Figure Out A Way To Pay Your Bills
It’s a topic I’ll explore in more depth in future articles, but Freelance Flash Games News has a nice summary of some interesting data published on FlashGameLicense.
If you’re like me, you might find this data to be somewhat discouraging. While some people might be encouraged by the idea of making $2,000.00 per exclusive game, consider how long it takes to produce the average game that sells on Flash Game License. If you could crank out a game every two weeks, never took any time off, and had zero overhead, you could make 26 games a year. At $2,000.00 per game, that means you could earn a gross income of $52,000.00.
Obviously that’s an over simplification because each game, theoretically, can build upon the next and can be leveraged in other ways to increase your average income across each of the games. But, at the same time, 2 weeks to make a game you can sell for $2,000.00 is going to be a challenge, and making 26 of those in a row is a pace that would be close to impossible to sustain.
So, what do you do? Don’t even bother trying, right? Well, no, it means that you need to be aware that the game you’re working on is unlikely to be a resounding financial success (it’s most likely to earn you between $1,000 and $2,000), so you need to make sure you have another way to pay your bills.
My recommendations:
- Marry someone rich.
- Live with your parents.
- Don’t quit your day job.
Perhaps even all three.
Colbycheeze
lol WTF?
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:53 pmurbansquall
Footnote: There are other ways to make money with Flash games that should supplement your sponsorship income. I will be getting into that at a later date.
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:34 pmjason
I think a lot of Flash developers have trouble seeing the forest. Ads and sponsorships get talked about a lot, but those should not really be your focus if you want to earn serious money. It’s all about the traffic.
January 25th, 2009 at 1:03 pmAda Chen
Great post to drive home the point that sponsorships and ads aren’t the only solution out there to monetize your Flash games. The heartening thing about the industry, however, is that we’ve definitely seeing a significant upward trend in sponsorships and prices even in the past year.
What I’ve seen most commonly as the tipping point that helps a developer quit their day job is focusing on recurring revenues – e.g., setting up your own website, creating sequels of games, selling renewable licenses to sites, etc.
January 28th, 2009 at 2:26 pmChris Hughes
I also want to note that this wasn’t “official” information that we put out. We didn’t break down the data granularly at all. The fact of the matter is that many games… the best games… make MUCH more than $2k. Only if you’re willing to settle for making average games are you going to be in the $2k range for every game. However, better games usually take longer to make, but in all the data we’ve seen, making better games always ends up being more profitable, even if they take longer.
As Ada has pointed out you should NOT rely only on a few sources of revenue for games that you develop. You should be looking at every possible opportunity for monetizing your game. Getting a primary sponsorship for $2k is actually not so bad if you add on top of it a performance payment, in game ads, revenue share on sites, non-exclusive license sales, etc… much of which are revenue streams that continue forever!
I will say that each developer needs to consider what direction they want to take before choosing, as well. In the end your greatest asset will be your IP. If you can build a popular and desired brand you can do all sorts of things, from leveraging better licensing deals (getting renewable licenses ain’t easy and probably impossible with an unknown brand), to selling it off to a large company and retaining future revenue share.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:25 pmurbansquall
Thank you Chris and Ada for sharing your thoughts on the subject and bringing your knowledge and experience to the table.
Chris, I was wondering if you guys publish any of the median / standard deviations?
January 29th, 2009 at 12:03 amChris Hughes
No problem at all.
We don’t currently post any official data, though we do plan to. The biggest problem with just tossing out data is that if it is not focused it really is meaningless or even misleading. For example, many (but not most) games sold through FGL are non-exclusive license deals. Some are even API deals with no branding changes whatsoever. So it’s not really fair to include those prices (which can be as low as $50 for high score implementation) in with the games that are up for bid and have never been released. Also, since we really strive to help all levels of developers there really needs to be a way to filter out not just what games are making on average, but what games of specific qualities are making on average.
Once we have time to properly massage the data and are ready to release it we’ll definitely let everyone know
January 29th, 2009 at 12:31 pm