Two by Two

It’s very fun and creative but extremely short.

Thanks for sending it to us though.

Best,
[name omitted, lest millions of Untold Entertainment supporters swarm the Armor Games site with pitchforks and frowny faces]

So there you have it! The game was not up to snuff for Armor Games’ standards … which may actually affirm your faith in Armor Games.

The Rundown

time spent: 5 minutes
result: utter failure
cash earned: $0.00

The Graph

Let’s take another look at our graph and see how much money the game is earning, shall we?

But while the teams behind Totally Drive Cars in 3D and Totally Murder Hookers in 3D stand to win back their investment and then some in high sales numbers, what’s the best that an indie or casual game developer can hope for? Day by day, there are more and more opportunities for independant developers to monetize their games. In this series, i’ll be taking one of our own games and running it through the setup process for every monetization plan i can think of, to generate some real data on how effective these various methods actually are.

i knew this guy who had a game …

Monetizing online properties takes on a bit of an urban legend stink when you hear about So-And-So who threw Google Ads on his page and bought a Bentley with the cash, and so on. i’m anxious to try out these various monetization methods to see what actually sticks, and what’s not worth your time.

The Lovely Lady

During this experiment, i’ll be pimping out Two By Two, a game i created in 2007 at TOJam 2. The game was built in a single weekend, top to bottom, and the quality definitely reflects that. It’s a simple flip n’ match game mapped to a cube. The graphics are simple, the sound is simple, and there are three gameplay modes: Easy, Normal and Hard. Simple! The game won’t win any awards, but it’s a harmless little distraction.

Keep an eye on this graph, which shows how much money i’ve made pimping out Two By Two:

The Johns

This is a list of the various Flash game monetization methods i know of:

This is a website hailing itself as “the Youtube of video games”. Upload your game to the site to participate in their revenue share split – as the developer, you earn a portion of the advertisting money. Kongregate also has weekly and monthly contests to attract new games on a regular basis. The site offers a bigger portion of the revenue pie to developers who integrate their more “hooky” features like high scores and statistics, as well as making your game exclusive to their site.

The new kid in the block, J2Play is the brain child of a group of computer science students from the University of Waterloo here in Canada. J2Play takes the Kongregate model to social networks, embedding submitted games in a chatroom wrapper and enabling play on sites like MySpace and Facebook, as well as other popular social networking sites in non-English speaking countries that you may not be aware of. The model is, again, a rev share split from ad revenue.

Home to the proverbial “15 year old in his basement”, Newgrounds hosts some of the most peurile and deplorable Flash content on the Internet, a reflection of its largely adolescent userbase. The site’s claim to fame is that one of its titles, Alien Hominid, was the first ever Flash-to-game console crossover product. Newgrounds recently released an API to serve ads inside your game, so i’m going to give it a try and report the results.

Integrate the MochiAds service into your game, and the site will serve ads into your product. You have to take care of the distribution yourself, but the idea is that the farther and wider you pimp out your game, the more people will play it and see the ads. Garner the most eyeballs possible to maximize your cut of the ad revenue. MochiAds is the prime source of bogus stories like “There’s this guy? And he has a game? And he put MochiAds on it? And then he made enough money to eat thousand dollar bills for every meal. Until he died, which was very soon because you can’t survive by eating paper.”

In this series, i’ll inject MochiAds into Two by Two, send it off to a bunch of portals, and report back on the actual revenue potential of the service.

The idea here is that you can post your game to the site and it stays behind their membership wall. Portal owners can sign up to view the games and offer money for them. If you accept a deal through the site, it’s up to you how much money to kick back to the Flash Game License site owners.

Second only to Newgrounds in terms of dodgy content, but tops in my book because they’re owned by a company who should know better (MTV/Viacom), Addicting Games decides whether to sponsor games on a case-by-case basis. The amount of money they’re willing to kick to your product is determined by their moderators.

Armor Games is another Flash portal that will sponsor games on a case-by-case basis, with a game’s worth being determined by the site’s moderators. The site owners appear to be very efficient at pimping out games themselves; the Armor Games splash screen seems to pop up in every conceivable corner of the Internatz.

That’s a good start

We’ll start there. There are plenty of other sites where indies can make a few bucks on their games. If there are any sites or monetization methods you’d like to see reviewed in this series, please post a comment and let me know.

If my findings differ dramatically from your experience pimping out your own games, speak up! By the end of this series, i’m hoping to have an accurate overview of the current state of affairs for independant online game developers.

Hypothesis

My best guess is that Two by Two will earn a few hundred bucks at most, making these monetization methods appealing for the 15-year-old hobbyist, or for someone hoping to break into the industry, but i doubt we’ll see enough cashflow to support the American Dream, which consists of a house in the burbs with two cars, two kids, and a dog named Petey … let alone the Canadian Dream, which is characterized by four canoes, steel-framed fur traps and free caribou rides around the igloo.