I uploaded it to gamejolt and kongregate. As expected, the game wasn’t a huge success. Only 200 plays on both sites. But today, When I went to the analytics site I saw that more than 2,000 people played the game, most from a Chinese site called 4399.com.
So be aware this may happen. In my case it was a very good thing - the number of plays grew from around 200 to 2,300.
But in other cases it can be bad.
Thats how the flash game industry works, you actually want other sites to pick up your games. Usually you would include in game ads, so you get revenue no matter where your game plays.
On sites like kongerate the person who uploads the game can get revenue from the plays it gets from the advertisements that are shown beside the game, if other people that your game and upload to sites that use this method then you could lose out. Check out the other site itself and see if its user uploads or there own and see if there is a report button then upload it yourself if you want.
But in the long run you can’t stop anything like this so its bet to either include in game adds or a big link to your site in the game.
It would be nice if the people using other people’s work acted as an advertizing agency instead of crooks. If they worked together with developers the world would be a better place.
Like for example if your game has a lot of dialogue or text for the player to read, and some guy in china wants to rip it, it would be in his best interest to contact the developer and work out some deal. They could work together to make a Chinese version and share the royalties while the game reaches more players.
Sadly, this is not something we as game developers have a lot of influence over. We are at the mercy of the nature of the system. An established company like Valve or Unity would be better suited for making some sort of game export agreement program.
If somebody in China has a legit deal with the developer say from the US, then they would protect the copyrights to the game within China and the developer doesn’t have to worry about trying to sue somebody of another nationality.
Stealing is wrong, of course but if I were you, I wouldn’t be too worried about this. In most cases, you will spend(waste) more time chasing after the thief than gain anything of monetary value equivalent to the time spent.
Rarely does a game bring enough money on game plays alone. The payouts from this mode of revenue is typically small. One uses sites like kongregate etc to make the game popular and not with an eye on play revenue
Key to success is make game popular and try and get your players to spend on in game items
Maybe what you should do is have a free version (or a low quality web version) and you pay to unlock the HD version - where they click the button and it goes to your site (so even if they got the ad money you would get the converts - so the pirates would actually help).
Even being a blessing in disguise (or not that disguised) for many flash game developers, I think those sites should at least bother to either thank or contact the developers… It just doesn’t feel right to rip off the work of a developer and put it in your page without asking a simple yes/no question via e-mail.
For my second game, Zombies vs. Knights, this helped a lot actually. After a year of staying at roughly 10,000 plays on Wooglie, I recently logged in just to check on the game. I wasn’t expecting much.
In the last twelve months, after a year-long dead period, it gained about 10,000 plays, and has been pretty much paid me 0.01 Euro every week.
Provided that those plays are coming legitimately, I honestly don’t mind that a quick Google search for ‘Zombies vs. Knights’ shows this game on a few portals I’m sure I did not submit it to; I still get a little bit of money for my labor, which is always welcome.
