Hello faithful readers!

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to write anything on here, but that’s not without reason: I have been working on a semi-secret project that is sure to please a lot of Flash developers. While working on this project, I found myself taking a good look at the modern flash scene and trying to figure out where it’s all headed.

Many reputable sources have written articles on the Flash game scene in the past year, including IGN and Edge Magazine. These articles have talked about how the scene is booming and how easy it is to break in to. What they don’t talk about is how difficult it is to STAY in.

I come from the old school. When I broke in to the industry, Flash games were not at the high level of quality you see today. Programmers did all their own art, sound effects were uncompressed and minimal, music was very rare, and typically illegally sampled from copywritten material.

Yet, there was a certain magic about them. People were taking a new technology and constantly pushing it in both technical and expressive manners.

This was the golden age of Flash games, where everyone simply did it because they loved doing it.

Nobody thought it would be a big business back then, but we all did our best to make the coolest stuff possible anyway.

Around this time, the online advertising industry was starting to recover from the dot-com crash of the late 90’s, and people were looking for places to advertise.

This was the start of Flash games becoming a real industry, although nobody recognized it as such at the time.

By 2003, the Flash scene was a bountiful place for independent developers. We made our games, and we ran our web sites. People came from all over to see our individual work, and we made a lot of ad revenue. Enough for most of us to quit our day-jobs and work on Flash full-time.

Back then, if you made a good game, it would get placed on the front page at Newgrounds.com (the most popular flash site of the time). With the number of developers being much smaller than it is now, these games would often sit on the front page, sometimes for weeks, getting massive amounts of plays from casual users too lazy to click beyond the pretty icons they saw. This massive exposure generated massive traffic kickbacks, and as a result, massive revenue spikes.

Needless to say, the bar kept getting raised as people fought for that coveted slot of exposure.
Like all good things, the ad boom came to an end and slowly leveled off. We didn’t care, even with the decline in ad rates, they still paid pretty well and we got by as long as we kept making good games.

The ad agencies became so saturated with gaming sites that they pretty much slammed their doors to anyone not already on-board. It was now nearly impossible to break into independent Flash as a career.

In just a few short years, we found ourselves grown up and out-dated. There was a new generation of developers. Kids tinkering with Flash in high school or college, learning how to make games and having a good time. It was like a natural resource… pure, unrefined talent just waiting to be tapped.

While many of the old pioneers clung to their precious sites and ad revenues, this new generation was all about making stuff for fun, just like we used to be. And they wanted their work to be seen.

In no time, Newgrounds was getting several new games a day and the front page was updated more and more frequently. The coveted slots were harder to get, and if you DID get one, they didn’t last very long at all. The traffic on our sites began to dwindle, and soon, our incomes were becoming tight.

At the same time, new sites started popping up with promises of developer empowerment through sponsorships. While you couldn’t make as much money from a sponsorship as you potentially could from advertising, you could make a decent living as long as you didn’t have a lot of bills and expenses. The money was a sure thing.

This was the perfect time for the new generation to thrive. Many of these developers still lived at home, and could rapidly make games for $500-$2000 a pop without any hardship. Sponsorships also gave us old-guys a way to supplement our dwindling ad revenues and kept us doing what we loved.

It looked like a new renaissance was upon us as the bar was being raised higher and higher by many people. It also turned out to be a curse. While many strived to push Flash farther and farther, most were simply producing large quantities of mini games and over-glorified tech demos.

Self-publishers got buried by massive quantities of Armor Games and Crazy Monkey Games logos, and more and more sponsorship sites were popping up every day. This was amplified by contests that had developers plastering sponsor logos in their work without any sponsorship, simply the CHANCE to win a few grand if your game was the best out in the pile.

My own website was making a mere 25% what it once had, and all i could do was bust my ass to get a new game done every month or two and hope a sponsorship would be enough to cover my bills. Many of my peers were in the same situation, some even abandoning their sites for the stability of an unsatisfying day job.

The fact I am still around tells you I’ve managed to get by, but my work suffered for it. Corners were cut, ambitious projects were sidelined in order to get quantity puzzle games out the door, and so on and so fourth.

Meanwhile, site traffic continued to drop because the sponsors got the lions share of the kickback traffic and the game’s lowered quality gave them shorter shelf lives on most sites.
Then I discovered a new option: Mochiads.

Mochiads accepted me into their private beta and I decided to do a little experiment. The Generic Defense Game project was my first stab at challenging the status quo, and it was a huge success (which you can real all about here).

Now I was making money from other sites hosting my game. This single game was supplementing my site revenue. An additional sponsorship from Kongregate was the icing on the cake!

It looked like Mochiads would be the answer to the sponsorship monster that was crushing so many creative people.

But the mass amount of games being published on a daily basis proved to be too much, and Generic Defense Game quickly got buried and started getting minimal views. Without the sustained views, the Mochiads could no longer make up the difference.

Another new option popping up was revenue sharing sites, like Kongregate and GameGum. These sites would give you a cut of any ad revenue your game earned. These programs were appealing, but also proved ineffective once a game was buried by the flood of new submissions always pouring in.
I would still need to rapidly produce mediocre content in order to stay afloat. And so I did, and have been doing so until I stumbled on to the work of one Adam Schroeder.

Adam had been working with Flash for several years, but had just recently decided to give Flash games a try after getting involved on the Kongregate Forums. He built a really basic game called Asteroids Revenge, which he hoped Kongregate may sponsor. The game wasn’t up to the standards of the time, and so Adam gave Mochiads a try. He found the same result as I did… the revenue wasn’t sustainable for very long and his game was soon buried.

Adam was still unfamiliar with how people were making money for their work, so he did something crazy. HE ASKED AROUND!

Long story short (click the link above if you want the long story), Adam discovered that by merely talking with several sites and being patient, you could get better sponsorships. By listening to feedback and putting in extra work, you could even get GREAT sponsorships.

Adam didn’t stop there. He talked to many other sites about their outlooks on the business and actually published his findings.

When I first read his stories on FlashGameSponsorship.com, I was immediately drawn to the information provided by Ezone (creators of Sling) and Flipline Studios (creators of Papa Louie), and saw mention of the Holy Grail: Non-Exclusive Licensing!

These guys were doing it right. Making stuff that was high-quality fun and self publishing without any sponsors. They were talking to the right people and getting their games out on the blog-o-sphere, thus bringing the players to THEM (getting banner ad exposure as well as Mochiad views). And as if that wasn’t enough, they were also selling non-exclusive copies of their games to other high-quality sites and making far more than anyone was making with lump-sum sponsorships.

After reading this collection of information I was also impressed by Kongregate’s Premium Sponsorship program, which is really more like advanced funding for game development than a traditional sponsorship. You get a very large sum of money, typically enough for a person to live on for a year, to develop a high-quality game of your own design. The program is based on royalties. The more the game is played, the more royalties you get. The initial funding is merely an advance on these royalties, meaning you get a small cut of the game’s initial profits, but end up with the majority cut once the term of the advance is fulfilled.

With these great methods for serious developers to utilize, more and more people are turning their heads. Many venture capitol sites like Kongregate are popping up ready to fund developers or buy licensed content to power their business models.

While it’s easy to be drawn to these sites, I am seeing a trend of cookie-cutter gaming sites trying to cash in on this movement. Who knows how long the landscape will last, but for now… this is where the opportunities will lie.

Adam is currently working with his partner, Chris, on a new site, which gives developers a place to show their pre-published work and get the best sponsorship possible via auction, with additional potential for multiple, non-exclusive deals for high-quality games. The site is still in development, but I’ll definitely give it a plug when it’s up!

Meanwhile, the place that originally kicked off the industry, Newgrounds.com, continues to grow as well. Soon, it will empower developers who want to break free from the system, and keep them unshackled.

How do I know this? It’s a secret…..

I recently had the opportunity to interview Kenney Vleugels, best known for his work with Armor Studios, the official development brand for Armor Games. This was quite an interesting interview, because Kenney has made a very good living making generic mini-games, and he was brave enough to chat with me knowing full-well my opinions on such games.

Kenney, like many, got started with his career at a very early age. In 2004, at the age of 14, he had developed his first Flash game, and was shortly contacted by Daniel McNeely of Armor Games.

Daniel was impressed with Kenney’s first game and was hoping to pick up the young talent to help promote Armor Games, which was still in it’s infancy at the time.

Kenney had developed a new game called Mario’s Time Attack, a very simple Super Mario game where you run through a series of levels to give a deserted princess peach some water before the time limit runs out.

The game was simple, but kind of fun, and so he was offered a $500 Armor Games sponsorship. For a 14 year old who was only on his 2nd game ever, $500 was a fortune!

His parents did not approve of the idea.

His mother worried these games would interfere with his education, and his father was weary of the legalities involved due to his age. But, like any 14 year old with a $500 carrot dangled in front of him, he took the sponsorship behind their backs.

“They had this perfect story of me getting money for making games. Of course, I couldn’t say no but my parents were a little fishy about this since it didn’t sound really legit. … I just went on with it. Come on, it was my dream!”

“I signed up for PayPal and combined it to my Junior bank account” he said. ” After I got my first payment I almost pissed myself, Bill Gates; Here I come.”

Kenney told me how, after his first paid game, he decided to really push himself and make his next title something more innovative. Mario’s Time Attack used ripped sprites from licensed Nintendo titles, so this time he wanted to do more of his own art. He developed a web-cam game called ‘Dress Up Yourself‘, where you can drag goofy eyes, facial hair, teeth, etc.. onto your own webcam image.

While the webcam was innovative, and he certainly put more effort into the game, the end result wasn’t as well received as his previous title, and so his next sponsorship offer was noticeably lower.

“Because that [first] game was made using sprites, I had a hard time making my next which should contain my own art. So it took me fairly long before I made my next game, I just showed it to them and they gave me a certain amount which I forgot (I wasn’t very happy about it though) and I published it.”

Before talking to Kenney, I took a stroll through his collection of games. What I found was far from impressive. I was able to see the appeal of “Mario’s Time Attack”, but could also understand why “Dress Up Yourself” wasn’t so well received. The game merely took your webcam image and let you drag stuff onto it. More of a gadget than a game.

In fact, Kenney’s game library consisted mainly of unimpressive mini-games, many of which were clones of other games that had recently seen success on other sites (compare Jack Russell to Line Rider, for example), and sequels of said games. I asked him about this.

“Yeah, making lot’s of mini-games for AG earns you more than making 1 or 2 large and expansive games. So that kinda kept me making small games.”

Posted in Interviews, Gaming News | 33 Comments

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