How much money is there in the production of flash games? The majority of the people playing them are people in school, looking to play their hour away. Nobody would pay, and i couldnt really blame them. Besides advertisements (which usually dont bring a very large amount of revenue) i can't see any way to make a decent living from flash games. Then, i noticed the creators of bubble tanks 3. They seemed to have made a decent amount of money from bubble tanks 2, but i have no idea how. Anyone know how they did it?

Flash games are fairly lucrative if they become popular, even if only with commision from ads. Another way is to create the game and sell it outright (ip and everything) to someone, there are a few places that offer these services just do a quick google.

Facebook and Kongregate are two places that can make you a bit of money with flash games. Although you do have to create a fairly high quality game with a nice hook to make much.Oh forgot to mention, you can also make money from competitions with flash games.

Flash games are fairly lucrative if they become popular, even if only with commision from ads. Another way is to create the game and sell it outright (ip and everything) to someone, there are a few places that offer these services just do a quick google.

Facebook and Kongregate are two places that can make you a bit of money with flash games. Although you do have to create a fairly high quality game with a nice hook to make much.Oh forgot to mention, you can also make money from competitions with flash games.

I made a couple bucks on kongregate with only one weekend just for fun to learn flash project. I probably should have done it more because I could have probably paid for my drinking in college, but I finished my college degree in 3 years instead :-/

edit: granted I never hit the amount needed to actually get paid, but with maybe 10 hours of work mostly learning flash I was fine with that.

Flash games are fairly lucrative if they become popular, even if only with commision from ads. Another way is to create the game and sell it outright (ip and everything) to someone, there are a few places that offer these services just do a quick google.

Facebook and Kongregate are two places that can make you a bit of money with flash games. Although you do have to create a fairly high quality game with a nice hook to make much.Oh forgot to mention, you can also make money from competitions with flash games.

Microtransactions are a fairly effective way to make extra money (and for multiplayer games its a good way to help cover the hosting costs as advertising alone might not cut it when the portal sites take their share aswell)

Moving to the Business forum.

Most of the money comes from portal owners sponsoring your games. Basically I would be paying you to place my portal's branding within your game. That's going to bring in customers to my website, and make me money. Games generally get sponsored for around $500 - $2000 but there are a few cases where they've been sponsored for $20 000 or even $100 000. Check out Flash Game License for more info.

Flash games can be something as big as Dofus and zOMG, they're not necessarily small. But even if you're talking a puzzle or sim game, as long as it can be played for 20 hours or more you can provide a free trial of the first half or third, then charge $10-20 for the full version. Students are often willing to lay out that little money on a game. Seems to work pretty well for companies like Popcap. Flash games can also be grouped to make a cash shop MMO like NeoPets - in those cases the flash games are provided free, they keep the players coming back every day, but the money is earned on customizations and rare in-game items sold at a cash shop. Gambling is yet a third model - a group of flash games can be set up as an online casino, the player sees that they are winning when they play the free version and buys in with the idea of making money on the cash versions.

The majority of the people playing them are people in school, looking to play their hour away.

That's an easy thing to say, but have you actually researched it? I'm sure a large percentage of people who play Flash games are probably students, but -- although it could well be the case -- I don't know that it's necessarily fair to say they're in the majority. Professionals also play Flash games in their lunch break, or sometimes during work hours if they have a lax work-ethic. Older people play Flash games to pass the time at home. There are Flash games aimed specifically at pre-school-aged children, some of which are quite popular.

The lesson -- unless you have actual market research, don't assume you know who is or is not a part of your audience.

Nobody would pay, and i couldnt really blame them.[/quote]
Again, easy to assume if most of the people you personally know couldn't or wouldn't pay, but there are quite a lot of people out there who will pay small amounts to unlock additional content, or to get advantages, or to skip difficult parts of a game. As mentioned above, micro-transactions are quite common and popular now -- in a game like FarmVille you can pay to have buildings other players cannot build, or can simply buy gold rather than having to work and save it up. Many Flash games make money from premium features like this now.

Besides advertisements (which usually dont bring a very large amount of revenue)[/quote]
Again, you're assuming things. In this case you're correct in the general case, but on the other hand popular Flash games can bring in a lot of advertising revenue. A popular game with good replayability can also potentially bring in a small but steady amount of income over a very long time period, and at very little cost to the developer after initial development. Consider also that you can have different (and potentially multiple) types of advertisement -- ads can be placed on the pages around a game, they can be displayed when the game first loads, or they can be displayed during game-play. In some cases you might even have product-placements. If a popular game or collection of games features ads some people will also be willing to pay either a one-off amount or a small subscription fee to remove those ads.

[other than advertising] i can't see any way to make a decent living from flash games.[/quote]
Ok, so advertising aside, how can Flash games make money?

1. As mentioned above, many games make money from micro-transactions, with players paying to access premium features or skip ahead of those who aren't willing to pay.
2. It's quite common for Flash games to be sponsored by companies such as Armor Games, who will give you some money up-front to feature their logo at the beginning of your game. Unless the game is particularly good a first-time developer could usually expect a few hundred dollars from a sponsorship -- assuming they've made a good enough game -- but for a good game from a proven developer a sponsorship could be several thousand dollars.
3. This is still relatively unusual but will likely become more prevalent over time, but some games use a small amount of the processing power from their players to do work for other businesses, earning money for getting that work done. Plura Processing offers this capability for example.
4. People sometimes licence their games -- I don't have a Flash-based example of this on hand, but Angry Birds released a version based on the upcoming animated movie "Rio". Flash developers can sometimes earn money be licensing their existing games to businesses and creating specially themed versions.

The average Flash game makes little-to-no money however -- you need to create a good (or at least popular) game and get it in front of plenty of players to make a decent amount of money.


Hope that helps!

The average [s]Flash[/s] game makes little-to-no money however -- you need to create a good (or at least popular) game and get it in front of plenty of players to make a decent amount of money.

Fixed

Flash games really aren't special in this area, Making a profitable game is hard regardless of platform, as with any form of low budget game development keeping costs down is essential, reuse as much of your work as possible and make sequels to anything that becomes even remotely popular. (Just don't release sequels too fast, you don't want to compete with your own games).