Flash Game Monetization

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!
As every Xmas eve I publish my report about the passing year. During last 4 years I had developed and/or released more than 40 games. Also few games on EyePhone - by myself and via others. Still I have only one portal and one blog. I was trying to launch other projects - like new portal, facebook-game-shop, some minor things - but in general they all had already failed or on the way to be closed =(

Here are some Numbers:
In total I was able to earn - $230,870. The first year it was - $40,468, the second - $28,329, the third - $76,734, the forth - $85,370. In average per month - $4800, or $7100 if consider only last year.

Where: Licenses - money from selling exclusive/primary licenses, Ads - money from advertisements, Others - selling url-locks, non-exclusive, sources, Portal - money from ads on portal (there are other sources of income there, but they are all small and less than $100), Micro - money from micro-payments, Apple - earnings from AppleStore & MacStore.

We have a new item in the list - Apple! I hope I`ll earn more with Apple next year. Micro - as I told you last year - will be less. It was predictable - there is no more portals left that accept games with Microtransactions. Game has to be super-hit like 'KingdomRush' or 'GemCraft' - but in general this kind of games can earn money via any kind of model =)

Now about sad things - my expenses. Last years I spent almost nothing - just for paying for servers, additional art and music. This year I decided to hire external coders for routine job - porting games via licenses. It turned out as total failure =( reasons was obvious:

- Managing and testing took away an incredible amount of time.
- Chat. Unnecessary talk or questions. The fourth questions from code programmers took more time than the code itself.
- In the beginning of the year I supposed to manage not alone, but it happened that I manage with 8 projecs at the same time and programming another 4. As a result, I failed some promises and led some people and companies. I plan to fix and restore my promises to February 2012.

In total for 2011 I spend around $35k as payments to coders, servers and support, additional art and sounds, taxes.

Game that generated more money per title to one person, still the same - EF:Conqest($13k). The most cool title - Red Storm($29k).

What am I planning to do next year?
In the first place to improve the quality of games - It has a positive impact on them after start.
To do more games for AppleStore - and to do myself, not from other studious.
To develop portal - to buy advertising, released my own games with с advertising of my portal.
I am going to make a mini-conference only for indie-flash-developers and flash portal owners.(In Kaliningrad region, in May)
To orient the game developing to multiplatform.

Shortly, it`s the same plan as it was 2 years ago.=)

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!
And beside that, 3 years passed since I left office space. During that time I developed and/or released more than 30 games. Also few games on EyePhone - by my self and via others. Still I have only one portal and one blog but we`re working at the new one casual-portal.

Here is some Numbers:
In total I was able to earn - $145,531. The first year was - $40,468, the second - $28,329, the third - $76,734. In average per month - $4042, or $6380 if to count just last year.

Where: Licenses - money from selling exclusive/primary licenses, Ads - money from advertisements, Others - selling url-locks, non-exclusive, sources, Portal - money from ads on portal (there are other sources of income there, but they are all small and all less than $100), Micro - money from micro-payments.
Portal share went up double. Micro share - x10, but I think it`s a ceiling.

I think I should highlight some things that helped me to get more money this year:

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Finally new Red Storm has been released. First week took to fix some critical bugs, now its ok. Most critical bug was freezing during playing - and it was caused by 3rd party lib - Greensock. I really recommend you to avoid them - bugs like that cant be fixed =( and tween animation is easy to do by yourself. And any external API - I guess only box2D is essential and OK to use.

Total by Games: 1333$, Total by Portal: 1582$, Total by Micro: X$(I really don`t know, and don`t wanna spend hours to get stats for them, lol =)).

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Next week I will release few new games - some of them for elite-games.net! And now checking pre-christmas eCPM, just wonder if there any changes. So changes to eCPM against May 2010.

Total by Games: 1048$, Total by Portal: 1415$, Total by Micro: 300$.

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Summer is coming - less work, more rest =) OR, if you have noticed - CPMStar have double rates for Ads for next months - so if you are going to release smth, next few weeks is the best time to do it.

Total by Games: 1372$, Total by Portal: 1260$, Total by Micro: 300$.

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