I found kongregate.com yesterday while looking for a good platform for my games. I didn’t think of earning money I thought of getting visitors and recognition. So I uploaded one of the games I presented here aswell to it to be surprised that within half an hour I had the first comment and 100 people - according to it - have already played it and some even commented on it.
Then I realized that they earn money with my games just to deliver the traffic which bugged me. So I found out about the reward system. But this blog found, that the revenue is bad. For offering the platform and traffic you only get 50% of the revenue if you develop exclusively for them and include their weird api. Otherwise you only get 25 per cent.
See this:
Monthly plays of 1 million, which is really awesome only amounts to €500 whereas the owner gets €1500 . For literally nothing.
If you only care about getting visitors and feedback, does it matter what the percentage you are getting is?
Anyway, it’s probably more lucrative to build your games for mobile and put them on the app store.
Not many but think on this, it is there own site which uses a lot of bandwidth, they are mainly financed with adds and a small subscription service.
They get thousands maybe tens of thousands of people or more visiting there site each day and in return for you uploading your game and having access to all these visitors they share there own add revenue with you. So if its exclusive and you use there api to add some badges you can get up to 50% of the revenue they get from hosting your game with none of the cost of hosting or technical support or anything just pure profit? I think that’s very generous.
The only alternative is to either host the game on your own site or sell it directly to people, if you don’t think your site will attract enough people to make it worth while to host it or that not many people will pay for it why not upload it to kongreate and get cash you would not have if you didn’t upload it.
If you just made $1 from your game that is $1 you did not have before.
If only you knew how much it costs to host a service that has millions and millions of regular users and gigantic amounts of data transfers per month, you’ll realize that €1500 is chump change.
Ads will never be a significant form of income; on these sites or in your game itself. The only real purpose they serve is to annoy the players enough that they’ll pay to make them go away. (Harsh, but true.)
Rely on game sales and IAP to actually earn your money.
I agree, relying on ads alone is a poor approach, and to then only get a slice of someone else’s control of the ads is even worse. That said, free games with ads get a lot more downloads/plays than paid games, which helps a bit.
That’s actually very untrue, it was true 10years ago but today hosting bandwidth is pretty much free. I use ovh servers and they offer 100mb to 1gb unmetered for example along with beefy servers for a few 100€
I wasn’t argueing on either side, just cirrecting wrong info. As far as i’m concerned i see nothing wrong with what they do business wise, just no need to justify it through fake costs. Today it doesn’t take a huge budget for a few tera of disc 64gb ram, 16threads and unmetered bandwidth
There are more costs to running a large site like that than just bandwidth there is also server upkeep cost, staff, advertisement, improvment costs and lots of other bills that add up.
It may not be your most profitable channel, it may not be suitable for all games, but to say it will never be significant is not true. Ads are still a massive player in mobile games, and web revenue in general is still primarily ad driven.
Getting rich with advertising? 1,000,000 monthly plays is an insane number. That means that 32.258 people play the game daily.
And you only get 2000 dollars for it all in all. That’s 2 cents per player. And you get 0.5 cents for each player. 0.5 cents. That’s nothing. Also for some reason there have already about 300 people been playing my game and still Discover and Play Free Online Games on Kongregate!/revenue_summary shows zero.
There’s something really wrong with this service.
Also, what’s that weird W-8?
I have already tried to create communities for ages. They never took off. I don’t know how they do it and I am curious how they do it. Same with youtube. You have to create an insane amount of “good content” for people to start contributing. A lot of people are leechers on those sites, they want all and pay nothing.
1mil a month is not a big number, at least where revenue from ads are concerned. In fact, on platforms like FB, that would be a failure. And that doesn’t mean that 32k people play daily. The amount of plays is going to be made of mostly people who have stopped by and checked it out once and never played again. Plays/users are very different things.
Kong doing ad share of 25% (non-exclusive) is a pretty good deal, they are providing the bandwidth, hardware, community, platform, advertising players and handling all the administrative stuff like ad revenue. You just have to make the game and they do all the rest. Hardware and bandwidth is expensive.
“Unmetered” generally come with speed cap, you still have limits, they try to make is sound like you don’t. Bandwidth is not cheap, at least not when you are doing it at any real scale. And that is the catch with web games. To make money, especially from ads, you need serious traffic. Millions daily, not monthly, and that will be expensive to maintain. Kong can make it work because they have millions of people visiting the site with several thousand games.
IIRC Kong rev is based eCPM which is multiples of 1k impressions. So you probably won’t see any rev numbers if you have less than 1k views.
Unless you have a totally awesome run away hit, you will probably won’t make more than a few bucks making a web game and relying on ads. (anywhere, not just on Kong.)
I have an own server for my company and that’s very cheap. Unlimited bandwidth included.
The real challenge is building a community that does not realize what I realized. Those companies only pay if the threshold exceeds a certain amount. This means that all those people whose visitors are below that threshold get nothing while the company earns money. This adds up. Also the visitor counter is on k.'s side, so they can manipulate it at will.
I heard about k 2 days ago, how long did it take this community to prosper, do you know?
No really no. Not today, a few years ago yes, today no. The exemple i gave for unmetered is for anywhere between 100mb to 1gb sec with 100€ month per additional 100mb sec. So basically 1k = 1gbs to the net. That really doesn’t add up fast at all. Just how many concurrent downloaders do you think kongregate has? Just pulling numbers out of my hat here but say something crazy like 100k ppl connected at all times. That’s probably abojt 1k downloading vs 99k in game. So lets say 1000 ppl at 10mb/sec that’s only 10gbs. And it’s probably way overestimated,
Ronan, they seem to try to prevent us from going into that business by spreading wrong facts. As I wrote, no, server costs are low, bandwidth costs aswell. The problem is not server/bandwith costs but creating good content that animates people to contribute. How do you do that?
I don’t know nor do i claim to know, my only point in the conversation is that no, hardware bandwidth isn’t expensive, i have 0 opinion on kongregate nor their added value. All i’m saying is that what they take is justified by the service, not by the physical costs they have running said service, because those costs are probably very close to 0. If kongregate is about in the scale i imagine it is, i could probably host it (server bandwicth storage etc, all technical parts included) for 10k€/month tops.
