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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.'"
I'm currently a homebrew GBA game developer, and I am considering trying the SWF platform. Is there any decent SWF authoring software that's less expensive than Macromedia Flash and suitable for developing games?
But the bigger reason is accessability. My mom has purchased a couple of these games. They are simple, not twitched based (the ones she buys, she's not good at that kind of stuff), and easy for her to find and buy online. She can play them for a quick few minutes, or spend more than an hour playing them. In every way they are more accessible than a big console game.
And these are basically the same kind of games a cell phone games which are also exploding (and what do you expect when many of them cost $5 A MONTH to play here in the US).
I've tried my hand at it, and I intend to do it again. I'd love to be the next person to make a little game that goes BIG to become the next Bejeweled or Snood. My little game is on my website, and you just need Java 5 to play it, if you're interested.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Seems to me, small, simple time-wasters will be just as big a market for people on the go soon. Mobile phones and PDAs are just as capable of running this type of game, and you can play them when you are stuck on the train or whatever too.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Wrong link, apparently the text version only does one article instead of the entire issue /rollseyes
Here ya go for varney's article: Linkage
"Next" button at bottom of the screen.
While this makes horse-sense to me, I'd still like to see some numbers. There have to be some examples out there. I wonder if ringtone sales work the same way?
IIRC, totally written by one guy. And sold at least several hundred thousand units, spawned what seems like a dozen sequels and expansion packs. Chris Sawyer.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
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
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?
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
That article is just fluff. That's why they put those large pictures in the background. To distract you from the fact that the actual article is barely informative.
OK, I'll switch rails here and get more specific: The article makes it sound like:
A. It's easy
B. EVERYONE gets rich.
C. EVERY independant and/or casual game sells crazy numbers.
This is so far from the truth. And the writer avoids the key reasons WHY some casual games are huge hits: MARKETING. It's quite easy to sell huge numbers of a game like Bejeweled when it's featured on SO MANY (All?) casual game websites.
Now if Joe Shareware writes a game that's got ALL the key points a good original game requires, does that guarantee the same sales as Bejeweled?! Of course not! No one will buy Joe's game if no one has heard, seen, or played Joe's game!!! This is true of any commodity. Making the public aware your product exists is half the battle.