There has been a lot of noise about kongregate finally accepting unity3d games. Which is great.
But how much money is there in free browser games?
To share my limited experience: my 3 games on wooglie.com have a total of just under 5000 hits and have generated 5.26 euros.
I also found this link from Oct 2008:
To me, this is very discouraging.
If I were to expect to make complex games that took a long time to develop, and thus use that as my main source of income, I’d be discouraged.
If I were to do quick, simple games that took little to develop, and thus use that as a small boost in income, I’d be happy.
I’d actually love $100 a month once I’m done working. Doing nothing and reaping those benefits would be awesome.
Of course, it would be 100000x more awesome if I could actually LIVE off of making browser games. That would be amazing @_@
But 5 euros a month? That is not even worth submitting to the website.
My question is this: Would you be better off selling the game for $1 or $2 somewhere else? Sometimes people don’t even need to make a good game to sell it for $1, which means if it is a good game people would feel easy buying it. Unless there aren’t websites for that sort of thing?
Several games on Kongregate are sponsored, which means the developer got paid to develop the game. All the games also have a ‘tip jar’ which can be a source of additional revenue. Talking about the size of the community doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the community. Whether it was 2,500 or 25,000 really doesn’t matter. How many of those developers are creating games which attract traffic.
This is from ads alone, Even for $100/mo, that’s $1,200 a year from a game that, once published, you don’t have to touch. If you had 10 polished games, on several portals (dimeRocker, Wooglie, Kongregate, etc) and all I did was earn money from ads,(no microtransactions, subscriptions, etc), I’d estimate that I’d be doing pretty good.
I think selling (one-time purchase) browser games are pretty difficult to do, because I could just go to Kongregate and play games for free. These are usually casual/arcades, so trying to sell a casual browser game is going to be hard. If it was something with a subscription, you might be doing much better. Kongregate actually has a number of MMOs which use them as a gateway.
the 100 that is mentioned above is for the developer i.e. for all his games, not just one game. So you may need all 10 polished games to make the 100 on kongregate.
Most of the 2,500 developers on kongregate (>95% it seems), make virtually nothing from what I understand.
I think it’s exactly like what Tempest said, most of those game already got the upfront money from sponsorship (through site like flashgamelicense), so the developer not really relying on ads anymore.
I hope in the near future we will have something like UnityGameLicense so we can find sponsorship for unity games too 
(the kongregate contest thing is a good way to raise up popularity of unity)
Putting a game on Kongregate, or any portal for that matter including shockwave, isn’t going to pay your mortgage.
I believe that Kongregate posted here on the forums, that a developer averages around $1 per thousand views, depending on api/exclusivity and such. So you would need a million hits to make $1000. All you need to do is to look at the views/submission dates on a sample of the ‘hot’ games to understand that isn’t very likely.
Flash developers have an huge edge in that regard over Unity. They can maximize their return by putting a game on hundreds of portals, combining a paltry sum from all of them.
The old lady casual gamespace has moved away from portals to facebook over the last few years. They’re now playing family feud on facebook instead of bubble pop on Pogo. Sadly, there are no real options for in-game advertising with Unity. It was on Dimerocker’s roadmap, slated for Q1 of last year but evidently never materialized.
http://www.cubestat.com/www.kongregate.com
the website as a whole is making good money, but the majority of the developers, are not…
You can get some information about flash games market at http://www.flashgamelicense.com
P.S. Report by the man (googletranslated) who got about 150K$ in 3 year
http://translate.google.com/translate?js&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/startup/110516/
When you submit a game to a contest its a different thing as there is a theoretical option to win a higher prize. Its also different when you have a licensing deal going with a portal so it pays you more.
If you have no custom licensing or proper revenue share percentage deal with a portal, most portals where the only way to get money is a one time low sponsoring fee or only ingame ads money that amount is very very low for the huge large majority of games and hence would not be worth it other than when seen as nice pocket exchange beer money.
Hence why usually people only do ingames ads only way to try to earn money either if they have a huge pile of games (so then the tiny sums per game per month add up) or if they are younger and hence the lower income is like a nice sidejob as they don´t have to actually worry about paying mor expensive bills every month.
Correct, but the majority of developers are not getting the traffic. Polished games. Sponsored games. Hot games. Games that get spotlight, front-page, etc that get traffic, get the ad rev.
Flash developers can put their game on multiple portals. There are also several services (like Mochi) were actually resell your game to portals, which gives your games more exposure. More exposure = more ad rev.
There actually exists LinkedIn group for this purpose, but it’s not as public as a web site for that.
I think if you’re interested in portals, you should do some research into how developers make their living doing games for portals. One thing you could have going for you is a free Unity game (ad sponsored) you can also sell your game through the Mac App Store, or potentially Steam, if they approve it.
Man, we have games on most major portals and on 100s of thousands of the small- medium sized ones.
And we also do various other ways for earning money with games. And yes, we have games which get a couple of million plays a month.
So yeah, based on that experience i can tell you just ad money from web sites is one of the worst ways to make money per game.
That´s why a lot of game developers switch over to other options after a while, like running their own portal, have micro transactions in games, selling their games themselves or via other distribution options, or do subscription based stuff or client work, multi platform (sold) publishing etc. etc.
And btw first selling your game in some way and then putting it out on some of the portals in free to play ad financed model for an additional pocket exchange can work ok; going the other way round, first letting everyone play the game for free and then afterwards trying to charge players for playing it in one way or the other would in most cases not work out, especially if you don´t change and enhance the game enough to make people feel they are actual getting something in exchange for paying money for something which was freely available before.
since you mentioned it, how hard would it be to create a game portal website?
say like wooglie, or kongregate where the developers can log it, see statistics for their games, upload highscores, etc.
Are there any pre-made game portal websites that can be purchased?
Also, do you need to host that on your own server, or any hosting website would do?
Creating a crappy portal is very easy and can be done cheap and quickly. Creating a better portal which can compete in features, usability and look with the “best” portals is quite a bit more work. It also needs constant work and money flow to keep it up to date in features and content. For that you also have to create a lot of games or incentivise developers to put games on your portal exclusively or earlier than on others so users have a reason to visit your portal rather than the millions of others out there.
DECEMBER CONTEST WINNERS
1st place:Sarah’s Run (preview)
by SophieHoulden
2nd place: Arkandian Crusadeby undefined
3rd place: Tentacle Warsby gamezhero
4th place: endeavorby Zillix
5th place: City Siegeby thepodge
6th place: Steambirds: Survivalby spryfox
7th place: Factory Balls, the Christmas edition
by bontegames
8th place: ShellShock Liveby kChamp
9th place: Zombie Trailer Parkby Ninjakiwi
Well look at the top unity user. She had 2 top games with 200k plays each (which we can estimate with +$400). She also won the kong december prize for another 1500. Which is not bad, and if consider she will probably win the unity contest at 10k
http://www.kongregate.com/game_groups/unity
I don’t think its realistic to expect $400+ in ad money fronm kong for 200k plays.
Next up, yes, as i said winning a contest is a special case. Think about how much if anything all the others got who didn’t win the contest.
Some are happy one can submit games to another site and contests are a cool thing for excitement, exposure and those who win, but yeah, the question in the thread was whether free to play ad based portals usually bring a lot to the developer per game, so yeah, the answer in general is no, not at all. And for Sophie winning several contest prize sums that’s great but she could have earned a lot more with her games in other way.
Well she had 2 games that got over 200k plays each which is a total of 400k and using that estimate it seems reasonable that it was $400.
Do you know how much kong pays in ad money per play?
And yup, no matter what someone earns in first month on one of these sites, usually it is a lot less in second month (due to the huge volume of content that comes out on such sites each month pushing most older content back even way more than on mac app store and even more than on iOS or android app stores).
Sophie did mention that she was able to pay her rent from the ad rev she had earned thus far from Kongregate.
That´s very nice of course but as i said Sophie has a special case there. She has submitted a bunch of games at once, unless someone can submit that many new good games and have them ranked as high each month, well, it would not be a good idea to expect to be able to pay the rent from the ad reveneue split from the site. Ask the hundreds of thousands of guys there who submit all those games to all those portals and see how many of them can actually pay all their living costs from that, the percentage is so low that its close to non existent for anyone who doesn´t also do other ways to earn money with the games.
Handing out games for free for nothing else in return than ad revenue largely became popular thanks to the huge amount of younger ones doing flash games in their spare time and not having to actually worry about paying all their living costs, rather enjoying the bit of revenue they got as pocket exchange.
Once you actually have to worry about paying way more expensive things every month that usually means having to consider other options to earn money like some of those i mentioned earlier in the thread.
Well if you make sth like platform racing 2 then it will give you some money… It has 20 million gameplays… for every 1k plays you get 1 to 2 dollars… that means about 20 000 - 40 000 $… well yeah…