Experiment: monetizing a Flash game – Part 7

January 13, 2008 by Emanuele Feronato
Filed Under Flash, Game design, Monetize • 24 Comments

Multipart tutorial: available parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

For those of you that wonder how it’s going with the experiment (read posts from 1 to 6 to know more about it) here’s a quick update:

Circle Chain
Days in the wild: 77
MochiAds impressions: 267,872
MochiBot plays: n/a
MochiBot top 3 sources: n/a
Google Adsense impressions: 33,256
Newgrounds score: 3.56
Kongregate score: 3.05
Hours spent developing: 3
Hours spent promoting: 1
Income: $234.49 ($59/hour)
Notes: It’s the game that started the experiment. I did not embed MochiBot because I thought it was included in MochiAds. At the moment, it’s the game that people liked the most, and it was reviewed on Jay is Games.

Christmas Couples
Days in the wild: 47
MochiAds impressions: 17,648
MochiBot plays: 2,110,171
MochiBot top 3 sources: mindjolt – t45ol.com – jatek.hatekonyan.hu
Google Adsense impressions: 4,024
Newgrounds score: 2.60
Kongregate score: 2.33
Hours spent developing: 6
Hours spent promoting: 1
Income: $14.40 ($2/hour)
Notes: It’s my most played game, with over two millions plays. Unfortunately, I suck so I sent a couple of versions without MochiAds around the web so my income is very very poor. At least I am in the million players club. It’s also the game that people liked the less and the game that costed me the most hours of development. I’ll never thank enough Richard Fields at Mindjolt for the big exposure. Mindjolt rocks!

Tileball
Days in the wild: 28
MochiAds impressions: 27,106
MochiBot plays: 29,450
MochiBot top 3 sources: freeworldgroup.com – daflax.com – t45ol.com
Google Adsense impressions: 743
Newgrounds score: 3.52
Kongregate score: 2.91
Hours spent developing: 6
Hours spent promoting: 1
Income: $14.42 ($2/hour)
Notes: I spent the most time designing the levels because the game is based on an engine I already developed. It’s not going well but I have some ideas to promote it in a better way. This game has to generate more than $400, that’s what a sponsor paid for a game based on the same engine.

GuessNext
Days in the wild: 15
MochiAds impressions: 106,008
MochiBot plays: 112,003
MochiBot top 3 sources: mindjolt – kongregate – newgrounds
Google Adsense impressions: n/a
Newgrounds score: 3.12
Kongregate score: 2.15
Hours spent developing: 4
Hours spent promoting: 0
Income: $85.33 ($21/hour)
Notes: I made this game to test if including any API in Kongregate would change its revenue. Revenues and impressions on Kongregate remain low if you do not hit the frontpage, but I modified two rows and submitted it to mindjolt. It’s now featured in the most popular scored games so I think it will be a success

Glomb
Days in the wild: 2
MochiAds impressions: 799
MochiBot plays: 665
MochiBot top 3 sources: newgrounds – kongregate – zupagames
Google Adsense impressions: n/a
Newgrounds score: 3.24
Kongregate score: 2.68
Hours spent developing: 3
Hours spent promoting: 0
Income: $0.79 ($0/hour)
Notes: no income yet but I made this game yesterday. It’s the first game that features MochiAds Leaderboards and I plan to spread it massively during next days.

Total hours spent developing: 22
Total hours spent promoting: 3
Total income: $349.43 ($14/hour)

An average freelance programmer in Italy is paid about $44/hour so in my opinion the experiment is not going well.

But, it’s not over ’til it’s over… I am sure I’ll pass the mark of $44/hour and a lot more.

Stay tuned!

Multipart tutorial: available parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

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24 Responses to “Experiment: monetizing a Flash game – Part 7”

Bob Ippolito on January 14th, 2008 2:04 am

Well, you probably missed out on at least $500 w/ Christmas Couples, which would’ve put you at roughly $34/hr, not to mention what it would’ve made over time.

Although this isn’t quite realistic, if you projected the same eCPM and traffic level for GuessNext, it would make $1100 (your break even number for 25 hours at $44/hr) on its own in less than 7 months.
zedia.net on January 14th, 2008 2:30 am

I don’t know if you can track that, but it would be interesting to know how many people came to your blog through your published games, because that’s kinda like advertising at the same time.
Ahu on January 14th, 2008 9:22 am

Thanks alot emanuele the experiment encouraged me to start developing…I was just gonna ask how was it going yesterday but here it is thanks for the update and keep up the good work
shiv on January 14th, 2008 10:59 am

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMANUELE!!!

Hey CELEBRATE, its your birthday!

HOORAY!!! Eat CAKE and PARTY!!

About the experiment, I am quite shocked to see that boring “GUESSNEXT” is going better than “TILEBALL”.
Anyways, try to make the updates faster.
Or make a column over here in this white space below archives on how the games are going.

Ok then, Happy Birthday once again.
Javier Cuellar on January 14th, 2008 4:09 pm

Hi Emmanuelle,

Great web site!!!!. I learned a lot with your tutorials.

Thanks for your time in posting all this.
Happy birthday.
Ed on January 14th, 2008 7:41 pm

Happy Birthday!

By the way the cake is a lie.

Also I think that lots of games don’t actually receive as many views as this, I think a lot of your views are because people are going on your blog. It would be a “fairer” test if you didn’t have a really popular blog. Too popular, eh?
SheepSlayer on January 14th, 2008 9:05 pm

Reading your tutorial I make a game with mochi ads
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/417163
I also recived good scoring, but 0 results!!
Into one month 0.15$ … why ???
shiv on January 15th, 2008 7:49 am

SheepSlayer,

Mochiads is a site which literally sucks at paying off. Especially for non USA ppl.

You are still lucky.
My three games got only $0.66 in mochiads.

Also submit it to other sites.
Moomoo on January 17th, 2008 3:21 am

Me and my friend want to start making flash games. When we make one how should we monetize it?
guy on January 17th, 2008 10:33 am

MooMoo,

by actually reading this blog.
Arby on January 22nd, 2008 12:28 am

What’s this shit of spending only 3-4 hours developing each game??! Why bother if that’s all the effort you can put in? I give up.
Samedi on January 24th, 2008 8:38 pm

isn’t it possible that if you would invest a little bit more into the look and feel you could achieve better offers? also did you tried other monetization options?
Krystian Majewski on January 26th, 2008 1:19 pm

Great experiment! Please keep us posted, it sounds exciting.

However I’m surprised that you try only so very simple games. It would be interesting do add a game which takes like 40 hours just to see if better quality pays off. I would imagine that it does in the long term…
Krystian Majewski on January 26th, 2008 2:55 pm

Oh yeah, could you release the MochiBot statistics?
quentin on February 2nd, 2008 12:16 pm

hwo do you do to get that much money
i published one game , 5 days later i didn’t even got up to 1 dolar –’

help me
jason on February 6th, 2008 5:25 am

i wanted to donate some money to you. i just love to see an aspiring programer. the only problem i had was i cant read italian or whatever launguage paypal was in. sorry if you send my an email i will try to help you out.

Good luck,
jason
gsxr1100 on March 1st, 2008 2:36 am

Hi Emanuele,

I’m Italian too, and I like very much Your experiment!
I have written a game ‘for hobby’, but it had a very bad response… maybe because I only want to create a 3D vectorial game, but I didn’t work for the playability… :)
The game is this:
http://www.menato.net/cyberkart3dWEB.html
It’s written in HAXE, in about 2 month, about 1 hour a day.

Now some questions:

- Will Mochi pay outside America or not?
- How do You tell people to play the game in Your site and not in the other sites (to monetize Adsense)? I think because You do the tutorial! No one go in my site, so I can’t monetize anything from Adsense!

If Mochi doesn’t pay, and no one go in my site, do You think it’s better to release something else (like Flash scrolls, freeware tools..) before spending much time on a new game?

Thanx a lot!

Ciao!