You can't make an online game with Python. It's a good starting language, to a point, but others aren't that much harder.

As far as making money, they do it with ads from a sponsor.

I did some googling and the best of these games can make thousands of dollars from sponsorship's. That's really cool, and explains a lot.

You can't make an online game with Python. It's a good starting language, to a point, but others aren't that much harder.

My somewhat trollish comment of the day...

I can only think of a single reason to recommend Python to a new developer, and that's pretty damned niche. ( If the person want's to ultimately work in the CG industry, such as in the position of TD, Python is the most used language. )

Otherwise, frankly, I dont really see the upside. Unless you go Stackless, performance is an issue. It's got worse tooling support than many languages, isn't any easier than say... LUA, isn't as popular as say... JavaScript, isn't as clean as Ruby, etc. Even when it comes to libraries it doesn't really win. PyGame, Panda and Blender are nice and all, but I can think of better libraries in each niche area that I would recommend first.

Python is a language that had sooooo much potential and frankly it was one of the first scripting languages that supported programming in the large. Sadly, a bad upgrade cycle stalled the language horribly and fragmented the community, while at the same time, other languages rose to take away it's shiny-ness.

Dont read that as saying Python ( and PyGame by extension ) are bad choices to start with, they aren't. However, I just cant think of a reason to actually recommend it over the alternatives by any metric.

As far as making money, they do it with ads from a sponsor.

I did some googling and the best of these games can make thousands of dollars from sponsorship's. That's really cool, and explains a lot.

The sponsored game market is struggling a bit right now though.

Basically sponsored games were 99% Flash. With the rise of mobile and the decline of Flash for a variety of reasons, this is a segment that is really suffering for it. It used to be that Flash was ubiquitous... it isn't now, at least, not as much. HTML5 is trying to catch up, but some seriously stupid decisions (audio) and the glacial pace of improvement across browsers, simply isn't helping. Meanwhile, pretty much every Flash alternative ( Unity Web, Silverlight ) have basically abandoned ship. I realize many of these sites now offer HTML5 support, but numbers I have heard ( like 5% of revenue ) are terrifying.

Not saying you cant make money in this segment, you certainly can. Just saying it's a rockier proposition than it used to be, and the future isn't rosy.

You can still get some money from Flash on desktop, and also use Adobe Air to export to Android and Ios. I don't know how good this works as I haven't tried it, but Air now supports hardware accelleration for those platforms.

I'd recommend Flash to a new games developer as much as I'd recommend QBASIC. Sure Flash isn't dead yet but, them neither is QBASIC if you look at Black Annex. But just because one or two people can make a decent amount from it does not mean it is a good path to follow.
If you want to make games that run in the browser then the best option for a newcomer is Javascript and canvas. Most of the ad revenue companies also have javascript APIS and so do the micro payment companies. Even if you migrate to a different technology in the future you are still going to need javascript to get your app to work in a web page.

The trouble with that argument is that Qbasic is a language apart form itself, so it's not really "like" most OO languages. AS3 was rewritten from the bottom up and it's about as OO as you can get. Javascript is still evolving toward OO and the next version will be such a big change, it won't be much different than going from AS3 to Javascript. There are some decent HTML5 engines around, however, I really wonder how sponsors look at it. From what I've seen, it's like they prefer Flash. It certainly won't be a big deal going from AS3 to Javascript, and almost everyone will learn at least 2 languages. If it wasn't made opensource with free tools, it might be different. Anyway, the game he was pointing to was made in Flash. Most online games I play are still in Flash. A lot of HTML5 engines use Flash for sound. You can export a Flash game with Adobe Air to both Ios and Android, and they are hardware accellerated. There are lots of alternatives, but I think Flex/AS3 is as good a starting point as anything. There are free engines with decent tutorials. If you want to try something else that's object oriented, it won't be a big deal at all.