Unrefined Awesome

As previously mentioned, I’m planning to use MochiAds to earn money from the Flash games I’m working towards.  I like how the system works and I already know it’s reliable - John Hattan uses it and apparently makes a decent income off his own games.  I’m taking the opportunity however to mention some of the other possibilities for making money with your Flash games which I’ve also considered.

The first is relatively similar to MochiAds.  GameJacket is a brand-spanking-new service which places ads before or during play of Flash games in much the same way as MochiAds.  Like MochiAds they will also host the Flash files for you, although unlike MochiAds there system is set up in such a way that you must host the files with them; the file you ‘release into the wild’ (distribute online) so to speak is a wrapper which displays an ad and then retrieves your game dynamically from the GameJacket servers.  The advantage of this is that you therefore guarantee any updates will be available everywhere the game is played.  I’m actually going to give this system a try by releasing a couple of very small and rough games without any branding just to see how they go - unless they perform unexpectedly well they’ll just be fire-and-forget releases which don’t receive any updates or maintenance.

Secondly there’s the option of sponsorship; essentially someone (Armor Games for example) pays you to be the ’sponsor’ of the game, usually involving display of their logos.  I’ve personally elected not to use this option due to the fact that they’re often a once-off payment rather than a potential stream of income, and because I want to build brand awareness for WGA rather than for a sponsor company.  If you can produce a good quality game the payments for these sort of offers can sometimes be quite large however, and many companies are willing to offer non-exclusive sponsorships, so this option may well be worth consideration by others.

My other option (which I will actually be using as well, but won’t be attempting to rely on) is release through Kongregate, who pay developers a portion of the money earned from ads displayed on their page around the games.  They also offer cash prizes to the most popular weekly/monthly games, but this is of course not a reliably obtainable source of income.  A game containing MochiAds will not show it’s MochiAd advertisements when shown on Kongregate due to a deal between the two groups, so I will be releasing my games using both of these systems - there’s no harm in giving my games a shot at winning those Kongregate prizes, and they may still earn some ad revenue from the site.

Another option I won’t cover here is the upsell - a Flash game can be used to entice people to pay to download an improved stand-alone version of the game.  I will also be attempting to use this and will cover it in significantly more detail in future.