Flash Game Monetization

On the first day the most interesting report was - "Trends" from Alexander Lyskovsky (Alawar). A lot of numbers and statistics. Social games are the other games that other teams made - casual experience doesn`t work there (as an example: There was just one game designer who works both casual games and social ones). You can build a social game of the same brand as the casual, using the content of casual titles, but you will have to redo the game.

Mobile platform: your own games ported just for these devices pay off. Publishers make their own shops for the platforms, developers porting and looking for publishers of these platforms, indie developers make all themselves or looking for outsource. If you suddenly missed something - I have already told here in details how and where you can port your games.

Follow up:

Slides were very interesting - the different topics and answers for questions from three entities: publishers, developers and indie developers =)

Share of profits - the average top title brings good money from every platform, for sure PC dominate - but compared to last year the profit share of copies on the PC has fallen and will continue down.

Evening party was held on Bigfish with fighters, fights and belly dancers. It was very cool =)

On the second day I visited a lecture about HTML5 from Michael Mahemoff. As the conference was the maximum speed of the Internet 1KB / s, there were shown only screenshots of examples. The first half of the lecture was devoted HTML5 security - if you replace the HTML5 to flash - nobody notice the difference: sandbox, cross-Domain-Policy. However, for me (as a developer who is fed with advertising) it was more interesting possibilities for modifying the game html5 other sites (how difficult to change the original game - to remove advertising and insert his own, branding etc). It`s clear that social games don`t care or mind on facebook - facebook is the One. For small developers I didn`t see any protection. Also Snake with multiplayer and in the screenshots was shown.

Later, in the club, we continued talking about HTML5: Everybody suppose the future is there. I`ll try to write the article "Indie way" to HTML5 and will see what we can do with it.

As well I visited round table - "Porting for iPhone". Since no one except the G5 did come, so the G5 talked about how he is porting games to the iPhone. Casual titles they're doing great. If there is a casual-shareware-title - there is no better porting+publication.

Then I came to round table about social sphere. Talk was good, but nothing new - facebook continues to reduce viral, the other social networks will be engaged in this as well - the price of advertising and installs will continue to grow. iJet was advertising himself and his platform. Need to go to other networks. But the other participants weren`t agree to use any universal technology for introduction to other networks - each network has its own requirements and viral-tools, and support for any universal platform is much more expensive then just making own version for each social-platform.

Once again was reminded that without marketing tools is almost impossible to run the game. One of key point of successful start is to monitor all incoming traffic 24/7, and fixing points where users stops to play the game.
Thanks God, we refused from social games =) small companies out there doing nothing, medium - heavy to fight.

The third day was held under FlashGamm & Social.
Vitaly Khit (Absolutist / WellGames) talked about different ways to optimize, accelerate, and development ways. In general - if you have С++ stuff, go for "Adobe Alchemy". Beside getting flash-content, you will get iOS too.

Stephan Keiss (WheemPlay) spoke about the hardcore-MMO-social sphere. You can not fuss with the users - just quietly and quickly fix the bugs.