Comments on: You Should Be Making A Premium Flash Game

By: LilGames

LilGames — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:56:29 +0000

Our game Spore Cubes, one of the “grand daddies” of Flash games was offered in CD-ROM format back in 2001. We sold 800 copies at $6.99 each. After costs, we had a profit of over $4100.00. It’s nothing fantastic, but still a nice chunk of pocket money.

By: Leroy Frederick

Leroy Frederick — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:37:01 +0000

‘We mooooOonetized it!’ The video link along makes this post epic!

By: space

space — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:38:17 +0000

That’s irrelevant. This article is about what the developer makes, and the sponsorships included in these calculations are paid up front, regardless of how much the sponsor ends up making from it. The sponsorship amount is only based on how much a sponsor _thinks_ he can earn from it.

By: Colm Larkin

Colm Larkin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:46:29 +0000

Don’t forget that sponsorship is ultimately ad-funded, it’s just paid to you upfront. Portals are essentially paying for traffic from your game, and earning it back with ads.

By: space

space — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:37:03 +0000

“Sponsorship in particular can easily account for 90% of your income for an ad-based game.”

In which case a eCPM calculation is completely useless!

The hole point of this article is to compare the earning power, as he calls it, of games that only use ads, and games that sell items.

To do this, you must not include other kind of income in the calculations, such as up front payments, like sponsorships, since it makes the values incomparable.

By: Danc

Danc — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:01:14 +0000

Nice article. eCPM (and more useful ARPU) are notoriously difficult to compare across companies. Colm made a great attempt and the numbers are solid as long as you understand the assumptions that he made. Sponsorship in particular can easily account for 90% of your income for an ad-based game.

The main take away that I get from this is that asking people to pay for your game is a good thing.

The other interesting point is that your design for *how* you integrate payments has a giant impact on how much money you make. Taking a standard flash game and adding simple purchasable upgrades does better than ads, but does worse than if you build your game around either microtransaction purchase loops (longer games) or content gates (shorter games).

take care
Danc.

By: Cosmo

Cosmo — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:26:49 +0000

Boy, that picture of all those pennies looks really enticing…

By: space

space — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:12:38 +0000

Even at one million, the value is still way off. For my example, a million plays are hit after a hundred days. As you see, even after a year, the value is not good. I only really see one way to do it, and that’s to subtract initial payments such as sponsorships.

If the eCPM isn’t correct, it’s no good at comparing their earning power.

Also, you just can’t compare values based on unique players with values based on total plays. I know you said “if we had the ‘total plays’ number this would be lower – but not all that much lower.”, but I think it will be a lot, really a lot, lower, since else it would have to mean that each unique player only played the game about once.

By: Colm

Colm — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:34:53 +0000

Yes, the ‘Gross eCPM’ idea is totally unsuitable if your total plays number is too low. I think for flash games if you only consider it when you have total plays over say 1 million you avoid a lot of the problem.

I’d agree that Mytheria (and Armor Wars even more so) has an inflated Gross eCPM due to lower than expected plays, but that’s OK. This isn’t an exercise in ranking games by ‘Gross eCPM’, it’s an attempt to get some measure of relative earning power of the two different monetization approaches.

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:49:35 +0000

Space makes some really good points. Mytheria is a great game that I really enjoyed a lot, but if we’re talking about strict numbers here, its eCPM is only high because I sponsored it for too much money with consideration for its distribution.

Personally I believe the game deserved far better distribution than it got, but it’s that lower-than-expected distribution number, paired with my own overestimation of its distribution potential as a sponsor, that led to its inflated eCPM listed here.