The experiment – one year later

October 28, 2008 by Emanuele Feronato
Filed Under Flash, Game design, Monetize • 32 Comments 

On october 28th, 2007, exactly one year ago, I started an experiment about monetizing a Flash game and released a one-day game called Circle Chain.

Since that day, I published a total of 10 games.

If you want to know more about the games, read the posts about Circle Chain, Christmas Couples, TileBall, GuessNext, Glomb, BallBalance, Bees n’ Flowers, Jamag, Summer Couples and RRODE.

But I think the real question you are asking is: how about the money?

Well, I have to say it’s not an easy question for two reasons:

1) Some games have been self sponsored to promote my blog and my brand, so I should add a percentual of this blog income, or determine an amount I would pay as a sponsor and add to the grand total.

2) Making these games made a multimedia company located in Italy hire me for a Flash related job, so I should add the income for that job, but since I passed the job to my company it would be really really a mess to determine the income due to my games.

So I decided to post the earnings based only on the games themselves… so forget points 1 and 2 because they are not included in the report.

MochiAds: $4,628.18
Third part sponsorship: $4,000.00
API integration: $250.00
Donations: $124.00
Google Adsense: $390.77
Revenue Sharing: $20.80

Grand total: $9,413.75

It’s not that bad for something started as an experiment made in the very spare time.

So I decided to make things a bit more seriously for the year to come and double the income.

Income goal from now to october 28th, 2009: $9,413.75 * 2 = $18,827.50

It should not be a big problem since I still have some passive income due to these 10 games.

Do you want to try by yourself?

You can do it… just follow these simple steps:

1) Sign up to MochiAds. This company allows you to ake money from every game play and offers some more interesting services such as leaderboards, link tracking, and so on

2) Sign up to MochiBot, a free service to determine Flash games popularity

3) Sign up to FlashGameLicense, the place to buy and sell Flash games. Read a review about this service here

4) Think about a game design idea. The more original, the better. If you have no ideas, copy successful games. Or visit Three Hundred Mechanics for some big inspiration.

5) Make your game…

6) Once you think it’s finished encrypt it. You can use the MochiAds free encrypter.

7) Add MochiAds ads and MochiBot stats

8) Submit your game to a developers forum or take a look at First Impression service by FlashGameLicense, to get some qualified reviews about your game. Remember to sitelock your game to prevent it to spread without your control. If you don’t know how to sitelock a game, read How to sitelock a Flash movie

9) Now that your game should be really finished, submit it to FlashGameLicense

10) Wait at least two weeks

11) At this time if you found a sponsor, distribute the game according to the partnership you signed. If you did not find any sponsor, return to step 10 or proceed to 12

12) Sumit your game to as much portals as you can. For a faster distribution, try FlashGameDistribution. Read a review about this service here

13) Return to step 4

That’s all… I hope you will enjoy Flash game making as much as I am, and wish me good luck… I have 365 days left and almost $20,000 to earn…

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32 Responses to “The experiment – one year later”

  1. zedia.net on October 28th, 2008 8:51 pm

    Can’t believe that its already been a year!

    I’m really happy you did this recap, it fills me with motivation to finish games I have started but are not done. Not that money is the primary factor of motivation, but it sure helps.

    Continue with the good work

  2. Smurf on October 28th, 2008 8:59 pm

    Wow, that’s an awesome lot of money and good luck with that doubling. I’m sure you will succeed. And thanks for the tips, should get me some more inspiration :)

  3. dVyper on October 28th, 2008 11:12 pm

    This has actually given me more impetus to finish off my own game and start making my own moolah!

  4. Daniel Rodriguez on October 29th, 2008 12:15 am

    It would be better if you put the number of plays of each game, and the money of each game gives to you. CContinue with the good work, lot of money for some free time :D.

  5. nick on October 29th, 2008 2:00 am

    how many hours did you spend. and how much per hour did you make

  6. Leroy on October 29th, 2008 3:09 am

    Great work and a very successful experiment methinks!

  7. Frederik on October 29th, 2008 4:14 am

    Hey. Cpngrats… I hope you consider this a success. Your experiment have been my only reason for following your blog, so I hope you will keep up the updates.

    I find monetizing the web interesting while gamesaren’t my genre it still tickles my curiosity.

    Good luck on the next year. Steady updates are golden.

  8. Bill on October 29th, 2008 8:44 am

    How ironic. I just found your site earlier today (still 10/28 here) and and was reading through your previous posts on the experiment. Great information. It’s a huge inspiration, and I respect the way your designed your experiment. I live on a Linux box and I wonder if you could post circle game .as .mxml etc in a .zip instead of a .fla? I don’t know of a way to open .fla in Linux. EWither way, thanks again and I owe you a beer when I sell my first game!

  9. terbooter on October 29th, 2008 1:32 pm

    Hi. Im very admired with your blog. Especially with some articles like this. I want to translate some of them and place in my blog. Let me know what do you think about it.

  10. Emanuele Feronato on October 29th, 2008 1:41 pm

    @terbooter: sure, no problem.

    Just remember a link :)

  11. Wackiegames on October 29th, 2008 3:28 pm

    Good luck with the goal :D

  12. jeanpier on October 29th, 2008 4:08 pm

    Congratulations Emanuele!!!

    I entered the world of Flash Games thanks of your posts and since that i never look back.

    - Two games sponsored (more than 3 million plays).
    - Website Legionlight.com is online and almost ready.
    - 4 more finished games (they are going be released before this year ends).
    - A learned a lot about game programming, marketing, flash business, and other more things.

    Continue your great work!!!

  13. Cody S on October 29th, 2008 11:01 pm

    Hey Emanuele, thanks for the total recount of what happened with your little experiment. It really got me interested in flash.

    I have a few questions for you if you have a e-mail address I could contact you at. I sent a e-mail to info@emanueleferonato.com about a 3 weeks ago but I didn’t get a reply. If your too busy that’s cool im just eager to have some questions answered.

    Thanks either way.

    Cody S.

  14. jay on November 1st, 2008 1:59 am

    Incredible! i’ve been doing flash stuff for free, and, for a sixteen-year-old boy like me (well, for you is good too) that money or less than a half is a lot for me :D

  15. nick on November 3rd, 2008 7:33 am

    but how much time did you spend, and how much is that per hour??

  16. tasos on November 4th, 2008 9:00 pm

    Hi Emanuele!
    I was about to start my own game creation activities but I was intimidated by the complete absence of knowledge of the tax policy in my country. No one can answer me what tax should I pay, not even people who are working on the tax office.
    What did you do about that issue?

    Thanx

  17. JL on November 5th, 2008 1:14 pm

    Inspiring :D

  18. r0f1c0pt3r on November 7th, 2008 4:52 am

    Hi, Emanuele! You have certainly helped me a lot over the months. ever since i found your website, I have been obsessed with Flash game developing.

    Just one question though:

    Do you have a job, or do you make enough money off of flash games alone?

    I’m quite curious, as this “experiment” generated about 1/6 of a fairly well-paid person’s yearly salary…

  19. Gene on December 4th, 2008 12:09 pm

    almost 10k in a year? not bad, not bad at all.

    someone else has also started similiar experiment, just with a little more ambitious goal:

    http://www.apmid.org/2008/12/03/100000usd-flash-game-experiment-part-1/

    =)

  20. Ryan Henson Creighton on December 20th, 2008 3:36 am

    i’m with Nick. You only made $10k on 10 games. Not counting the amount of time spent submitting these games to portals an implementing various APIs, if each game took a little over a week to develop, you’d have earned $20/hr gross.

    Here in Canada, you can’t hire a good Flash programmer for less than $50/hr freelance – most Flash guys i know are at $75/hr. It makes more sense to freelance or to do full-time Flash work with a company than to mess around with this rev-share stuff.

    Here’s how my own experiment is going (keep in mind that i’m not tracking the amount of time spent submitting games to portals either):

    http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/feature-articles/pimp-my-game/

  21. Emanuele Feronato on December 20th, 2008 12:22 pm

    @ Ryan: most of the games took me less than 8 hours (a normal full-time working day) to be made & published.

  22. gulpy on January 8th, 2009 8:16 am

    Hi Emanuele
    Nice to see your posts on the real money matters related to games, your experiments were gr8 and your initiative to show the gains is awesome.
    I am a developer, still thinking that why still every game is not from mochiads are they not earning well?
    Insight is needed or one to one comparison will be gr8 the comparison of non mochiads games and mochiads injected games,

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