The perfect swf file size of your Flash games

July 23, 2010 • Flash, Game design by Emanuele Feronato • 12 Comments

When you are making a Flash game, do you worry about the final size of your swf?

I had a look at 17.666 games with known filesize actually stored in Triqui.com, parsed from MochiMedia, and that’s what I found

Average swf file size: 0.99MB

swf file size # of games %
<100KB 2512 14.22
100 – 250KB 3311 18.74
250 – 500KB 3477 19.68
500KB – 1Mb 3271 18.52
1MB – 5MB 4596 26.02
>5MB 499 2.82

Finally, this is a chart representing the number of games (horizontal) for at any size (vertical) with a 250KB step

What’s your average swf size?

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This post has 12 comments

  1. Enrique

    on July 23, 2010 at 1:31 pm

    300-900KB.

    What do you mean with “the perfect size”?. It depends on the complexity of the game itself.

  2. Vega

    on July 23, 2010 at 6:28 pm

    100k jigsaw games ftw..
    ..NOT :D

    I would get the same numbers, cause i am using mochi too :)

    What i realy would find interesting if the “conversion” /bounce rate, depends on the flash game size.
    Do players get bored while the flash game gets loaded and leave?
    Or are they already used to the loading/advertisement?

    Wouldnt know how to meassure that tho..

  3. Cardin

    on July 24, 2010 at 2:52 pm

    Awww… a cumulative bar chart would’ve been more informative. But mine weighs in about 500Kb currently, so I’m still in the lower majority i guess. :)

  4. Nick

    on July 24, 2010 at 4:00 pm

    My current flash game is currently at just over 500KB.

  5. Geoff

    on July 24, 2010 at 10:57 pm

    What’s more important is that SWF files are progressive, so once the first frame is loaded you can start playing the swf.
    For my last game I put all of the sounds on a later frame (via mxmlc -frame) and the music on an even later frame, so you could effectively start playing the game when only 300kb of 1.2 mb was loaded. Flash game developers should try to organize their game code so the user is presented with a game menu within the first 50kb and can play the game before all the bandwidth intense sounds and music have loaded.

  6. jose

    on July 24, 2010 at 11:59 pm

    if you add a blank frame you can still do that even with mochi

  7. jose

    on July 25, 2010 at 12:00 am

    she means the equilibrium between size, for the loading and complexity. too big boring to wait too small not enough space for complexity.

  8. matakukos

    on July 25, 2010 at 12:12 am

    ‘she’? you wanted to say ‘he’ lol

  9. Andreas Renberg

    on July 26, 2010 at 1:00 am

    Thanks for the info.

    Do you think you could do a summary of game dimensions as well? (width and height)

    Speaking of that, is there any standards or recommendations for what dimensions games are supposed to be, perhaps 5 different “recommended sizes”?

  10. Euan Mead

    on August 7, 2010 at 3:10 am

    95487 bytes or 93.2kb.

    I am going to shrink it further by removing delay at start of 3 two second long clips. This should knock off 1000 bytes.

    I haven’t got background music yet. Depending on repeat type (short loop or music around 1 or 2 min mark) it could add on 50kb to 1mb.

  11. uorp

    on August 20, 2010 at 8:12 pm

    what about performances related to game size?

  12. ABBASS AJAMI v1 | Cyprus flash website design

    on December 10, 2010 at 8:00 pm

    [...] The perfect swf file size of your Flash games – Emanuele Feronato [...]

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