How Much Money To Browser Games Make

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There has been a lot of noise about kongregate finally accepting unity3d games. Which is great.
But how much money is there in free browser games?
To share my limited experience: my 3 games on wooglie.com have a total of just under 5000 hits and have generated 5.26 euros.
I also found this link from Oct 2008:
To me, this is very discouraging.
If I were to expect to make complex games that took a long time to develop, and thus use that as my main source of income, I'd be discouraged.
If I were to do quick, simple games that took little to develop, and thus use that as a small boost in income, I'd be happy.

I'd actually love $100 a month once I'm done working. Doing nothing and reaping those benefits would be awesome.
Of course, it would be 100000x more awesome if I could actually LIVE off of making browser games. That would be amazing @_@
But 5 euros a month? That is not even worth submitting to the website.

My question is this: Would you be better off selling the game for $1 or $2 somewhere else? Sometimes people don't even need to make a good game to sell it for $1, which means if it is a good game people would feel easy buying it. Unless there aren't websites for that sort of thing?
Several games on Kongregate are sponsored, which means the developer got paid to develop the game. All the games also have a 'tip jar' which can be a source of additional revenue. Talking about the size of the community doesn't matter as much as the quality of the community. Whether it was 2,500 or 25,000 really doesn't matter. How many of those developers are creating games which attract traffic.
This is from ads alone, Even for $100/mo, that's $1,200 a year from a game that, once published, you don't have to touch. If you had 10 polished games, on several portals (dimeRocker, Wooglie, Kongregate, etc) and all I did was earn money from ads,(no microtransactions, subscriptions, etc), I'd estimate that I'd be doing pretty good.

I think selling (one-time purchase) browser games are pretty difficult to do, because I could just go to Kongregate and play games for free. These are usually casual/arcades, so trying to sell a casual browser game is going to be hard. If it was something with a subscription, you might be doing much better. Kongregate actually has a number of MMOs which use them as a gateway.
the 100 that is mentioned above is for the developer i.e. for all his games, not just one game. So you may need all 10 polished games to make the 100 on kongregate.
Most of the 2,500 developers on kongregate (>95% it seems), make virtually nothing from what I understand.
I think it's exactly like what Tempest said, most of those game already got the upfront money from sponsorship (through site like flashgamelicense), so the developer not really relying on ads anymore.
I hope in the near future we will have something like UnityGameLicense so we can find sponsorship for unity games too
(the kongregate contest thing is a good way to raise up popularity of unity)
Putting a game on Kongregate, or any portal for that matter including shockwave, isn't going to pay your mortgage.
I believe that Kongregate posted here on the forums, that a developer averages around $1 per thousand views, depending on api/exclusivity and such. So you would need a million hits to make $1000. All you need to do is to look at the views/submission dates on a sample of the 'hot' games to understand that isn't very likely.

Flash developers have an huge edge in that regard over Unity. They can maximize their return by putting a game on hundreds of portals, combining a paltry sum from all of them.

The old lady casual gamespace has moved away from portals to facebook over the last few years. They're now playing family feud on facebook instead of bubble pop on Pogo. Sadly, there are no real options for in-game advertising with Unity. It was on Dimerocker's roadmap, slated for Q1 of last year but evidently never materialized.
http://www.cubestat.com/www.kongregate.com
the website as a whole is making good money, but the majority of the developers, are not...
z00n

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You can get some information about flash games market at http://www.flashgamelicense.com
P.S. Report by the man (googletranslated) who got about 150K$ in 3 year
http://translate.google.com/translate?js&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/startup/110516/

Last edited: Jan 14, 2011
ugur

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When you submit a game to a contest its a different thing as there is a theoretical option to win a higher prize. Its also different when you have a licensing deal going with a portal so it pays you more.
If you have no custom licensing or proper revenue share percentage deal with a portal, most portals where the only way to get money is a one time low sponsoring fee or only ingame ads money that amount is very very low for the huge large majority of games and hence would not be worth it other than when seen as nice pocket exchange beer money.
Hence why usually people only do ingames ads only way to try to earn money either if they have a huge pile of games (so then the tiny sums per game per month add up) or if they are younger and hence the lower income is like a nice sidejob as they don´t have to actually worry about paying mor expensive bills every month.
Correct, but the majority of developers are not getting the traffic. Polished games. Sponsored games. Hot games. Games that get spotlight, front-page, etc that get traffic, get the ad rev.
Flash developers can put their game on multiple portals. There are also several services (like Mochi) were actually resell your game to portals, which gives your games more exposure. More exposure = more ad rev.
There actually exists LinkedIn group for this purpose, but it's not as public as a web site for that.
I think if you're interested in portals, you should do some research into how developers make their living doing games for portals. One thing you could have going for you is a free Unity game (ad sponsored) you can also sell your game through the Mac App Store, or potentially Steam, if they approve it.
ugur

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Man, we have games on most major portals and on 100s of thousands of the small- medium sized ones.
And we also do various other ways for earning money with games. And yes, we have games which get a couple of million plays a month.
So yeah, based on that experience i can tell you just ad money from web sites is one of the worst ways to make money per game.
That´s why a lot of game developers switch over to other options after a while, like running their own portal, have micro transactions in games, selling their games themselves or via other distribution options, or do subscription based stuff or client work, multi platform (sold) publishing etc. etc.
And btw first selling your game in some way and then putting it out on some of the portals in free to play ad financed model for an additional pocket exchange can work ok; going the other way round, first letting everyone play the game for free and then afterwards trying to charge players for playing it in one way or the other would in most cases not work out, especially if you don´t change and enhance the game enough to make people feel they are actual getting something in exchange for paying money for something which was freely available before.
since you mentioned it, how hard would it be to create a game portal website?
say like wooglie, or kongregate where the developers can log it, see statistics for their games, upload highscores, etc.
Are there any pre-made game portal websites that can be purchased?
Also, do you need to host that on your own server, or any hosting website would do?
ugur

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Creating a crappy portal is very easy and can be done cheap and quickly. Creating a better portal which can compete in features, usability and look with the "best" portals is quite a bit more work. It also needs constant work and money flow to keep it up to date in features and content. For that you also have to create a lot of games or incentivise developers to put games on your portal exclusively or earlier than on others so users have a reason to visit your portal rather than the millions of others out there.
DECEMBER CONTEST WINNERS
1st place:Sarah's Run (preview)
by SophieHoulden
2nd place: Arkandian Crusadeby undefined
3rd place: Tentacle Warsby gamezhero
4th place: endeavorby Zillix
5th place: City Siegeby thepodge
6th place: Steambirds: Survivalby spryfox
7th place: Factory Balls, the Christmas edition
by bontegames
8th place: ShellShock Liveby kChamp
9th place: Zombie Trailer Parkby Ninjakiwi
Well look at the top unity user. She had 2 top games with 200k plays each (which we can estimate with +$400). She also won the kong december prize for another 1500. Which is not bad, and if consider she will probably win the unity contest at 10k
http://www.kongregate.com/game_groups/unity

Last edited: Jan 15, 2011
ugur

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I don't think its realistic to expect $400+ in ad money fronm kong for 200k plays.
Next up, yes, as i said winning a contest is a special case. Think about how much if anything all the others got who didn't win the contest.
Some are happy one can submit games to another site and contests are a cool thing for excitement, exposure and those who win, but yeah, the question in the thread was whether free to play ad based portals usually bring a lot to the developer per game, so yeah, the answer in general is no, not at all. And for Sophie winning several contest prize sums that's great but she could have earned a lot more with her games in other way.

Last edited: Jan 15, 2011
Well she had 2 games that got over 200k plays each which is a total of 400k and using that estimate it seems reasonable that it was $400.
ugur

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Do you know how much kong pays in ad money per play?
And yup, no matter what someone earns in first month on one of these sites, usually it is a lot less in second month (due to the huge volume of content that comes out on such sites each month pushing most older content back even way more than on mac app store and even more than on iOS or android app stores).

Last edited: Jan 15, 2011
Sophie did mention that she was able to pay her rent from the ad rev she had earned thus far from Kongregate.
ugur

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That´s very nice of course but as i said Sophie has a special case there. She has submitted a bunch of games at once, unless someone can submit that many new good games and have them ranked as high each month, well, it would not be a good idea to expect to be able to pay the rent from the ad reveneue split from the site. Ask the hundreds of thousands of guys there who submit all those games to all those portals and see how many of them can actually pay all their living costs from that, the percentage is so low that its close to non existent for anyone who doesn´t also do other ways to earn money with the games.
Handing out games for free for nothing else in return than ad revenue largely became popular thanks to the huge amount of younger ones doing flash games in their spare time and not having to actually worry about paying all their living costs, rather enjoying the bit of revenue they got as pocket exchange.
Once you actually have to worry about paying way more expensive things every month that usually means having to consider other options to earn money like some of those i mentioned earlier in the thread.

Last edited: Jan 16, 2011
Well if you make sth like platform racing 2 then it will give you some money.... It has 20 million gameplays.... for every 1k plays you get 1 to 2 dollars.... that means about 20 000 - 40 000 $... well yeah...
You're not factoring in two things. That the game came out back in spring of 2008, and that they are paying for upkeep of multiple master servers in various parts of the country.
After taxes, how much did they really make?
ugur

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Also it is quite an optimistic expectation to think you get 1-2 dollars in ad money (revenue share) from 1k plays. In most countries you get a lot less for untargetted advertising.
ugur

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Also don´t forget about things like skipped ads, either due to display error or your ad provider not having enough ad inventory or also things like with many ingame advertising services the more impressions you get the lower your payment per single impression.
With 20 million plays they would usually get around a tenth of what you estimated in most cases.
That´s not exactly a lot of money for something that has considerable upkeep costs and counts among the games with higher play counts (more average online games can be happy when they reach 1 million plays regularly after the first 3 months of release).
$1-$2 per thousand views based on exclusivity and api integration is the figure that Kongregate themselves posted here on the forums. We can only go by what they stated.
ugur

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I have some flash games on kong for some years now, so yeah, i have an idea of what that brings in average. Its nice for short timespan when one has a game with a huge number of plays but that drops of quickly due to the sheer amount of content posted (the amount of free games posted on the web makes the amount of games on the iOS app store seem tiny) and yeah, you won´t get a smash hit on the front page with each of your games either.
ugur

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Again, i don´t want to diminish Sophie´s success at all, its a great achievement and as i said that makes her a special exception to the rule case for posting several good games at once, getting the buzz and prize money and all together in short timespan (though sure she worked on all those games a good while before and just could post them now in one go).
But yeah, its a big exception to the rule, have a look at where usually the big indie success stories are, its things like minecraft, the humble indie bundle etc where people sell a game on their own or others via things like steam, psn, xbla, wiiware, the app store, or doing subscription based stuff like club penguin, runescape etc or doing micro transactions stuff on facebook etc.
It will be very rare if it ever happens that you´ll hear of any game developer making anywhere close to the amounts of such options by nothing else than posting on a free to play ad revenue split portal. The huge overwhelming majority of people posting games on free to play ad revenue split only portals can be happy if they make a few hundred bucks a month for longer than 3 months per game.
getting 20 Million gameplay is not an easy task,
if you check on kongregate, only 4 games that passed the 10 millions mark, and this is out of thousands and thousands of games.
http://www.kongregate.com/top-rated-games?sort=gameplays

also usually ads revenue is more like $0.5 - $1.00 per 1000 play.
You aren't likely to make very much money if any at all from indie games. Just look at indie music, indie films, indie whatever. It's sad but true.
I don't want to exaggerate on one side, but we shouldn't do it on the other either.Sophie submitted one game. After it got about 200k views, she submited another. It also got about 200k views, and from those 400k views she claimed to have earned enough to pay her rent (whatever that amount is).
It isn't likely that she will continue to see this same amount, each month. Right now there is a lot more attention aimed toward Unity games at Kong, so I imagine they're also paying out better for ads. Give Unity devs a larger share (without telling them), and they'll see Kong as a fantastic option, and then months down the line, bring it back to what it should be.

A few game which has been on the front page of Kong for about a year or so, have about 6-9 million plays. These handful of games, compared to the thousands of other submitted games are probably earning a bit of cash. Keep in mind these are very well polished applications, a lot of them are also sponsored by Newgrounds, Kong or Armor Games.

I think looking at total apps vs. how many are making money is a bit flawed. There are a lot of apps on the App Store. Some of them are great and earn back their investment. A few are real success stories, selling millions. A lot of them don't make money

Not to be rude, but not every app is of a quality that players want to pay for. Even on Kong, with a free app, you're competing for people's time. If your game isn't worth it, they're not going to play if they don't play, they don't see an ad, you don't earn money. There may be thousands of games on Kong, but how many of those games would you honestly play the same amount of time as you'd play one of the games on the front page.
ugur

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I don't disagree with you =) It can happen in many ways that one makes money and it can happen that one doesn't =) I just think its good to keep in mind that when one puts a game up in free to play form only financed via ad revenue share one gives away a lot of other options.
Okay if you look at the games on kong, the key seems to be user-rating, if you get a high user rating you will get on some lists which translates into more plays. There seems to be 3 spots for "Hot New Games" on the front page and then another for weekly and monthly top 5. I mean if your game is not going to get a 3.5 or higher you might as well forget it (and that becomes somewhat subjective, but not really if you look at it objectively).
Making money frrom free to play games is hard, but at the end of the day, making money from making games at all is hard. Yes, some people will score big from the traditional approach of "fire and forget", but most will work for every dime. Even those that do hit, planing and strategy can drive them higher. Angry Birds is everywhere these days, and I'm sure they're making money on all sides. Now, even by App store standards they have stayed longer than most, resisted AAA studio attempts to knock them out of place, and carried their current success cross-platform.
Yes, a new fantastic game may sit on the top of Kong, or any other portal. Direct sales, like Steam are always going to deliver higher returns per hit. But if you aren't doing the business end of gaming, then you're going to miss opportunities. Maybe Bungie doesn't need to figure out every concievable way to make money from their games, but indies do. (not to mention Bungie has a publisher more than happy to figure out how to squeeze every dime out of their IP )

Just my thougths,

Galen
Damn... Making money out of indie games seems more like black magic every time I think about. Best thing to do might be to develop the best game you can, and hope for the best, lol. The question is, what would people just love to play? If you can make a game tons of people would really want to play, you'll need less 'luck' to be a success.
@dogzerx - there's no "black magic", luck in some cases, but no magic... There are general guidelines and specific guidelines:
Generally (based on industry stats):
1) Games rated (ESRB) E - everyone 7+ - despite media attention, games rated E sell more than any other type. Games rated A or M are the "kiss of death". No traditional retailer will carry the title, and most other sales channels will be very hesitant at best

2) Casual learning curve gameplay - Hardcore gamers despise this, but it's a powerful enough stat that many AAA games have a "casual gamplay mode".

3) Mainstream genre standards - for any game genre there are common expectations. Unless you have a fantastic new concept, you should adhere to the standards, particularly around UI and gameplay. Level of Detail is one good example, FPS games have a genre expectation of pushing eye watering photo-realism as a main distinguishing factor amongst genre leaders, so if you make a FPS expect sharp critism based on your graphics.

Platform specific:
1) Price - customers have a comfort zone per platform, for better and worse. To break the mold in either direction is to draw critism

2) Platform expectations - For example, PS3 has a typically older or hardcore gamer audience than Nintendo, so certain games are better suited to one platform over another

3) Marketing approaches - Consoles and PC/Mac have very similar marketing approaches that work, where as mobile is different. Do market your game!

And finally, the indie factor... Most of these are very simple and can be drawn from any small/medium business when compared to an overall industry:
1) Be good, or be cheap - you can either compete on price (at a minimum quality) or compete on quality. This one is real hard for indies, since the big studios have an extreme edge in this space. Unfortunately, like any small business, you really can't afford to compete on price. The best advice is to make your game as tight and polished as possible.

2) Price - yup, again... don't undervalue your game. Pricing strategy is not easy, especially when you make your game and are danged uncertain what to charge. There are good business approaches to pricing, that work ... learn them. Heck, you learned a h*ll of a lot to make your game, don't trip over the finish line Now, I didn't mention overpricing.. why? because most indies lean the other way. I see games that are good quality sold out at $5 and $10 that certainly match the quality, gameplay and fun factor of many of the "second string" games on the market.

3) Take some time to learn the basics of business... business is just as much of a set of skills as Graphics, development, testing, etc... if you want to make money from games, learn how to make money. The big studios have business support, either in-house or from publishers. Sid Meier can get that support by pitching an idea, indies have to handle that (like everything else) ourselves.

(side rant) I hate the often promoted "standard approach" to pitching ideas to publishers, the truth is someone like Mr. Meier has spent a long successful career of game design building to a point where publishers are willing to take a chance and invest in him. Too many people smash up against the publisher walls trying to walk through the door like Steve Jobs at a board meeting, or beating themselves up day and night on some of the common "messages" handed out by some in the industry. Yes, you might get a publisher to cut a check for your game... most will not. You can succeed without that support, if you take the right steps. (ok, rant off...)

I hope that helps. My message, if muddled, is "don't give up"

Cheers,

Galen

Last edited: Jan 17, 2011
Our eCPM on Kongregate is $1 with 25% revenue share and $2 with 50%....
Damn. but wouldn't it be better to go for a graphical style that no one has seen, than to spend years and money trying to catch up with the bigger FPS titles?
Hi, does anyone have any idea how much would a browser game like tribal wars make in terms of profit? Really need to know please thanks!
I don't know exactly but 2009 They had more then 10 million Euro revenue with two or three games but I guess most of it was generated by Tribal Wars.
Here is their player groth in million users, you need to be patient:

Note until 2008 this is Tribal Wars only.

@ Topic
You can do so much money with free2play games but it is hard to create "good" games by definition. I belive we will see more quality here in terms of graphics and technique like EA and Ubisoft are already working on AAA Free2Play games. But I doubt that we will see in-depth gameplay in this decade in free2pay games.

Last edited: Jul 27, 2013
Free to play games make huge money, but most of it is on social networks like Facebook or mobile. Using aggregation sites like Kongregate is a losing scenario for the creator of the game, don't do it if you really want to make real money.
I personally know of several 1-5 person startups that were making over a million a year just on facebook. That was several years ago, it's a bit more difficult now but it's still doable. There are still a lot of games on facebook that are 1-2 person shops making a good living out of it.

As someone that was at one of those startups, I can say there is still a ton of money to be had with games made by indies, but you have to do your research and be smart about it. It's not enough to just make a fun game and throw it up on an aggregation site.

How Much Money To Browser Games Make

Source: https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-much-money-can-be-made-from-free-browser-games.73920/

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How Much Money To Browser Games Make

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How Much Money To Browser Games Make

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