I wondered if any Unity developer made more than a few dollars with publishing games on Kongregate.com. Any developer made more than my 17 US$ there? 
Just curious to see if I should add more games or not. Right now it does not seem like a good deployment target.
Regards
Martin
Iâve never put anything there, but if they donât force you into a exclusive contract, put an addware version on there that advertises âtry the mobile version for only .99!â and 17 bucks is better than a kick in the shin, and you can sell it elsewhere too if thereâs no contract.
Thatâs a good question.,.
Iâd ask the same for another site,âŚmore Unity specific,âŚ
Youâll make more money on the contests than the actual ad revenue. I donât think itâs worthwhile, really, for revenue, unless youâre doing microtransactions. But for testing and getting feedback/awareness, itâs great, since itâs essentially youtube for games.
Iâve made more than 17$ there, but nowhere near enough to call it a notable revenue stream.
Sadly, I think these seems to be true about Kongregate. If you look at the top played Unity games the highest is at 650,000 plays (life time plays I assume) in 7 months. It was previously stated that devs earn an average of $1-2 per 1000 plays, so that puts the most played unity game at $650-1300 over a 7 month period. Thatâs really not a lot.
The contests, particularly the sponsored ones, can be a good source of extra revenue - Quickfingerz did very well and won the recent sound-based contest (First prize was $10,000 if I remember right). I think thatâs over $17
Iâve made 0.25 so far! (Mind you the game wasnât very good)
Four games, $6.32
Joy.
So if its not really doing much revenue wise for any of us developers, why is it so popular for developers to put it up there?
Maybe itâs just a place where you know youâre going to get a few plays? Or you might get lucky with popularity. And besides, a bit of money is better than none.
Is the site itself not popular enough, or are the devs just getting a very small piece of the pie?
According to Kongregate Devs get 25-50% of the Ad revenue.
I have submitted one game (nothing much really, I was just testing), and it has so far earned $2 (@ 40% share and 1787 plays)
To clarify, itâs the ad revenue that sucks, microtransactions are a different story. I think I saw something where kongregate was saying that their overall kreds revenue was pretty much matching ad revenue. Now, that doesnât seem like a big deal, until you consider that the vast majority of games on the site do not support microtransactions, so the few that do are obviously pulling down much more than they do from ad revenue. Ad revenue sucks all over the internet, you really have to have a massive audience for it to pay off.
Itâs youtube for games, so as an indie, Iâd use it even if I got no money from it.
Also it is good if you have a small iOS game, then you can make a lite version for Kongregate and put the iTunes link to your game, youâll get some more buyers.
The thing you might want to do if possible is have the equivalent of in app purchases in your game. You can see an article about on average the person spends $14 per pop, where 1 to 3% buy in app purchases.
So if you have 100k players you would except 1k to 3k in app purchases, if on average they spend $14 you can except to get 14k to 42k per 100k so you should start designing your games with in app purchases in mind (that is the person should be âdeeply invested into the game before they will buy somethingâ so probably something with a deep techtree (see army of darkness defence). Over 51% of the money is made from the minority 13% of the users who spend more than 20 so its important to do that as well.
I made about $2+ for a couple of weeks with 3 small games. I got pissed off at the general attitude of the users so I removed them. If I put another game there it would be a lite version of an iphone/android app with a link to the itunes page. (or just a puzzle game with no solution, just to piss people off and waste their time).
Cheers for the name drop Nomad, I donât mind sharing my Kongregate experiences and thoughts about Kongregate so I wrote up a quick blog post (with figures )
check it out here :
Sorry i spelt it wrong though 
Thanks for posting that blog - it pretty much confirms what I was saying form the money point of view. The point about the free testing and level of comments is something Iâd overlooked really, and if someone was to put a game on Kongregate with the aim of gaining testing and feedback then Iâm sure itâs a great place to do that. The types of comments are generally better than the feedback you see on other portals that simply equate to âOMFGZzz ths gaem is teh suckzz!!!1111â
Unless you are searching for it, I doubt you would find Kongregate.
I wasnât aware of it either until the first discussion of it here.
And if I look at the games I see good reasons why I personally as user as well as dev have no need to care about it, its the android of webgames (not youtube of games), filled with masses of no quality crap that I wouldnât want to play commonly even if it were the last game on earth and there are really only very few exceptions on Kongregate to that.
If you have a a casual friendly, polished game for desktop or web I would approach BigFishGames with it where it even at worst will still do significantly better
How do you mean you got âpissed off with the general attitiude of the usersâ ? Could you explain more?
I have to imagine a little seo and your own site would be a lot better. I mean building up some rank in the search engines over time can give you tons of free marketing. Having a single âportalâ to access your games and refer users to, along with a forum, etc can build a community and google will suck all that information into itâs results.
Iâm newer to gaming but have done small web development projects for friends and seen amazing results with a little seo for small businesses, without paying a penny for advertisements.
Building a script to shuffle ads as people play your game, rather than just showing a single ad, will make the money. Look at Google Books, each page you scroll down loads a new set of 4x ads on the left. So you scroll down 10 pages, you just saw 40 ads (page impressions) lol. They have it figured outâŚ
Same thing on the forum, maybe itâs at the very bottom of the page, but Iâve noticed most games donât have any ads on their forums. Missed opportunity. Iâm not talking about bombardment of ads, but the minimal amount reloaded every 30-60 seconds, maybe even a random interval.
Another under-used marketing revenue once youâve got some success is throwing brands into the game and selling space inside a game. Heck with over 400k plays you could probably approach some small, eager marketing companies with a starting point.
I know at least 1 marketing company that has done that in big budget games, donât know any game developers that know about it. Some marketing companies are open to good ideas.