Pixelante Game Studios - Revenue Breakdown & Flash Game Monetization
April 24, 2009 - By: Evan Miller
You may already know that Flash gaming has gone through somewhat of a "boom" in the last year or two. If you didn't, well, now you do. The little hobbyist games that people have been toiling over for the last decade with no reward other than some nice reviews and a little attention are now capable of making money through sponsorships and advertising. Kongregate and now Newgrounds are offering revenue share programs, start-ups like Whirled are tackling microtransactions, and more and more indie games are starting to get ported and published to downloadable services like Steam and the iPhone. The market and potential for Flash games is growing very, very quickly.
When you can make money off of Flash development it becomes a lot easier to justify spending more time on it. You can plan out bigger, more ambitious projects. You can do more design iterations. You can hire testing services to give you feedback. You can contract out jobs to get better quality assets. You can even, possibly, create a full-time job out of making Flash games.
This is what I've been attempting for just shy of one year now.
My name is Evan 'madpixelante' Miller. Founder/owner/only-employee of Pixelante Game Studios. Full-time university undergrad. Ninja. Talentless hack. 20-21 years old, in the timeframe this article covers.
Stats
Since this is such a new market I'm in, a lot of people are eager to hear what sort of numbers a kid in his bedroom can pull off and, more importantly, where those numbers are coming from. People have been releasing numbers for iPhone sales, self-published titles, licensing models & such but I haven't seen much raw data on the more typical sponsorship route.
So here goes. Numbers are rough figures in Canadian dollars and taken from May 2008-April 2009.
Gross Revenue: $35 000
Expenses: $5 750
Additional Information
Conclusions
So what can we conclude from this? Well for starters: making a living is possible. Going to get rich? Not likely. Difficult? Perhaps. I didn't just suddenly decide I was going to make games one day. I've been learning various aspects of development since I was 12. On the other hand it's a really awesome job. I sleep in, set my own hours, have tons of creative freedom, don't have to deal with shitty management and don't even have deadlines unless I want them (which I do - but work process is, again, a whole other article in itself). Can you support a whole company like this? That's the bigger question. A single guy like me with a very laid-back lifestyle can get by on $30 000 a year. Two people? Notsomuch. I've got some group projects going now and it'll be interesting to see how it turns out financially. In general, though, I find solo work and small amounts of outsourcing to be many orders of magnitude more efficient (I mean my teammates are totally awesome in every conceivable way so please don't throw your shoe at me... again).
The other major thing to take away is quite clear: Sponsorship payments make up the vast majority of my revenue. I'm not saying it's a bad idea to go on a strictly site-by-site licensing model or that you shouldn't try to self-publish and make money from Google ads; those are both completely viable strategies and possibly even more profitable if done well. All I'm saying is this route can work too... and it works without me having to do much "business" - I get to focus almost entirely on the games instead of the monetization.
Where do I go from here? Nowhere! Here is already great. If I can build up more tech, funds, and reputation hopefully I can put out some more impressive projects and maybe hire more some help but on the whole things are just fine as is. Sure, I have crazy dreams of making multi-million dollar games with hundreds of people like most little aspiring game developer punks, but that type of fantasy is usually appealing precisely because it's not real. Small low-budget titles with a quick turn-around rate are ultimately much better for my mental health, I think.
So as long as I can keep making money, I'll try to keep making flash games. And, getting back to the original point of this article: I'm making some money.
April 24, 2009 - By: Evan Miller
You may already know that Flash gaming has gone through somewhat of a "boom" in the last year or two. If you didn't, well, now you do. The little hobbyist games that people have been toiling over for the last decade with no reward other than some nice reviews and a little attention are now capable of making money through sponsorships and advertising. Kongregate and now Newgrounds are offering revenue share programs, start-ups like Whirled are tackling microtransactions, and more and more indie games are starting to get ported and published to downloadable services like Steam and the iPhone. The market and potential for Flash games is growing very, very quickly.
When you can make money off of Flash development it becomes a lot easier to justify spending more time on it. You can plan out bigger, more ambitious projects. You can do more design iterations. You can hire testing services to give you feedback. You can contract out jobs to get better quality assets. You can even, possibly, create a full-time job out of making Flash games.
This is what I've been attempting for just shy of one year now.
My name is Evan 'madpixelante' Miller. Founder/owner/only-employee of Pixelante Game Studios. Full-time university undergrad. Ninja. Talentless hack. 20-21 years old, in the timeframe this article covers.
Stats
Since this is such a new market I'm in, a lot of people are eager to hear what sort of numbers a kid in his bedroom can pull off and, more importantly, where those numbers are coming from. People have been releasing numbers for iPhone sales, self-published titles, licensing models & such but I haven't seen much raw data on the more typical sponsorship route.
So here goes. Numbers are rough figures in Canadian dollars and taken from May 2008-April 2009.
Expenses: $5 750
Additional Information
- As a full-time university student, I couldn't actually work full-time on making games all year round. More like 4-5 months out of the year, really, with bits of part-time work for the rest. Obviously this impacts the amount of games I could put out and potential revenue. On the other hand I get tax breaks. Also, it's not correct to assume that 3x the development time = 3x the revenue. People need breaks: morale and motivation are easy things to lose. School helped change things up which kept me focused.
- All of my currently released titles are individual efforts outside of a couple art & music assets I contracted out (a character in Towering Forever and a music track in Oozing Forever). My friends also help test a little.
- I don't actually do much work in terms of contacting sponsors, selling licenses, handling distribution and whatnot. FlashGameLicense.com takes care of most of it for me. My commission to them is part of the expenses figure. I'm sure a more confident and business-oriented person could wrangle up more deals than I've bothered to look for, but my philosophy has been to focus on what I enjoy and see if that's good enough.
- The rest of the expenses are computer hardware and (obviously) software. Cost of living and income tax is not included.
- Again, these are Canadian numbers. US value would be ~70-80%.
- I generally aim to make games in a month and a half, and they actually take about 2 months + a week or so to deal with all the sponsorship & distribution shenanigans. These figures cover the four Forever Series titles I've put out.
- Hunted Forever was listed in Time Magazine's Top 10 Games of 2008. People always ask me, how much did you make from that? The answer is nothing. The publicity was a fun experience and very motivating (which is important) but financially doesn't do a thing for me. It's strange but the Flash market is so insular that outside attention doesn't matter that much - not that it isn't appreciated! Big shout out to Kotaku for mentioning me a couple times. It's practically unheard of for gaming press to recognize that there are things worth caring about in the Flash market (ironically one of the biggest gaming markets in terms of active players there is - but that's a whole other article/rant).
Conclusions
So what can we conclude from this? Well for starters: making a living is possible. Going to get rich? Not likely. Difficult? Perhaps. I didn't just suddenly decide I was going to make games one day. I've been learning various aspects of development since I was 12. On the other hand it's a really awesome job. I sleep in, set my own hours, have tons of creative freedom, don't have to deal with shitty management and don't even have deadlines unless I want them (which I do - but work process is, again, a whole other article in itself). Can you support a whole company like this? That's the bigger question. A single guy like me with a very laid-back lifestyle can get by on $30 000 a year. Two people? Notsomuch. I've got some group projects going now and it'll be interesting to see how it turns out financially. In general, though, I find solo work and small amounts of outsourcing to be many orders of magnitude more efficient (I mean my teammates are totally awesome in every conceivable way so please don't throw your shoe at me... again).
The other major thing to take away is quite clear: Sponsorship payments make up the vast majority of my revenue. I'm not saying it's a bad idea to go on a strictly site-by-site licensing model or that you shouldn't try to self-publish and make money from Google ads; those are both completely viable strategies and possibly even more profitable if done well. All I'm saying is this route can work too... and it works without me having to do much "business" - I get to focus almost entirely on the games instead of the monetization.
Where do I go from here? Nowhere! Here is already great. If I can build up more tech, funds, and reputation hopefully I can put out some more impressive projects and maybe hire more some help but on the whole things are just fine as is. Sure, I have crazy dreams of making multi-million dollar games with hundreds of people like most little aspiring game developer punks, but that type of fantasy is usually appealing precisely because it's not real. Small low-budget titles with a quick turn-around rate are ultimately much better for my mental health, I think.
So as long as I can keep making money, I'll try to keep making flash games. And, getting back to the original point of this article: I'm making some money.