Making Money with Flash games: Part I: Licensing to portals

Due to some recent talks here and also as i get mails with questions on such things each week i decided to post threads on such topics every now an then once i get to it :)
All points are based on personal experience and may vary in your case.
I try to put this a bit like a FAQ
Any feedback/ additions are welcome to make this a useful ressource to all developers :)

So yea, let´s roll, today´s topic: Licensing your game(s) to portals:


Q:

How to approach portals, is it ok to just show em my game right away?

A:

There are of course also naughty websites who spread around content as soon as they see it/ get hold of it, so ideally before showing it to certain sites you should at least add a url check in your game and obfuscate the swf.
Check the protecting games thread and others here for more info on that topic.
Overall, at least the bigger sites are normally trustworthy so for those negotiating about price/ licensing deal specs,then doing a licensing agreement contract and then licensing the game to them AFTER showing the game to them is fine :)

Besides that protection side its not a bad idea to make a promo page for your game which features some screenshots and highlights its USP well though, it can only help you in negotiating talks and quickly showing clients why your game is special.


Q:

What about prices? How much can i get for game X ?

A:

Regarding pricing i can´t tell any exact sums because that varies a lot from client to client,depending on the specs of the licensing deal and the game with its features itself.
To give a general ballpark range licensing prices for web games range from 500 $- 50 k $ normally so you could get anything in between.

Again, your results may vary based on the licensing deal specs you go for, which clients you approach, your negotiation skills/luck etc :)


Q:

Licensing deal specs?

A:

Generally speaking, regarding the licensing agreement specs: you have to watch out to clearly state whether you licence a game exclusively to one site or non exclusive (so you can license it to several clients) and what usage rights the client gets
(like is he allowed to spread the game to other sites,allow users to download it, publish it in other form,edit the source,reuse the source for other things etc) and what rights you get (add mochiads in the game for example,keep all IP rights etc). Also clearly state which todos/features are included in the base price (like adding an intro,adopting game to some hs/tracking system)

The more the client wants of these points and on some other ends,the more it normally reduces your options to make money with the game in other ways, so regarding that you should change your pricing (upwards) accordingly or reevaluate if the deal is worth it.


Q:

So tell me, how much do you get per game?


A:
I can´t tell what a normal minimum price for our games is, again, that depends on many points (like many of our current games are custom developed to the needs of a client and licensed exclusively to him for a certain timespan at least, but to that thing more in another post/ thread),
but yeah, our prices are meanwhile normally higher than what the average portal pays per non exclusive game license.
(Still a very fair deal regarding dev efforts/timespans though :) )
Also its not seen as nice business manner (counted even illegal in some countries) to tell/ discuss prices openly.


Q:

I want connections to clients, how?

A:

Regarding building up solid connections, those come automatically with time, once clients see you deliver good stuff and you see which clients stick to their word, are friendly and pay well and then you do several deals with em :)

Sweet Tom, thanks for the good info.

It's dangerous to post a price range like you did. It should read "$0 - $50k"
We're gonna have a ton of amateurs thinking their half-assed crap is worth more than gold now.

to walsher:
np mate, glad if it helps :)

to Ray:
sure a price range can vary a lot more than that, i´ve heard of people paying way less and of others getting way more than the max i stated.
I tried to state range figures of more common prices though, as i said, it depends on many factors which price you can achieve, if your game is crap or exists a million times in pretty much same form on millions of portals, yeah, then you can´t expect to get a lot without a huge chunk of luck of course ;)

You should consider how much time you spent on a game, how much you think your work time is worth, don´t sell yourself low but yeah, also don´t ask for an unrealistic price regarding your dev efforts, licensing deal specs and game features etc.

Not to open a kettle of fish...but what about sponsorship.

Thanks for sharing the knowledge

to Will:
It would only be actual sponsorhip if the sponsoring site doesn´t expect to have any usage rights on your game.
In reality, what is often labelled as "sponsorship" actually is a "nicer" wording for getting an exclusive or non exclusive usage license for a game, so at the end generally speaking the same topic as i outlined here roughly.
Still, yup, it often ends up with some different ups and downs, so i didn´t talk about that under this main topic.
Just like with the other options outlined above its important to make clear which rights/duties each side has.
Personally i never went for a deal which was entitled as sponsorship deal in some way as those i heard of normally paid too low regarding our expectations/ dev efforts/costs and also those sites then had usage declerations like they´d be allowed to spread the game to any site/in any form (pretty much reducing other revenue ways for the developer with this game a lot if not completely by doing so).
On the upside since there are things like mochiads where it makes sense to the developer that his game gets spread around on the web as much as possible, suddenly even such deals could get interesting again (if that site doesn´t have anything against you putting your own ads in there).
As always you have to judge the specific deal/offer, no way to give a general go or nogo.
So, yup, decide for yourself what looks good to you, again i´m just posting my personal view on things :)

I hate to sound stupid but what exactly is mochaids? I see it here and I've seen a few other posts, never of it till now.

mochiads is an advertising system for flash content and is in private beta right now.
Basically you register,log in,set up a new game and it spits out some code you can copy & paste into your game. Once you do that each time your game is loaded it will show an advert, so normally you´d add the code so the ad gets shown before the game starts,in between levels or on game over.
That way you get money each time your game is played.
You can read more about it here: http://www.mochiads.com/
I think i will also do another thread on that topic later :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ray Beez

It's dangerous to post a price range like you did. It should read "$0 - $50k"
We're gonna have a ton of amateurs thinking their half-assed crap is worth more than gold now.

---

Good encouragement for amateurs!
Who wants to pay and play flash games?
There are hundreds free on-line games sites on the web.
There are also thousands of flash game developers in the market waiting to get their games sponsored.
Getting employed in a multimedia company, is better than trying to sell games as a freelancer.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Eager Beaver

Getting employed in a multimedia company, is better than trying to sell games as a freelancer.

---

Please don´t say something like that as if it was a fact, i know freelancers who earn huge sums just like i know agency employees who earn great,then there are also members of both groups who sadly don´t earn great at all.
Find a way that works well for you but don´t put it as if it was the only good solution.

Sorry Tom! I stand to be corrected. However, Some of the problems faced by game developers are,
a) The clients do not send complete specs., and game play in the beginning.
b) The deadlines are very tight even though the specs., and game play are changed frequently.
c) There is always another guy waiting at your back to do the project at half the price.
Lucky are those who survive.

np and sorry regarding your negative experiences. Sure, such things can happen and we´ve all been there in between, but then in between comes a client who gives you a nice budget/project timeschedule and pretty much creative freedom, you work hard to pull something nice, it gets liked and played a lot and that makes up for a lot of pain before :)
No worries,if it goes down it can go up again,too :)

Cheers Tom for the insight.
It should make a good addition to the knowledge base, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the threads yet to come. :D

Viza

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Eager Beaver
Getting employed in a multimedia company, is better than trying to sell games as a freelancer.

---

I tottally disagree, a company working me 40 hours a week would get alot more production out of me for his money than me freelancing my completed games, and it also leaves me to do other things with my 40 hour work from home week.

Plus many in house positions are very very very rare, not many companies today do any type of flash or animation in house, they just dont have the steady demand for it, and as an outsourced dev, you can charge more when you go in and do things for them.

I've worked both ends of the spectrum, and Im telling you, in a years time working for a design team in southbeach I made 50k, and that was a very very rare position to get considering I only have a bachelors from the art institute of fort lauderdale which cost me 65K.

Now I do my own thing and when I want, I work 90% of the time from the local coffee house, no one ever asks if I have a degree, they just ee my work and say wow, or dont care about my education, they just know I can do the work and thats all they care about.

If I could do it over, I never would have went to school, and instead started my own business years ago.

This goes out to everyone, if you truly have a passion for art and design, and coding, your going to make money, just keep at it, one day you'll wake up and you'll have a list of residual income clients and so much busines you cant even keep track.

I have had a passion for art my whole life, this spanded into websites, and then I found flash, but I tell you, as Im sure anyone here can, I have not left my computer in 4 years and since I started doing flash I spend 10 hours a day on flash stuff, not because I have to, but because "I have to".

So in conclusion, working for a company would not pay me enough to kill the passions I have in making my own works, and being my own boss, I dress how I want, I do what I want, hell I meet most of my new clients at a coffee house wearing blue jeans and a ballcap.

"a) The clients do not send complete specs., and game play in the beginning.
b) The deadlines are very tight even though the specs., and game play are changed frequently.
c) There is always another guy waiting at your back to do the project at half the price."

Sorry about this but...

a) It's down to you to do a design document and get things signed off. It's true, if you put yourself into a position where you can be messed around by a client, you will be. A good producer will always push you for the most they can for what they're paying.
If you've not covered things off at the start then you deserve it.

b) True, but again things shouldn't be changing, and if they are you should be able to highlight that and negotiate terms for it happening ( ie, more money, extended deadline, removal of features ).

c) I think once you're producing games at a certain standard, that's not entirely true. It's one thing going for a $100 in the freelance section here, yeah you are going to get turned over, but then that's people paying next to nothing and wanting the world, and there are always people willing to do that.
If you're working ( Freelance ) for a digital design agency they don't just farm the work out to the cheapest developer, they want to keep their standard high.

Squize.

Arent you mixing diferent things?I mean, licensing to portals vs making games to clients to promote their products/business vs sponsorship games?

Possibly, but if you're licensing a game to a portal, more often than not it's complete and you're just pimping it around.
In that case, then none of the points I replied to are very valid ( In terms of portals ), as they don't really request a lot of changes, it's usually just branding and hi-score integration, which can hardly be classed as amends.

Squize.

Quote:

---

if you're licensing a game to a portal, more often than not it's complete and you're just pimping it around.

---

Yeah the money is just a bonus.

Ok,Tom, thanks for sharing your knowledgment on this, SO, will the next episodes be
PART 2: Selling games that promote their products to clients
PART 3: Selling games to users in your own site
PART 4: Selling games to users using real arcade
PART 5: Making money with mochiAds
PART 6: Making money with sponsorship in your game
and finally...
part 7: Charging players to play your MMORPG!!! :p :p :p
?

This is really great. (Although a few months too late for me :)).
I look forward to the future posts as well.

great post.. good insight

I dont see why you cant post ur price range people pay you whats the worst that can happen?

Although it would be interesting, I doubt it would provide any real benefit. At best there will be a massive influx of crap games that want 500$ because some other guy got 500.

Not to mention that the numbers probably wont be at all relevant or even similar to what you may get.

Has any survey been done about the market size, number of sellers, and buyers?The price of the games depends upon the demand and supply. Presently it's a buyer's market, not to speak of developers like Van goghs, and Picassos.

thanks for all the positive feedback :)

to Cimmeran: Yeah, i had something similar in mind, let´s see :)

to Eager Beaver: Yes, indeed the market has been a buyer´s market for a long time, meanwhile there´s a transition going on for a while though.
As i see it there are thousands of game portals spreading daily and for those there are normally 2 main legal ways to try to compete with the rest:
Get lots of cheap content in or get fewer but in return probably larger scale games in the audience plays for a longer while (which then normally also cost more).
As game developer one can decide if one wants to do one quick game after the other and licence it around a lot for smaller sums per licence or maybe make more exclusive stuff and licence that to few or even just one propper paying client.
As i said meanwhile there are also other revenue ways coming up for developers (ingame ad networks like mochiads for example), so developers are also less bound to the actual payment limit of a portal, so yeah, regarding all that there´s a transition noticable :)
Decide for yourself at which price/game scale range you want to work, chances aren´t bad there´s a fitting client for that.

"I dont see why you cant post ur price range people pay you whats the worst that can happen?"

It's been a long standing un-written rule here that you don't talk money.

Without fail, every thread that has ever brought up the subject has always descended into a row, usually with people undercutting each other ( Before the freelance forum there used to be requests for ( Paid ) games here, and within about 5 posts it would always end up that someone offered to do it for free for "the experience", which would always start a flame war ).

Also look at the bottom of the forum page. See all those guests here ? A percentage of those are people looking to licence games. If you openly say you'll do a certain game (Let's say Tetris ) for $x, then that sets the limit for that game.
Suppose then someone is approached to code Tetris. They quote a price on what they expect to earn for doing it, only to be directed to your post where you've offered to do it $x.

I understand market forces, and that's just the way it is, but let's not make it that bit harder for everyone in what is already a buyers market.

Also, this is a lot of peoples full time jobs. It amazes me when people ask how much you got paid for doing such and such, I would never ask a stranger how much they got paid doing their job, especially if they knew that I was trying to do the same job as them.

Squize.

Good points by Squize. To me i´m not afraid someone else might offer a way better price for what we offer cause i´m meanwhile into doing things few people do. (Not wanting to sound show off,but yeah,its my aim to do something special, so if you seperate yourself from others regarding the quality level/originality/complexity of your work,chances are higher you won´t get underbid by a contender offer).
But yeah,other reasons for still not stating prices openly are still valid, like clients may not like it and its illegal in some countries. Also though i post threads like this to help developers, at the end its always up to the developer,his dev skills and his negotation skills to come up with fitting prices,i´m not into setting them for others.

This may be a little offtopic but i got to ask...
How those games portals make money?Just with banners?I've heard somewhere that miniclip also sells games but i dont know if this is his main goal

Alot of them make money from banners, served by ad networks (Tribal Fusion, Casale, Fastclick etc), that pay per 1000 impressions (views). For example they might be paid $1 for every 1000 visitors that view the banner.