Contracts vs sponsorship vs advertising vs sushi vs shovels
GamePoetry has a nice article up about making money in the Flash space, specifically discussing how contract work can be much more profitable than sponsorships an advertising. From my experience, I’d agree. We have been lucky enough to get to the point where some sponsors are paying us up-front for game, which is a nice luxury. Armor Wars was the first, and it’s gained a respectable (but not fantastic) 1 million plays to date. For us to have earned the same amount of money via advertising would have required at least 5-10 times the amount of plays, which is very difficult to achieve. It isn’t a perfect product, but I think there’s also a certain popularity ceiling to card games.
Thus, one of our upcoming titles is another “board” game (although more in the “board” vein, not the “card” vein), and the other will be a fantasy RPG of sorts. There are a lot of traditional “AAA” publishers starting to take look at the Flash space, and I think that will give it much more of an air of respectability. Will it escalate, XBLA-style, into the realm where hundreds of thousands of development dollars are required to have any success? Hard to say…