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Making A Fortune From Casual Games
hapwned writes "In yet another interesting article from the Escapist, Allen Varney has a piece on the ludicrous amount of money you can make from small, downloadable flash-type games that most Americans play. From the article: 'Which American designer personally made the most money last year from computer games he or she designed? Not the most money for a company, mind you, nor for a studio or licensor, but individual, take-home, taxable income. Was it a famous game god? John Carmack, Will Wright, Sid Meier, Warren Spector? Probably not. It was probably some guy you never heard of who wrote some little shareware game you never heard of. Those "casual games" - the puzzles and Mahjongg tilesets and card games and Breakout clones and match-three Bejeweled-type things - are downloaded, and sell, in numbers some game gods only dream about. Over the lengthy life of a successful casual game, the independent ("indie") designer can make serious, serious money - high six-figures and low sevens. Personally.'"
Wrong link, apparently the text version only does one article instead of the entire issue /rollseyes
Here ya go for varney's article: Linkage
hey tepples - i know you from gbadev/dsdev
m ented:flash8
i am personally a flash developer (though not games, we do applications).
If you don't mid doing everything through code, without the nice macromedia gui, there is a free, opensource flash compiler:
http://mtasc.org/
Check osflash.org for some nice tutorials on getting the compiler set up (as well as other useful tools). They show you how to use Eclipse, but personally I'm not a big fan of it.
http://osflash.org/doku.php?id=tutorials
Flash 8 has gone into beta, and will be released in a couple weeks...But with mtasc, you can already compile flash apps that use the new features! (A few new features: realtime effects like blur, shadow, convolve, displacement. Pixel-level control of bitmap data.)
Info on flash 8: http://osflash.org/doku.php?id=flashcoders:undocu
Some random things I have written for flash: http://rorexrobots.com/flash
ActionScript (the language of the flash player) is fully OOP, with classes, inheritance, interfaces, and error throwing/catching. It is similar to java, in that it is compiled into bytecode which is run by the Flash VM. In fact, if you wanted to, you could write code that looks a lot like java.
sig? uhh, umm, ok
If you want to develop for Windoze, I'd still would recommend GameMaker by Mark Overmars.
Its easy to use and quite powerful. 2D games are a breeze to make and since version 6, you can now make 3D games as well.
The GML programming language is very simular to object oriented C so you can make your games as complex as you would like to.
The forums are also a great resource for people just getting started.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
A couple of mistakes with your reasoning :
1) Making games of that quality is a lot harder than you think it is. A "simple" game like that can take a 3 or 4 person team a whole six months, not 2. You'd be surprised to know the time it took us to make some of our games (see sig)
2) Selling 3200 copies of a game is a lot harder than you think it is. A game that sells 100 copies a month from your site is considered successful. Sure you can sell a lot more copies if you associate with the big casual game portals (RealArcade, Yahoo Games and the like) but you'll get less than 30% of the net sales if you're a first-time developer.
My website
It did sell, but only at the sum of 200-300$ a month. Nowhere near enough to support 3 people.
The other thing to consider is competition. Visit Rocket Download and see how many games are listed there. Your game needs to be in the top 5 to even consider quiting you day job.
Phemur