Archive for the ‘Making a Living’ tag

First Year of Flash Game Development: a Balance

I’m not aware of the exact date we said “We’re going flash games” but since I registered us on Flash Game License mid-July 2008 and our first game took about 6 weeks to be made, I would imagine that mid-June would be near the exact date.

I know it’s irrelevant, but I’m brainstorming so bear with me…

Technology was… refreshing!

Oh well, what to say… we used to work with Torque Game Builder and C++, mostly because Torque Game Builder had some… erm… issues. In those days, that damn thing didn’t know how to render a font on screen properly, so, to get a commercial game out, we couldn’t trust it and we needed to change the actual C++ engine.

Actionscript does have it’s issues also, first and foremost, it’s not a game engine, nor there’s any proper commitement from Adobe to change that. But game developers are used (and should be used) to make the wrong feel right and Actionscript is a bag of good suprises in that department.

Money was good!

Money is not only licensing… we did more stuff… but let’s start with the part that interests most developers.

Licensing

While I still believe that the topmost games of the casual download market space do make more money than topmost flash games. But download games take more time and more people. Another thing with the casual games is that it is a hit market and the vast majority of the money goes to a tiny minority of the people.

We released one download game and we were working on the second when we ran to an halt: we had a lot of proposals for distribution, none for publishing. If you don’t know what this means, basically we didn’t have any upfront money to work and that would kill us in a couple of months.

I would love to share with you real money values but under contract of the download game I cannot, therefor, I’ll give you comparasion figures. I calculated a revenue ratio:

revenue ratio = revenue / team members / months of development

Balloon Bliss has a revenue ratio of 1, because it’s what I want to compare with. Our first game, Tech Wars was a disappointment, mostly because we didn’t know what we were doing, but ok… still the revenue ratio is 1. This means that the revenue per month work per developer involved is exactly the same as a download game… hmmmm… for a game that is less market friendly.

Atomik Kaos and Atomik Kaos 2 have a ratio of 6 and 7.5 respectivelly and Lucy Swashbuckler has a ratio of 2.25.

Average is 4 times more revenue per team member per month worked than casual download market.

Contracts and Collaborations

We had some great ones and some bad ones, most of them were great ones though! Some of the contracts are yet to hit the web, which is a shame because we are very proud of them, but this section is about money so let’s cut the chase… is it good or not to have contracts and collaborations?

It depends… Using the exact same ratio, we had contracts that ranged from 1 to 10 and collabs that ranged from 0 to 36.72. The problem is that 0 there… some developers started projects with us, received assets and then dropped the project without a word. That’s nasty.

I think that we will have less collabs and more contracts in the future, which is ok I guess, but although a higher risk, it’s potentially more profitable to have a collab than a contract. Something we’ve discussed a lot is to what extent is more interesting to get these gigs instead of our own game development? On average our own game development is more profitable, but it has the highest risk, so I guess it’s a matter of balancing things.

Conclusions…

While we did more money per team member per month, we really need to sort how to balance between contracts, collabs and internal production.

Contracts offer 0 risk but lower income, internal production presents the higher risk with a potential higher income and collabs are somewhere in the middle. Since collabs were the more profitable the also the most problematic, I think that what we need to balance is internal vs contracts and leave collabs drop unless we get a really interesting project.

Visibility and contacts

Like it or not, a business is as viable as is it visible unless you are running some illegal thing, then it’s the exact opposite.

About a year ago our games were played by roughly ten thousand players. In a year we got around ten million players, that’s the equivalent to our country’s population, so kind of a milestone for us.

Our visibility, simply boosted and most of it happened because of the good people we had the pleasure to work with.

Flash Game License

All started here: please click here if you don’t know what it is… The services offered by the portal allowed all our primary and exclusive game sales, but it did not end there. Adam in particular has been always open to hear our complaints and suggestions and drive business our way. I’m sure we would do it sooner or later, but not has fast and as hassle free as while working with this wonderful group of people.

Portals

All the portals that worked with us. All, from the smallest to the biggest, have part in the visibility of our work but more important, all of them cared. I never felt that these portals were some faceless institutions that overloaded us with paperwork or false intentions. They wanted the best for their service and worked with us to deliver it. Sometimes it was possible, other times wasn’t.

I’ll open a new link section to be sure I don’t leave anyone out… and drive a little traffic their way too, why not?

Conclusion and future plans

This first year was very good. Next year is a bit edgy for us. We want to continue growing but we need to sort what our bets are and how we will manage somethings.

I don’t doubt for a minute that I’ll be here a year from now making a year 2 balance.

See you all soon,
Vlad

Making a living

There’s a lot of information about how you can monetize from flash games. When I look at it I wonder how many of that information is written from the real world perspective in mind, which is: is it possible to make a living from flash games?

Not everyone has the skill and the vision to create Desktop Tower Defense, Bloons, DinoRun or some other hit games. For a game like these to appear a number of requisites are necessary and then some luck to help. These games or better said, these IPs are certainly profitable or at least allowed its creators to further expand their development.

But if you haven’t created a successful franchise, how are you going to live from flash games? Here is my opinion, after all, I do it full-time.

Don’t make a good game, make all your games good

I lost count on how many times the sentence “make a good game” has been used, but I find odd that there’s not a lot of mention to producing quality work continuously. If you want to monetize: make a good game; if you want to live from flash games: make all your games good.

Short games are too risky

If you create short games (less than a month development time) thinking that you’ll sell all of them for $500, think again! In my opinion, any game that receives that extra mile of polishing and featuring will substantially enhance the quality and therefor the probability of being licensed for more money.

Cut your expenses

Before starting this business I made about three times the amount of cash I do now. All I did was to cut expenses. It’s not that hard and you don’t have to lower your standards as long as you can identify when do you really need something or it’s just stupid to waste that money.

Why do I do it? I’m happy, that’s the whole point of doing what you want to do for a living: being happy. I just don’t have that many Xbox games and I don’t go out to dinner so often. I learnt to be supermarket smart and so on. It’s all common sense, really.

And why do I say this? If you really think that you’ll be rich from game development, if that’s what moves you… maybe you should think if this is the right choice for you.

Self-employment is not easier

So you have your own schedules now? No boss sucking your soul? Well… I work about twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week. In my before gamedev life I worked six to eight hours a day, five days a week. Oh I also had vacations! Now I take some days from time to time.

My current boss is a soulless man that keeps pushing me. My boss is me, sometimes, me and my partner Marco, which is the good side of my boss. You see, if you are in charge, the weight of decisions is on you! The responsibility is also on you!

Keep focus!

I’m going to write this in a confusing way, because that’s what will happen daily… Don’t waste your time browsing forums and reading blogs: work! Don’t waste your time watching TV: read blogs and forums! Don’t waste your development time with stuff you don’t need: code THE game! or relax and watch some TV. Don’t waste your time recoding everything: write reusable code in AS3 for crying out loud!

Hope this helps!

All game development takes dedication, love and hard work. Unlike most game development markets, we don’t have publishers to approve and release money ahead of development, it’s on our back to support ourselves. The tricky part is to keep development tight and smart and create good games continuously.

I hope that this helps if you are just starting up. Use your head and get ready because sometimes it’s really hard, but nothing pays the feeling of having a game out there being played by millions.

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