Over the past few years casual gaming hsa taken the Internet by storm. Browser games, an in particular Flash games are now more popular than ever, and with that increase in popularity comes an increase in demand. If you’re a Flash designer or developer, here are 7 ways in which you can cash in on this growth in the market.
Developing games for clients might be the most obvious way of earning money as a developer, but it’s surprising how few companies offer the service. I’ve been developing games for over 8 years now, and I’m constantly asked to work on new projects. There are lots of companies out there ready and waiting to pay you money to design and develop games for their marketing campaigns.
If meeting client deadlines isn’t your style, and you would prefer more creative freedom, then sponsorship deals might suit you better. This allows you to develop a game in your own style and at your own pace, and allowing a sponsor to embed branding and links into your game before it is published. This is often a win-win situation as the sponsor will market your game getting you extra exposure.
The next optin is to monetise your games yourself. These days several advertising networks offer the ability to embed adverts directly into your games, earning you money every time they are played. The networks usually have publishers who will distribute your games for a share of the revenue making it easy to get your game noticed.
You can also monetise your games by simply hosting them yourself, and displaying adverts on the same page. Banner adverts, Adsense blocks or affiliate promotions are all viable ways of monetising the traffic that a good Flash game will generate.
Recently several companies have introduced micro-payments and in-game currency. This allows players to buy upgrades and items, and is a new and fast growing way to monetise games. While this method is still in its infancy, I predict we’ll be seeing more and more of this in the near future.
Finally, and perhaps most obviously, a good Flash game can be ported to a more commercial platform. You can offer a downloadable version for a few dollars, an iPhone version on Apple’s App store, or you could even port to a console platform such as Xbox live. In fact, once you’ve learned the skills of a Flash games developer, the doors to the games industry are wide open to you!
So what are you waiting for? There’s no doubt that developing browser games can be very profitable, and there are some great opportunities right now to enter the industry during its growth phase. If you haven’t done so already, start working through some tutorials, pick apart some existing game source code, and learn to become a successful games developer.
Find Actionscript game tutorials, articles, book reviews, game source code and more at FlashGamesClassroom.com or download Flash game source code to learn from, modify, edit, rebrand and create brand new games at ViralFlashGames.com