Is It Worth Developing Good Games For the Web?

SlashSlasher writes "A friend of mine started up a Facebook MMORTG game called Realm of Empires with his buddies as a personal project. Over the last couple of years, I've seen it grow up from an idea into a thriving community. A lot of money and effort has been sunk into constant improvement. As a result, it has become one of the most polished and substantial applications I've seen on Facebook. It's been quite interesting seeing the action behind the scenes without being directly entangled. Normal gameplay is free but certain premium features do exist. Recently, after allowing an open beta of premium features, the users complained vehemently that they would have to pay to keep these special features. They went so far as to start a petition to stop them from charging for premium features. People are getting up in arms about features that can be bought for less than $3 a month. I know the project hasn't broken even yet, and more money is put into it every day. I had always assumed that developers would receive a chunk of the ad revenue they attract to Facebook; apparently I was wrong. Facebook only gives the developer a very small (and shrinking) piece of real estate to try and make money with. How are these people supposed to break even, let alone profit? What working business models exist for the small game developer? Are people just too spoiled by free, throw-away games to be a target market for anything significant? Are developers who want to make any money for their work forced to move to restrictive platforms like the iPhone or the console market? More details of their story are available at their blog."

Comments

Facebook isn't Facebook anymore.

[Jahf]

Time for me to pull out the stodgy old man attitude:

1) I don't want MMORPGs on Facebook.

2) I don't want your "lil green patch" or "monty python widget" or whatever else on Facebook.

3) I don't want random people joining Facebook who only join to waste time on the little applets.

I can't be the only person who feels that Facebook went from a "much better than MySpace" place to a "omg what a freaking timesink" place in barely a year.

If Facebook not giving ad revenue or lots of real estate to developers helps keep the developers in a sandbox and helps prevent Facebook from hemoraging into the AOL of 2010 then I'm all for it.

Re:The problem

[HartDev]

I like to play games really quick on the computer that do not require me being connected to the internet, so if i take my laptop somewhere and I can't connect I can still play the game.