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I do all my game development primarily in Java. Is there any equivalent to flash games license or other sponsors for java applet based games? If not what other alternatives are there for monetizing java games?

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Looking for a Java FGL-equivalent is putting the cart before the horse. FGL is designed to make it easy to get a sponsorship / license from among dozens and dozens of Flash gaming sites. By contrast, I don't know of more than one or two sites dedicated to Java games. Why not just e-mail them directly?

Your right, there really aren't many websites dedicated to java games. I'm sorry my original question was poorly worded, and scatterbrained.  :crazy:

What I'm really looking for is information on how to monetize java games since I can't find much information on that. All I can think of is creating a game for the Google phone since it has great support for java. But other than that I'm at a loss for what one could do with a java game.

What are those one or two sites dedicated to java games? I really don't know of any myself.

I did a quick google search and found a couple of very low-fi sites 'dedicated' to Java gaming. Truth is, all of them had mostly Flash games and it was a great big effort for me to find ANY java games. http://www.java-gaming.com/ Can't find a java game on the whole site.

Using the Google phone thing you can go to www.android.com/market but compared to the iPhone games/apps market-it's nothing.

http://www.android.com/us/developer-distribution-agreement.html

It seems very limited regarding Java games.

http://forums.indiegamer.com is a site dedicated more to the "business" side of Indie Games. I'm not a member but perhaps if you are interested you can sign up and search their site and see if they have any tips for Java developers?

http://www.2dplay.com/game-sponsorship.htm
they accept Java games
http://www.flashgamesponsorship.com/portalPerspectiveArcadeTown.html (they accept java games but are honest about their pricing)

this post is kinda jumbled as I threw in the information whenever I found it in google, sorry about that 



edit:  :facepalm: forgot my most important link: http://www.javagaming.org/
I think you would have seen it but if not that would be a very important place to visit. Tons of links and it seems to be a very popular website. They have tons of featured games and reminded me I need to check out Minecraft again.* But they have a jobs and resumes section on that site that can get some some short and very small contract gigs to permanent jobs. Depends on if you want to supplment your income or if you want this to be a permanent job. Either way I hope you find some way to make money off of your skill  :coffee:


*Regarding Minecraft they went to a pay4play model but did it on their own. Going by their own rough stats they have grossed roughly €19,831 with 1,993 sales just in it's alpha phase. 

These guys (http://www.sigames.com/) make games using Java.

They have this radical idea for making profits. Involves you selling copies of the game in exchange for currency. They seem to earn a modest income.

You can always sell it like you would a c program.  Just offer a downloadable executable.

http://gamejolt.com also do java applets and have an ad sharing program, not sure how profitable it is though.

these guys also sells java desktop games, http://www.oddlabs.com and http://www.puppygames.net

but the best recent example on how to make lots of money from a java game is Minecraft at http://www.minecraft.net

For google phone there is the android market.
compared to the Iphone appstore, it's either a barren desert or a new virgin territory to conquer :eyebrows:

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone. I've found out that its actually possible to take a Java game and port it to iPhone with what looks like little effort. For anyone else interested in doing this check out http://www.xmlvm.org/overview/

Also I was wondering if anyone knows if Steam will accept Java games. I don't see any reason they would not since its possible to make an installer and executable for a Java game. I'm really interested in getting a game on Steam. Does anyone have any experience with them?


I'd like to think it is virgin territory waiting to be conquered. If everyone is avoiding the Google market, that means less competition for me, and there are very few technical hurdles for getting a Google phone game developed. I don't need to buy a mac, or an iPhone with contract. My friend has a Google phone, so I can just use that for testing the game out.

Finally, concerning minecraft. I'm very impressed that they have managed to get so many users on board for their alpha. I'm tempted to take the route of selling a game on its own website, but realistically I think minecraft is the exception to the rule. Its probably quite difficult to receive enough publicity to make a game successful from a single website.

Keving Glass wrote a good blog post about this. Not only about Java, but you should definitely read it. LINK (http://www.cokeandcode.com/6-ways-to-try-and-monetize-indie-games) He also has a lot more good stuff (also about iPhone) to read on the site.

A good way to start is to do it simple, and create an applet and get profit share from a site like http://games4j.com (http://games4j.com)
I am one of the guys behind it, so I am a bit biased :) but I honestly think that is best way to start (Why I started the site). Once you get comfortable writing simple applets, you can take the step up and make shareware or bigger games, but start out at least trying a simple game.

I've been gaining interest in the JVM for gaming lately, because of sheer technical superiority:

• It's the most mature, stable web-capable gaming platform around. Attractive plugins like Unity, InstantAction, etc., come and go, but by being extremely proprietary, and not getting a lock-in boost like a Microsoft bundle(which is what Flash got early on), they are declaring themselves disposable and hence are likely to lose long-term staying power.
• Huge quantity of libraries, huge tool infrastructure, most low-level development issues have already been encountered and resolved.
• Attractive modern languages(take your pick of Scala, Clojure, Groovy, and many others)
• I'm sick and tired of Flash's sucky, almost-good-enough implementations of everything.

I think the main thing keeping me from going that route now is the lack of a marketplace like what has emerged online for Flash. But that in itself seems to be a chicken-and-egg problem - Flash portals first came about because Flash started from a media-centric standpoint, making videos and animations with some interactivity, and they gradually branched into games as the support appeared. And now the situation with Flash is such that all you have to do is send up a game through MochiAds, and even if it's a really terrible game, it'll get at least a few hundreds or thousands of plays without any real legwork on your part. It's a very powerful way to find your audience, and there's nothing else like it - the "App Store" type of model is less egalitarian and more open to payola schemes. Hence the dilemma I face in Flash vs. JVM.

There are definitely examples of successful games for the JVM, small and large, but it's kind of depressing how almost any search with terms like "Java games" essentially sends you to student coding projects. The only prominent portal I can think of that hosts Java games in quantity is Yahoo! Games. And they're casual-games oriented, which indicates that we are in a technical Bizarro-Land: the performance-demanding, action-heavy stuff with physics and 3D and other cool tech is getting squeezed into Flash so that people on Kong, Newgrounds, and 1000 other sites can play it, while the relatively lightweight stuff that is reliant mostly on sparkly effects and good graphic design gets made in Java. ??? (Although, Kong did make an exceptional case of allowing Runescape to run its Java app in an offsite frame; that's a start.)

But it leads me to think: How can I help foster a JVM-portal market on my own and get that same marketplace benefit while using the better platform? games4j looks like exactly what I want to see, and so does GameJolt, but we have to see a zillion such sites. But I think that if we can make games that are really strong and are monetized with similar methods to Flash, the existing Flash-centric sites will start to treat both platforms equally.

When I make my own games, I am perpetually keeping my eye on ways to make the creation process faster and easier; I think that a Game Maker type of program with an engine targeting JVM would be a huge hit and support the above goal. And I have a good shot at pulling it off, too. Gradually, by solving real development problems day-by-day and observing how others do so, I've resolved a lot of the conceptual grounding necessary to make an entry-level system that's truly useful for nuts-and-bolts gameplay tasks. When I wrote out the road map to actually implement it on my own, though, the ballpark estimate was two years of work, including two game projects to test the system in the fires of "real development."

So that's a long-term thing. It'll be open source, of course. And in the meantime, we can always fall back to business models based on "traditional" product marketing techniques. Whatever those are.

I'm curious about any experiences people have had with marketing Java games as well.

As a platform Java is much more appealing to me than Flash (with the one downside being the time the virtual machine takes to start up). Unfortunately there just aren't as many venues for it. I'd love to see portals start to focus more on Java, it really seems like it would enable a lot of kinds of games that Flash just isn't well suited for.

For instance right now I'm thinking about making a city building game with a large, heavily populated world. I don't think I'd be able to get it running reasonably in Flash without sacrificing a lot of detail. I'd also like to be able to use both mouse buttons. The game probably wouldn't work in Flash very well, but I'm sure it would work well in Java.

I heard there was a new Java in the making. Java FX or sthg like that.

Subjective opinion: JavaFX is garbage. Go for Flash or straight Java. (Or C)

I develop almost exclusively in Java. I'm currently working on Minecraft, and a few years back, I was the client dev for Wurm Online.
Java has decent reach, but it's nowhere near as good as flash is, and if you're going to try to do the mochiads thing in java, forget about it and just go with flash, there's almost zero market out there for it.
To get paid, I just charge for the game and do payments via paypal. The conversion rate isn't amazing, but it's enough.

GameJolt (http://gamejolt.com/) is very nice, and I really should fix up a few more games of mine and put them on there. I don't really expect to make a lot of money that way, though.

Java used to be on the same line as Flash in the late 90s-early 00s. The JVM used to make browsers unresponsive then and it still does so it's not a big surprise on why it got left behind. The other reason is of course that Flash was much easier to approach for newbies.

Does Bigfish games and the like still have Java games? Those casual portals are probably your best bet.
GameJolt looks nice but it doesn't seem to create much traffic. Looking at some random top games there, they have only like few thousands of views.