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[kevglass]

First real post, woo hoo!.

I've been writing games a while, I've tried a couple of approaches:

1) Traditional Sell Out? - write the game, polish it up, convince some bigger entity to buy it lock stock. This worked but the feeling afterwards was like having testicles ripped off. It also didn't pay that well.

2) Traditional Indie? - write the game, attempt to push it to portals, sell through your own site, market like crazy. This felt more like I kept control, though some portals seemed to want a pound of flesh. The money just wasn't good.

Both the above could just be that the quality of the game was high enough, but I was wondering what other business models people had tried and what sort of success they'd had. Like everyone I want to be able to do what I love full time but right now I just couldn't make ends meet by writing games, so while money isn't the focus of writing games (especially atm) it is the means to the end.

A couple of other models had been mentioned to me. One based on writing a really good casual web page and surrounding it with adverts - can see how that would work. The other writing an online free community game which players can get extra features, perks, facilities by signing up and paying tiny chunks.

Has anyone any experience with these or any other models and did they work?

Cheers,

Kev

[Alex May]

Free-to-play micropayment MMOs have definitely worked - Three Rings is a good one to check out (Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy), and of course there's Habbo and a few other really significant ones - but for a lone developer it might not be the easiest project to pull off.

Ad-supported free-to-play browser games could work but you're relying on a massive volume of hits every day and of course you're in competition with Kongregate and a couple of other flash portals right off the bat. If you're going to do this then IMO you need to make your games really interesting, have strong replay value, and plastered with your name / website link.

Common opinion seems to be that donationware doesn't work. Shareware seems to be dead (it relied on peer distribution and since the widespread penetration of the internets it's been made somewhat redundant).

Lots of people set a lot of store by their newsletter. Start one up. If you have a library of games already then you're off to a great start, as long as people liked them and would like more games by the same person.

[Alex May]

Oh yeah, bundle up your stuff maybe. Orange Box!

Also:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080304/162842435.shtml

Maybe there's a business model for games in here somewhere.