Selling my websites and games. $10k monthly income

[kreso]

Originally Posted by mooktown

Just to add, that's not what rhetorical means. Perhaps you meant questioning or doubtful or distrustful or sceptical?

Good luck in your new direction

I don't remember that anymore.
Thanks!

[kreso]

Originally Posted by saintxi

Do you spend any money advertising the game to get those visit rates?

Never. Wanted to, didn't know how. Maybe it's better that way

[kreso]

Originally Posted by Uhfgood

I'm going to build myself a small flash game in the coming months... I'd like to know how to do this sort of thing. It would be nice to get a steady income stream (even if it's not very much) from flash web games.

kreso - would you mind spending the time to write a lengthy post about your experiences, and how it came about, all the way to how it still does today?

Keith

I wrote how I wish I would have contributed more so I'll consider this my contribution!

Let me tell you how I came to develop flash games in the first place... as I kid I used to play games a lot, specially arcade machines at the local circus. A couple of times I even stole my parent's money to play them. And playing games really made me happy. There was a couple of games I liked playing most, some of them were Pang (much like www.rebubbled.com), "Police cops" (2 guys, cooperative, shooting and busting criminals and picking up powerups for their armor-cop suit), "Beast wars" (two conan like guys eating powerup-balls and transforming into fierce animals), Moonwalker (starring Michael Jackson and zombies..so cool).
I am not sure about game name in quotations.

My passion for games was very strong. In high school I was working at a local PC game house (a bunch of PC's connected with LAN - favorite games DIABLO and WARCRAFT 2). At that PC game house we even had a team that was competing in Croatia's PC gaming league - my team won the competition. I was involved with a lot of freaks that were into gaming much as I was.

The college came and the obvious choice was something to do with computers - so I applied (and later finished) college for computer-design where I studied mostly graphics design. However at my first year I had a subject called Basics of programming. I have never programmed before (not counting a game I copied from a manual to BASIC). After the first semester and playing with C++ I started discovering programming in flash. For the last year of so I was into web-designing (Photoshop and Frontpage) and I always liked to make animations so I played with flash before college but mostly graphics until now.

First hours spent on creating Bubble Struggle 1 were actually practicing programming. I created a box that was moving left and right on keypress. Amazing! Then I added bubbles. Wow! Then the harpoon (shot) etc... After I realized that I have all the basic elements of a game I noticed something about internet and got an idea!
What I noticed was this: all of flash games on internet are either a) short in duration (you can finish the whole game within 5-10 minutes) or b) so boring that you don't want to play it more than 5-10 minutes.
My idea was – what if I would create a game that is a) long in duration b)had a new, different chalenge on every level.
I knew that this ment more programming for me, but as I was just learning and enjoying progamming this was actually a plus. A sidenote: code in my game is disastrous. I just kept adding code for each new level because it was so different than all the others. But I succedded!

GAME IS FINISHED
After aproximately 9 months, about 15 hours a day, after all the excitement and frustration (remember I was actually learning coding at this time) and googleing for tutorials online (flash's help wasn't so helpfull back then) Bubble Struggle 1 was finished (www.bubble-struggle.com)!
Actually at time it was called Bubble Trouble but after couple of months online a guy contacted me to change the name of my game because he was already using it (also a flash game). He was threatening me with lawsuits but I wanted a unique name anyway so I renamed the game to Bubble Struggle.

When I first created BS1 I uploaded it to the public account on the colege server. It started to get about 100 hits a day after I started some rumors on couple of local (Croatian) forums. In a month or so Croatian national newspaper written a review on it and the hits went up to 2000 uniques per day. At that moment I started to realize that I might have something really good here.

I started to email a lot of game sites if they are interested to buy my game, sites like miniclip, addictinggames and a lot of others which names I cannot remember since this was about 7 years ago.
Miniclip was actually only site that responded to my email positevly. They liked the game and wanted to put it on their website. They asked me how much money I want for it. When I first saw this email I was impressed with myself so I decided to ask for $250. Yep, $250!
The guy from miniclip immediately responded that it's a deal and asked how would I like to be payed? Now I started to change my mind for some reason .. I though to myself I should ask for more money than that. And I did. I asked for $750. Yep, $750.
I still remember my first check. I was doing some re-decorating of my room with my friend when the post man came bringing me a letter. After I opened and saw that piece of paper with miniclip logo and the amount of $750 I was exstaticly happy and my friend was amazed. Yep, $750! I was 20 years old and it was amazing being able to create something fun that made me so profoundly rich!

Within a year my site picked up..the site was getting about 50,000-100,000 uniques per day. I had no idea what google adsense was, I think it was actually just starting back then. BS1 was hosted on a free colegue server and game was free to play. I was looking for other sites like miniclip to license BS1 but without success. At one moment (after 1,5 years) I realized that I could be making money with ads. I switched to a commercial dedicated server and then the money became to come. First check was couple of $, next one couple of hundreds, and the next one was a thousand. Imagine my amazement then! I had no idea that something like that was possible! And it was great! I was making more money than most people I knew (including parents and other older people) at age of 21-22. Making money was never the primary incentive for me, but I do enjoy money.

BS1 was getting me substantial money for about 4 years (at the moment I sold the sites&games it was making about $20 per day which is still nice). At it's highest peaks I was getting $3500, lowest were around $500. I haven't used google adsense for a while now but then, eCPM was highly variable from month to month.

Before BS1 profits started to drop I decided I will make BS2. The primray incentive was that Flash 8 was published by macromedia (BS1 was created using Flash 5) and I wanted to make a lot of things that I couldn't in BS1 because of technology restriction. And I sticked with the principle that the game should be a) long in duration and had b) different chalenges every level. I knew this will work because there were still no great flash games. Here's a tip for you: there are still so few good flash games that if you make a commitment to make a good one (by my standards - a & b) I am pretty certain you will succeed. And now it's even easier considering tools (newest Flash version) ,Mochiads, GameJacket and various other ways of monetizing your work.

Creating BS2 was more frustrating than I imagined. I had some physical issues so game development was postponed for a year. Then I had a lot of hard time doing the things I wanted (for example coding bubbles to bounce off of every imaginable corner and surface). But every time I got frustrated I would rest and then start to play a random game on MAME32 emulator. That would help bring me into the mood I had as a kid while I played video games and that was a good mood in which to create games – it made me feel like I have the kid who I once was beside me telling me what is good and what isn't. I had the best critique possible

A lot of planning went into BS2 and eventually I had to dismiss a lot of options (like live game-replay) because I was working on it for too long (1 year planning and 1,5 years of coding - with a LOT of LONG breaks). Flash 8 kept crashing on me because of too much code in one file. A former Disney artist I hired kept pushing deadlines. I actually hired 5 different artists to draw the character. 2 of them sucesfully (but I wasn't satisfied), 3 of them pushed deadlines and eventually canceled. I hired a guy for backgrounds, he too backed off and dissipeared.
I created BS2 completely on my own. I learnt 3DMAX modeling with the help of linda.com tutorials and created the character and the main menu stage. I used my 'special knowledge' of using filters in Photoshop to create those amazing backgrounds you can see in BS1 and BS2 (www.rebubbled.com) Flash AS1 & AS2 (mostly AS2) was used for coding. Various free sound sites for sounds. For offline version I used Zinc wrapper that had troubles of its own – reason why there is no offline mac BS2 version.

Before BS2 was finished I collected about 100,000 emails from people signing their email to send them a note when BS2 is finished. I never sent that note.


BS2 started great and is still doing great. The ads market got more competition so the rates got higher and more money started to pour in. Not to mention getting money for my game offsite (Mochiads.com).


This post was a walk down the memory lane for me and I've really enjoyed it. I hope you got some valuable information from this Keith. If there is anything specific you would like me to ad please let me know.

Kreso