is there anyone out there making really good, professional quality flash games? is there anyone out there making money making really good, professional quality flash games?
As a disclaimer though, we haven't turned on the money hose yet. Still in beta. I made Underwhirled Drift and a friend of mine made Brawler. Both are pretty cool flash games in my totally biased opinion.
Alien Hominid was a flash game originally, I think. It's made plenty of money, allthough most of the money came from the non-flash XBox version.
Some folks are making money from flash games, but most profitable flash games aren't high quality. I think the situation will be changing, as flash becomes more like a game engine in some ways, and as more people go indie.
I'm in the process of selling my current game and am likely going to get >10k. It took 1.5 months to make, everything done by myself. Is it "professional quality"? Who knows? Doesn't matter to me. I'm my own boss, work whatever hours I want, have complete creative freedom, and assuming I can keep up the quality & pace make enough money to live off of pretty comfortably. You can decide for yourself if it's professional when it gets released.
The flash game market is currently in a transition phase of sorts. Over the past 2-3 years people have become very interested in monetizing it heavily. The value of good games is going up. 5 years ago everyone did everything for free. 2 years ago the best games could make a few hundred or couple thousand dollars. A week ago a game sold for 16k and there's probably some sort of continued revenue deal on it too.
And if you've got a big budget to get started with, the major social networking / MMO flash games are raking in millions yearly.
Alien Hominid is a bad example. That was made by Tom Fulp, owner of Newgrounds; not exactly talking about the average joe, there. Dude's got enough money to develop whatever the hell he wants for however long he wants on whatever platform he wants. Case in point: Castle Crashers still isn't out! (but it'll be so awesome)
Yes, there are actually several companies that make flash games exclusively, and make money doing it. I know that one of the divisions of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment makes flash games. One of the most common ways to make money on flash games is commissioned titles. Essentially, interactive advertising for major companies. A company like McDonalds may at some point want a branded flash game on one of their web portals. They would likely approach a company experienced at flash game development and make an offer.
The more consistent business model for flash game development is advertising. Flash games have a proven track record of drawing steady traffic to a site. The more popular, the better. Some companies will approach the creator of a popular flash game in order to get their advertising banners posted near the flash title.
The monetizing of what is essentially free-access gaming has not yet been regularized. A lot of people making flash games do so without any expectation of monetary return. For the time being, Flash is being used as a prototyping platform for games. You'll notice that a lot of games that started off as flash titles have moved on to more fiscally profitable platforms. Title like Alien Hominid, N, and now even Line Rider are being retooled for PCs, consoles, handhelds, and digital distribution services. Investors looking to sink money into a new studio are going to be much more willing to lay down the cash if the company already has a popular flash game under their belt.
x-tender and me we sold "codename-gordon" to valve don't know if that can be considered professional but we got payed and got a release on steam so we were happy-campers:D
The company is very successful financially, but I wouldn't call most of the games that we make "good". At the end of the day we generally end up sacrificing quality and gameplay to make the games what the client wants.
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Enjoy.
As a disclaimer though, we haven't turned on the money hose yet. Still in beta. I made Underwhirled Drift and a friend of mine made Brawler. Both are pretty cool flash games in my totally biased opinion.
Some folks are making money from flash games, but most profitable flash games aren't high quality. I think the situation will be changing, as flash becomes more like a game engine in some ways, and as more people go indie.
The flash game market is currently in a transition phase of sorts. Over the past 2-3 years people have become very interested in monetizing it heavily. The value of good games is going up. 5 years ago everyone did everything for free. 2 years ago the best games could make a few hundred or couple thousand dollars. A week ago a game sold for 16k and there's probably some sort of continued revenue deal on it too.
And if you've got a big budget to get started with, the major social networking / MMO flash games are raking in millions yearly.
Alien Hominid is a bad example. That was made by Tom Fulp, owner of Newgrounds; not exactly talking about the average joe, there. Dude's got enough money to develop whatever the hell he wants for however long he wants on whatever platform he wants. Case in point: Castle Crashers still isn't out! (but it'll be so awesome)
I worked on a bomberman clone, we did a sample, the gaming site said they wanted it, they paid a few hundred bucks for the final thing
the revenue model is on site advertising
The more consistent business model for flash game development is advertising. Flash games have a proven track record of drawing steady traffic to a site. The more popular, the better. Some companies will approach the creator of a popular flash game in order to get their advertising banners posted near the flash title.
The monetizing of what is essentially free-access gaming has not yet been regularized. A lot of people making flash games do so without any expectation of monetary return. For the time being, Flash is being used as a prototyping platform for games. You'll notice that a lot of games that started off as flash titles have moved on to more fiscally profitable platforms. Title like Alien Hominid, N, and now even Line Rider are being retooled for PCs, consoles, handhelds, and digital distribution services. Investors looking to sink money into a new studio are going to be much more willing to lay down the cash if the company already has a popular flash game under their belt.
The quality level varies greatly from game to game, all depending on the budgets the respective companies have for their advertising campaigns.
http://www.vpi.net/
The company is very successful financially, but I wouldn't call most of the games that we make "good". At the end of the day we generally end up sacrificing quality and gameplay to make the games what the client wants.