without knowing Taumel raised an interesting question to me in another thread about shockwave.com and alike and making money through these portals with your Unity games. I saw in older posts that some aspects of making money with Unity games have been discussed up and down, but how does it look today?
So my questions are:
Is anybody making already money with Unity webbased games? Are there any numbers available?
As I surely know that sales numbers are rare I’d like to trade mine for the Flight Game Example (Torque add-on - blog here). Although it’s not precisely a game but more a game making tool, but might be interesting too. Currently 115 sales, rising with 7 to 12 copies a month. Not much, but hey, enough to buy me a Macbook Pro.
The most annoying thing there is the ugly dollar to euro conversion rate, loosing there the most money.
I’ve seen the game Hordes of Orcs and the Tennis game on Shockwave.com, but are there any other places/portals that like Unity stuff?
So far my experience with those portals (like BigFishGames, Bigpoint,Kongregate) is that they all wait how Unity games perform on Shockwave.com until they accept UT games. That’s at least the reply I got from them.
Do ad-based/video-ad-upfront but free online gams make some cash? Or better focus on the old shareware/download thing? (and maybe use the webbased version as “teaser”?)
Are Unity Indy-version made games are accepted too although displaying on windows machines the watermark? What is your experience?
BigFish would probably be perfectly happy to take a Unity game so long as it was an executable and not a web version. One of my previous employers has a TGB game up there and another TGE game coming soon. Of course, you have to deal with the fact that it seems people on those sorts of portals are only buying hidden object and time management games right now.
Big Fish weren;t keen on Subz, neither was Shockwave, but I’m really not too worried given its a first game made by an Artist rather than a studio. What they said to me was:
So hopefully thats some help.
I had a fair bit of credit at the end of my school year last year so I printed CD covers, and I sell about two hardcopies a week thru online auctions for $5.95. Not really a suitable solution, but the whole excercise taught me that its a pretty big excercise shipping a game with a one person team.
The benefit to publishing via the web is ad revenue, which in the case of plain old AdSense isn’t a spectacular rate. However, the author of Desktop Tower Defense told GigaOm that he was making “high four figures” per month in ad revenue. Call it $5,000 per month; I’d say his game was performing great in the marketplace, and that was before DTD really took off on blogs. And it was also before Google made “AdSense for Games,” which claims to provide a better return for game sites.
I’ll let you know more after we finish our titles. But don’t forget: “The size of this audience cannot be understated: 1 in 4 of all Web users visit gaming sites, primarily to play casual titles.”
