The missing link - a service proposal

After you read the last blog entry it is clear that small casual-games studios are having hard time earning their keep using advertising/sponsorship.
Downloading the full version of the game does seem to produce a nice revenue stream , but is mainly done in the large publisher sites , allowing them to collect "humongous" percentage of the profits.

One solution comes in mind ...
Allow a developer to sell "serials" or "unlocks" for online game versions without the need to download a game version.
Use a service-model (like the "MochiAds") instead of the publisher model , allowing the studio to post the game to the publisher site , egonistic to which publisher is it.

Very high level architecture

• Client side - release public flash API (AS2/3) which allows locking certain features , buying an unlock-code online and submitting it to unlock the game in real-time.
• A server side - customized billing site per game , and a submission site allowing users to configure their game for unlock purchases.

This service earns money by taking a small commission on each unlock-buy.

Time frame: few part-time months of coding.


If it is so simple , why it was not done already?
Not certain.
For the big publisher , the reason is probably that they will not benefit from such a service - on the contrary : they may loose potential buys because they will be performed outside their domain.
For any individual development studio, it is not worth the effort for one game (and may even get them in trouble with the publisher)
But it looks as an ideal service for the independent casual developers out there , and unlike the hardcore-independent game industry (which is unbelievably small) , on the casual market their numbers are quite substantial.

In game advertisment - more details

After you finished marketing the game , and thousands of people play your game each day, how much money will you get from advertising?

There are common measurements for advertisement pay.

• CPC - how much money will you get per ad click (not view , but the rare actual click). This is less used.
  
• eCPM - how much money will you get for 1000 ad-views. This number mainly depends on your target-audience. As lots of publishers want to advertise to the US market , the eCPM for US target will be relatively high, however if most of your target audience is in a remote village in Africa , there are good chances that no one will want to advertise to them and thus the eCPM value will be zero.
  So , what eCPM can you reach? gamesjacket will guarantee a minimum of 0.5$ , which is quite high. Mochiads will not give you a guarantee. It can be a bit more than that , but also a lot less (In the middle-east its around 0.11$)
  

To give real numbers , lets finish with an example: Lets say your game is quite nice and had one million ad views. With 0.5$ eCPM it means 500$. With 0.1$ eCPM it means 100$.
Pocket money , at best.
Very good games (the "blockbusters") can be played tens of millions of times ( by a million or so unique players) and thus can reach thousands of dollars. But thats really blockbuster games. One example is "Desktop tower defense" which reached a 9 million games per-month for the first few months. But even these numbers will only give you 4500$ a month with a small game life-span.
There are few blockbusters that had even a bigger user base , but the numbers are not substaintly higher than the desktop-tower-defense example.

The obvious conclusion from these numbers is that in-game advertisement is only suitable for very small budget games , typically a week to a month overall development time.
Sponsership can add few hundered dollars on top of this , but the real money comes from a completely different monetizing solution. Instead of "play-for-free" solution , there is the unoriginal, old fashioned model of play a demo for free and buy the full game for 9.99$.

Lets assume, on average , the user plays the game 10 times (this means s/he load the flash game 10 times , no matter how much game-over/new-game sessions there are in each game load).
1000 views = 100 unique-players = 0.5$ of advertisment (with high eCPM).

• 100 players * BuyPercent * 10$ = 0.5$
• BuyPercent = 0.5 / (10*100) = 0.0005 (*100 for percentage) = 0.05%

This means that if 0.05% of the players will buy the game , you will get the same money as in advertisment.
But if 1% of the players will but it , you will get 20 times more.
For one million views (100,000 unique players) , this difference can be between 500$ to 10,000$. For a blockbuster , this number can be ten-folds high.

Note that I don`t know what is the percentage of players which eventually buy the game , but big companies like oberon-media successfully use this model , so it probably closeer to the 1% than to the 0.05%

Alpha-channel creator , save/load using flash10

Want to create an alpha-channel but don`t have Photoshop (or don`t want to use it)? your prayers got answered.


Suppose you have a picture without alpha-channel and you want to make one from it. for example , this one is without (the black background is an opaque black color).





You can use this small flash to load a file from your desktop and save it with the background as alpha-channel.
The huristic for finding the background color is simple: check what is the most common color and use it. On some pictures , it won`t work (but on most it will)

EcoFish - First flash casual game

I just uploaded a beta version to flash-game-license. here.
Encrypted and site locked (means only swf originated from few designated sites will work. If you download the swf and run it from your computer/on another site , it will fail)

just to see if my mochiAds and my mochibot is tracking me right

v1.0

Flash game development resources

A list of good resources I used:

Syntax
AS3 syntax fast overview (for advanced programmers)

Game dev tutorial
FlexFighters tutotial - teaching you to code a real game from scratch. Incredible post.
astroids - small, very basic , astroid tutorial.


Free Graphic Art
SpriteLib GPL - bitmap sprites , on the CPL(yes , the name is misleading) license.
photos - you need to mention the site (and link to it) as owner

Free music Art
Sound Snap - search for example for "beat"

monotizing casual(flash) games

In one paragraph:
Although casual gaming make over 2 billion dollars a year , you , the developer will find it hard to make a living from it.
Casual games cost little to develop and , as a developer ,tend to bring little money.
Rare "blockbuster" hits can generate a considerable ( 5 digit) some of money if you monetize it correctly , but those blockbuster are extremely hard to come by.

There are 3 major ways to monetize:
1. Ads in-game (mochiAds) or on the site
2. Sponsorship from a publisher site (by giving a splash-screen , and/or use only on that site)
3. -Advanced- selling unlocked, downloadable version of the online game.


The 13 steps to do when monotizing a game , from Emanuele Feronato , for the first and second monetizing ways.

forbes article with examples of (rare) blockbusters: