First of all, welcome to our new blog, not too shabby eh? Thanks to PixelResort.com and our in-house PHP guy (Sencerd) for their work on the design and of course WordPress for the tools.

Paul was selected to talk on the “doing it yourself” panel at Develop in Brighton on the 31st July along with Jeff Minter (Llamasoft) and Sean Cooper (Boxhead)

The talk was centred around how a team of one can still develop games that reach significant numbers of players and that you don’t need budgets of millions and teams of developers and artists to create a game.
Both Jeff and Sean have both worked in the games industry for many years and have considerable experience in the art and craft of making games. Jeff is currently making games for Xbox Live and Sean is doing amazing things in Flash for his Boxhead series.

While Jeff’s experience of developing games for Xbox is understandably different from my own, Sean’s experience of developing Flash games was also quite different. He is using a variation of the developer/publisher model and selling his games to a primary sponsor. Which, in the case of the latest Boxhead game ‘The Zombie Wars’, amounted to $45K + a revenue share from adverting. Such a value is certainly in the upper end of sponsorships and demonstrates the quality of the game.

When I released DTD it did not occur to me to get it sponsored such was my inexperience of the online games arena. It however turned out to be the best decision I (never) made. Excluding non-web licenses, DTD has generated over $150K of income and will pass the $200K mark in a few months. While the number of game plays is slowing, mainly due to the lack of a sequel, I am expecting DTD to keep earning money for at least another year. In fact the increase in CPM (the amount advertisers pay per ad view) this year has offset most of the drop in plays so my income has been steady.

While the figures speak for themselves, DTD is a break-out game and I do not expect to reproduce the feat. (Although I will continue to try!) At the Casual Connect conference Mochi gave a very interesting talk on flash game advertising and included actual figures from various games! (Casual Games publishers take note :o) While DTD is doing well, it’s a fraction of Ninja Kiwi’s $30K a month income from their excellent Bloons series of games. And I would hazard to guess that most of that income was from their Bloons related websites NinjaKiwi.com and BloonsWorld.com where players can create their own levels and take part in the greater Bloons community.

So, my tips for going it alone? Create a good flash game with a strong IP, build a website to support ‘enhanced’ features such as strategy guides or user generated content, incorporate ads and strong links back to your site into the game itself, distribute it for free, create sequels and/or derivatives incorporating the IP, build the brand.

Now get to it!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Desktop TD, Flash Element TD, Paul Preece. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.