Publishing Games - Building JavaScript Games for Phones, Tablets, and Desktop - page 383

Selling Your Game
If you want to make a living with creating HTML5 games, there are quite a few different possibilities.
A very simple way to make money with your games is to put them on your web site and add
advertisement banners—for example, using Google AdWords. If you get a lot of visitors, you will
make revenue from the advertisements. However, this ad income will be low unless you attract
a lot of players. Perhaps a more lucrative approach is to sell your games to portals. Most portals
offer their games for free, but they also make money from advertisements. There are also a number
of broker sites where you can make your game available for a price, such as Game Brokerage
( https://gamebrokerage.com ) .
Mark: “Selling games to portals can be done on a revenue-sharing basis, where
you share in the revenues from advertisements. Revenue sharing is implemented
either as the portal paying the developer or as the developer paying the portal. In
the first case, the portal puts advertisements in your game and pays you a part of
the revenue; in the second case, the developer puts advertisements in the game
and pays the portal a percentage of the income. Finally, you can also sell your game
through a fixed-fee model, where you get paid once for delivering a game to a portal.
Because the HTML5 gaming market is relatively young, portals are still willing to
deal with individuals who create and sell games. But more and more HTML5 game
companies are starting, so it will probably not stay that way for very long.”
Another way to try to sell your games is through an app store on Android or iOS. You can't directly
publish an HTML5 game to those stores, but need to convert it to a native format first. There are
wrapper tools that can do that for you, such as CocoonJS ( https://www.ludei.com/cocoonjs ) and
PhoneGap ( http://phonegap.com / ). The nice thing about publishing your game as a native app is
that you can introduce things like in-app purchases that provide you with extra revenue, in addition
to the money you make selling games in the app store. However, be aware that using wrapper tools
such as PhoneGap may cause performance lags that need to be thoroughly tested. The app that a
wrapper produces may look like a native app, but it's actually a web app that is running in a viewer.
Once your games are out there, you can start to think about other ways to make money with
them. For example, if your game allows players to play against each other, you could introduce
a subscription service that gives players access to your game when they pay a monthly fee. The
players get storage on your server for their profile and their achievements in the game.
Try to think about other ways to make money with your games. Sometimes it helps to involve
another party who already has a big network. Create a game for a charity of your choice, and
share the revenues with it. You'll help a charity, and it will do marketing for you at the same time!
Another way to try to make money with your games is to rely on crowdfunding. There are web sites
dedicated to crowdfunding for games, such as Gambitious ( https://gambitious.com ) . If you plan to
publish your games on Steam ( http://store.steampowered.com ) , look at the mechanisms it provides
for game developers to sell their work. For example, it has a mechanism called Early Access that
allows people to buy and play games that aren't finished yet. This could be a helpful mechanism for
you to build up a network of players, gain momentum, get feedback and bug reports, and provide
regular game updates. Finally, have a look at the blog by True Valhalla ( www.truevalhalla.com/blog ) ,
which talks about lots of different ways to make money with HTML5 games.