Flash Game Monetization

All content you can check here.

I`d like to highlight some panels:

1. "Working Together to Take Casual Games Mainstream" by John Barbour(RealGames) - Inspiring lecture where he mentioned the things which working now against Shareware Businesses. Try guess what? =D Free games and Exclusives.

Follow up:

2. "dr. Strangelove"(about Recession 2009) - Everyone doing fine! Especially Micro-transactions. There were just few words about ads-based model - it will good as dead during Recession.
3. "Designing Community and Sociability" - Avatars are cool, even better if they are everywhere, and even much better if they looks like cartoons. Tournaments are should be implemented as base of gaming community. And best way to extract money - micro-transactions.
4. "Crazy Chicken: the Story of the Moorhunt" by Helge Borgats(Phenomedia) - Promote your brand instead of your games. That is really cool idea - instead of making ads about every game, better and cheaper promote brand that you use. And get in partner Media - without them you doomed to be another-small-never-heard studio.
5. "XBox Community games" by Boris Schneider-Johne(Microsoft) - You can create your own games for XBox as community games. That is cool - you DO NOT NEED approval from MS! and you will get money from selling your game there. To make Xbox community game - all what you need is to buy XBox360(250$) and get developer subscription(150$ per year). Note: you have to be in "specific" region(USA, Canada, Ireland, etc - check official site).
6. "Publisher Showdown 2009" - Most interesting question was - "should developer publish his game without publisher?" and publishers says - no, if developer likes money. Why I`m sure that is non-sence? First of all, because there is a lot of companies who become publishers with they own first game(Check Enkord for example). If publisher likes your game - it means your games are awesome. Publisher is good options if you looking to get money in short term(2-4 months). In long term(4-12 months) - that is dead end.
7. "Starting Your Own Studio" by Jussi Laakkonen - Great slides, I`ll publish this one in my blog for sure! Main ideas was - if you going to make big money, get a team. Small team of multiclass people.
   Besides that - invest your money into your project. If you not going to do that - no one else will do it for you.
8. "Monetizing webgames" - Sell stuff inside games with guys who doing that best. Cause in addition to real cash, they can offer alternative options for users but for developers it'll be the same cash . Then spread your games, and count bucks. And no need to have publisher, games with stuff that can be bought have incredibly viral strength.

All this panels can be downloaded from CGA site after some time.

More info will be in next post. That is all for now.