Using your own Flash games it’s possible to make a good regular income to help finance future projects and eventually make a career of developing Flash games. Using a combination of the following 5 methods makes this possible:

1) In-game Advertising

The first and most obvious way to make money from your Flash games is using in-game advertising. There are a number of in-game advertising networks that you can use, the most popular being MochAds. It’s fairly easy to get these ads up and running within your Flash game, just sign up for an account and insert a small chunk of code into each of your games before releasing them.

In-game advertising can certainly provide a worthwhile top-up for your income but don’t expect this to form your primary income. Even with millions of hits on your game it’s unlikely you’ll ever make a significant amount of money from this alone, but the money will continue trickling in indefinitely.

2) Commissioned Projects

Once you’ve gained a reputation as a quality Flash game developer you can offer the service on a commissioned project basis to web designers, marketing and advertising agencies and end clients. This gives a one off lump sum per game and is often the best way to make the most profit from each Flash game you create. The disadvantages are work can be difficult to find, you’ll have to work to a brief (so often you’ll end up having to take on jobs that will stifle your creativity and so reduce your enjoyment), the final payment is the first and last income you will see from the game and you’ll need to quote for and manage the project properly in order to maximise your profits.

3) Sponsorship

A good way to earn a decent one off payment on release is to get an exclusive sponsorship deal with one of the big online games portals. It’s possible to earn thousands for your game straight away using this method. Quality is everything though, bad games will get little if any interest and the sponsorship offers will be poor (probably limited to a couple of hundred). So, to make good sponsorship money you need great games. Another issue with exclusive sponsorship is there are generally conditions attached. Depending on the sponsor you will probably not be allowed to use in-game adverts, eliminating a valuable regular income stream.

4) Site-Locked Licenses

Another option which in some cases you may be able to use in conjunction with exclusive sponsorship is to sell site locked copies of your game to games portals. These are often modified to include the website’s logo and possibly interface with their own highscore API. Again you need a quality game that website owners are willing to pay for. The main advantage of this over exclusive sponsorship is that you aren’t tied to the one website’s sponsorship conditions, you can sell multiple copies and never give up any rights to modify the game with your own links for general distribution. Although at a lower rate, overall it’s possible to earn much more than an exclusive sponsorship.

5) Self Sponsorship

Instead of using your game to drive traffic to a sponsor’s website, why not create your own online games site and drive traffic there. This eliminates the restricting conditions of exclusive sponsorship and although you won’t get a big one off lump sum you can get a potentially never ending regular income stream from your games.

This does however take a lot of work to set up and maintain your own online games site. Using free games from other developers is an option to fill out your site as it’s unlikely you’ll be able to create your own games at a significant enough rate to keep your site fresh. You’ll also need to invest in dedicated server hosting in order to cope with the bandwidth load that serving the large file sizes of Flash games will demand.

It’s not enough to just drive traffic to your website via the games you create and distribute, monetisation is a vital step in order to get an income that will pay for the hosting costs and leave you with a profit. On site advertising is essential and if done well can earn you much more than in-game advertising. This can be done either using an existing advertising solution, such as Google Adsense or selling advertising space yourself. Again this requires work and is beyond the scope of this article, but hard work and experimentation is the key to squeezing the largest income from your own website.

All of the above assume you have a great Flash game to start with and extensive distribution of your finished game to achieve satisfactory results. Without a significant number of players you’re unlikely to make any money.

Author Bio: Simon Walklate runs UK Free Online Flash Games website Flash Games Play and also takes on Flash Game Design and Development contract work.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: make money, flash games, online games, web games, design, development, regular income