Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Making money from your viral game
The “Distributing a viral web game” section was really just a way to show you that doing things on
your own can be very difficult. There are, in fact, a couple other good ways to get your games
distributed and a couple good reasons why you might not want to distribute your game at all—
well, not at first anyway
.
Using in-page ads
One very common method to make money with your game is to embed it in a web page and add
Google Ad Sense advertising to the same page to make a few hundredths of a penny (or so) per
play every time the page loads. In-page ads are very easy to set up through Google. Create an
account at Google (
https://www.google.com/adsense/
), get a JavaScript ad tag, and add it to
your page. Ads come is all shapes and sizes and can be customized to fit almost any space you
might want to put an ad. In-page display ads can be an easy way to augment your income from a
game. In fact, some developers find this to be the only way to make any real money. However, to
make
a lot
of money with in-page ads you need a lot of visits, which is a very tough thing to make
happen. And there are other pitfalls with in-page ads. You might be inclined, for instance, to
surround every available space with advertisements around your games. This might work for a
little while, but viral game players get tired or advertisements very quickly. Instead, choose a few
strategic places for in-page ads and realize that, unless your game is a massive hit and the only
place it is hosted is your site, these ads will make you only a small fraction of what some other
methods might make.
Entering contests
You will see Flash game contests on many portals and even on gaming news and lifestyle sites
across the Internet. Game contests are great way for web sites and portals to gather (mostly) free
content from unsuspecting and sometimes desperate game developers. OK, that's not the case
all the time, but many contests do seem to be set up to benefit only the owners of the contest.
Contests are good when they seem fair and don't ask developers to give up too much when they
enter. You need to read the fine print of the legal documents. Remember the words in the terms
and conditions that we told you about when discussing portals? Many of those same words apply
here. Most contests are legitimate in that they do have prizes, and people (even people you might
already know or one day will meet) win those contests. However, the chance of winning the
contest might not be worth what you give away (in some cases your game and source code) for
entering. Be careful, and read the fine print.
Inserting in-game ads with Mochi Media
The most common way to make money with your viral Flash game is to insert advertisements
directly into your game. The key term to know when trying to make money from in-game ads (and
in-page ads for that matter) is
eCPM
, which stands for “effective Cost Per Mille” (that is, cost per
1,000). eCPM doesn't show the total amount you've earned; it shows what you've earned per
thousand views. It's calculated by dividing your earnings by the number of page impressions and
multiplying by 1,000. Because of this calculation method, your eCPM will actually change over
time depending on what kind of ads you're showing (different ads pay different rates) and how
many page impressions you've had. The CPM is what the advertiser is paying for 1,000 clicks,
