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[Nix]

I'll just quickly add my first experience with FGL.

I made a fairly average twist on the match-3 puzzle game. It took about 15 hours to make, over a few weeks (usually while I was in lectures).
Put it up on FGL and did some updates.
Over all I've had 13 sponsors look at it, about half of them stay long enough to play the game at least 5 times and I never had any bids or contact from any of them.
After a 2 months or so, I put it up on Kongregate  and so far have earned about $8 from it 

Would you mind putting up a link to the game? I'm curious to see what it's like.

[Charcoal]

I'll just quickly add my first experience with FGL.

I made a fairly average twist on the match-3 puzzle game. It took about 15 hours to make, over a few weeks (usually while I was in lectures).
Put it up on FGL and did some updates.
Over all I've had 13 sponsors look at it, about half of them stay long enough to play the game at least 5 times and I never had any bids or contact from any of them.
After a 2 months or so, I put it up on Kongregate  and so far have earned about $8 from it 

Would you mind putting up a link to the game? I'm curious to see what it's like.

Sure can!

Here it is: Cascade

[Evan Balster]

The main discussion in the indie scene today is "How can we, at least, break even with a game in the flash market?"
Go to FGL, it's filled with really crappy games. Will you say that those games are going to make 2k or absolute zero?

What I want to ask is this (it would clarify things for me):
"Who around here has made, at least, 2k with a crappy game?"

I didn't read the topic, but I have friends who've subsisted on a combination of FGL-like things and contract work for a few years.  Recently, they've branched out a little more, though.

[Alistair Aitcheson]

Cascade

Had a go, and thought it was a neat idea, but could do with a bit more polish on the puzzle-gameplay side of things to allow a bit more strategy and make it a bit more enticing.

It would be nice if there was some kind of combo system, as there didn't seem to be much advantage in blowing up a large number of blocks at once. Then you could add in some nice rewarding exploding text for when you do well. I also think Rush Mode should be the main game, as that is a lot more exciting - the player has to play fast to stay in the game, building up tension and excitement. There's nothing better than having one second left on the clock and managing to cling on for ages, in any puzzle game!

It's a nice idea, but has a lot of potential to be much more addictive and buzzy than it currently is. In fact, this could be an excellent puzzle game with a bit of tweaking.

I wonder if spending an extra month to try the game out on people, twisting and tweaking the gameplay to make it more addictive, might have resulted in a better response on FGL.

[gambrinous]

Cheers for sharing the interview, hadn't seen it before. This is my favorite part and bears repeating:

"Andy: Oh, yeah. Well, basically, don’t make the game you want to make. Make the game to test the game you want to make. I’ve seen so many people like this guy in Vancouver who made Paper Zombies or Attack of the Paper Zombies. It’s this awesome, indie RTS game that I would have paid $20 or $30 for.

I spent an entire weekend playing it. I played more that – it’s like Command and Conquer. It’s just a little indie game, but he didn’t think it was worth it. He didn’t think because it wasn’t his big idea. It was just a test. So, he didn’t charge for it. It’s free. You can go to his website right now and get it.

That drives me nuts. He could have made enough money selling that to fund the big game, but I guess so many indie developers have this complex where they think that their work isn’t good enough unless it equals Team Fortress, or something. It’s just not true. If you ask people for money, they’ll give it to you, but nobody asked for money."

[KM]

I almost made a game and it cost me at least 2k, and it might of been crappy. Does that count?

[speeder]

I wonder how to profit (ie: make more money than I need to survive) making games... Currently my idea is make downloadable shareware, but I am not sure how much money this will earn.

I am kinda resisting into going to the web market (even having previously doing games with Flash 5 even...)

[moi]

I wonder how to profit (ie: make more money than I need to survive) making games...

Good question, I think everybody here will be interested in hearing the answer  

[speeder]

While thinking about it, I ended thinking about the original question, and made me think about this question in particular:

It is best to make several smaller and simpler games (like, churn several score "5" games) or make fewer games that take more to make? (make one "8" game in the period that you can make 4 "5" games)

[Charcoal]

I'd say the depends on where you're targeting. But I'd say that a single good game would be better than multiple not-as-good games.

[mirosurabu]

If you're talking about Flash sponsorship, you are most likely to earn a lot more by making 4 games a month than 1 big game in 4 months.


Take this into equation:

It's very easy to get 100,000 views with a flash game.

Assume that you are paid 4 cents per unique referral and you get 5% click-through rate, you'll make $200. If you are a bit better at designing referral pattern, you can easily get 10% CTR, which is $400. Now, if you get a 6 cents per unique referral deal (I know a sponsor who offers that) that would be $600.

If you make four games in a month that's anywhere between $800 and $2,400 a month.
In four months that's $9,600.

However that's the worst case scenario.

If you can get $1,000 per game up-front that's $16,000 in four months.

If you try to reach that with a single, big game you developed in four months you will either make a game that won't sell for that much or make a very good game that would do better without flash sponsorship. In most cases, but not certainly always.


Another advantage of smaller games is that you can allow failures and thus it's easier to test the market.

[Charcoal]

It's very easy to get 100,000 views with a flash game.

Damn, I must be doing Flash games wrong...

[mirosurabu]

Why? I re-released Recoil and In Another Brothel (both only Kongregate) and even though they are mere re-releases which didn't get any frontpage on Kongregate (except short weekly contest spot) and low Kong score and play count, they got another 100,000 views with no problem, without any distribution effort involved. All I did is submit these games to Kongregate on weekend.

And I can say these games aren't that great. Though, I must say, IAB has some very nice art.

Recoil: http://www.mochibot.com/shared/?key=7f2d7f61c6e840c21de49c1ea2c22e51
IAB: http://www.mochibot.com/shared/?key=4873473a5b29f2eb906d9515bd1a096c

[Charcoal]

Ahhh, I'm just relying on Kongregate; I have no idea if the game has been ripped and is anywhere else.

Looks like I'll have to dig in to the bowels of Flixel to add Mochi*, and then see what happens...

[jrjellybeans]

Earth Tower Defense has had over 300,000 IMPRESSIONS according to Mocchi.  I didn't find a sponsor for it...

The game has earned me about $40 in revenue. Granted Mochi isn't known for paying well...

I don't think I've heard of ANYONE who has a 5% click through rate, let alone finds that many UNIQUE visitors.  I didn't even know that sponsors paid extra for unique visitors.

[mirosurabu]

5% unique visitor CTR is about an average, I think, with a properly placed "More Games" link, intro, logo in the main menu and possibly another logo somewhere else. Highscores, achievements, logo visible during gameplay and bonus content on the sponsor's website can bring a CTR of over 10%.

That's what flash sponsorships boil down to - how many unique referrals you can bring to their website. Many sponsors are happy to offer this kinds of deals, though the pricing per unique referral varies.

[agj]

Why?

The best I've done is 35,000.

[dustin]

My most recent game took a couple days to do so far I have

1 site locked version
50,000 from kong
100,000 mochi views

all together I have made 250 from it so far.  That said I wasn't able to find a sponsor for it before hand and it recieved a 6.5 on flash game license.

[Greender]

I've been testing FGL, posted a puzzle game, left it on developers feedback for two weeks. Changed it according to the feedback. It got a 7 and in week and a half it has been played by six sponsors but all in the first 4 days. We made a trailer got some coverage on indiegames.com but that hasn't generated any new views from sponsors.
I will contact some sponsors directly but I'll wait until the game it's at least 3 weeks on bidding on FGL (Waiting sucks).

Also I think that the money on flash games it's not on the sponsorships sadly, the contract work it's where the money might be. We are working on a game smaller than the one we posted on FGL for an investigation group of my university and even though the pay it's low due to the budget of the group I think the money will exceed what we might get from FGL (I really hope I'm wrong).
The sponsorship money seems a little on the low side, sure you can survive for little money but it's not fair to get so little money for your hard work (maybe I'm just an idealist).

[jrjellybeans]

This has been mentioned before (by me, of course), but I think that the REAL money in Flash is in building a large library of games.  I don't think that you should necessarily look at each game as a make it or break it deal.

Just that each tiny game will help you in the long run of:
- learning new skills
- getting better at marketing
- gaining an audience
- making a tiny bit of money

For example, suppose you made a game in a month and it managed to earn no sponsorship and $100 dollars in ads over 6 months.  You might say that that is a failure.  But, if you could continue to make a game a month and earn the same amount of money, you're in a pretty decent position to earn some serious cash...

I could be wrong, of course