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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.'"
Good, so we've heard the success stories (which is all the author really mentions). What about the legions of shareware developers that just make a decent living (nothing wrong with that) without making a fortune? And what about the ones that soon have to find something else to do when they can't pay their bills?
It's just like rock bands. You only hear about the successful ones. You never hear about all the very decent bands that, 20 years later, are still playing in ordinary bars in front of an audience of 3.
(trivia: The Police once played in front of an audience of 2!)
Give me a break, "most Americans" do not play Flash games. What do you base that on?
Doesn't Popcap's framework only support Windows? BeJeweled doesn't work on OS X anymore... I don't even get an error message or something helpful like that.
If you're going to do a web game, you might as well do one that supports any web-enabled platform.
- chrish