How is money earned in free browser games?

Hi community here! I'm an indie game developer currently in need of a little help. I'm working on a browser based strategy game alike tribal wars and I'm curious to know how are revenues earned from free browser games? I have read about portals and advertising but I am still not clear how those work and how much revenue those can net you. I do know about selling in game items for cash and I understand that well enough.

I'm also curious about the difference about putting your browser game on sites like bbg.com opposed to simply putting your game on your own hosted server?

Hoping someone can help teach and educate me alittle more on this, thanks. Any help appreciated.

 

With adversiting, selling the users personal data (E-Mail address...etc.) or with ingame items.

 

@JackJan: selling users personal data does not sound ethical. By the way, any idea how much money can you make off advertisements put on the site? Any figures will be helpful here thanks!

 

Around 1 USD per 1000 play sessions with Kongregate.com. This is similar to how much YouTube pay for videos owners.

 

@Pat: Can you put numerous multiple ads so you can 1 usd per 1000 play session for each of these ads? It does sound like very little money does it?

 

The new ecomony is ... 'free'. It's your job to figure out how to make money with that. There are ads, there are ad-ons, and there is additional optional content. There are ways to do it, but ... none of them are easy - which is why most products don't make back their investment.

This is your challenge.... should you chose to accept it.

Gigi.

 

It is strange. It seems people pay for users now, whether those users are spending any money or not.

For instance, Amazon was HUGE and estimated to be worth millions, even though it took them years to actually make any money at all. The same goes for games like Angry Birds. Rovio wasn't actually making much money originally. But, because they had millions of players, they were able to raise millions in funding.

 

Angry birds has 100 million+ downloads on google alone.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rovio.angrybirds&hl=en

 

Angry wasn't free for some years.
Rovio has already made/publish more than 30 games before angry bird.

 

In addition to kongregate, in game items etc mentioned above (MOST DEFINITELY NOT selling users personal data)

If you own the flash export license for unity, then theoretically speaking at least mochiads should be another source of revenue
http://www.mochimedia.com/

I have never tried this myself of course but maybe someone who owns the flash license and tried this might be able to enlighten us

EDIT: Someone appears to have accomplished that. In this thread on the mochi forum, user named Paralogic mentions it
https://www.mochimedia.com/community/forum/topic/mochi-ads-for-unity3d
http://mochiland.com/articles/mochi-ads-for-unity3d-flash-games

 

The magic words are "micropayment" and "virtual economy" or plain simple: item selling. Basically you have two currencies: one you can acquire ingame by fullfilling quests and another one that's based on real currency and can not be acquired ingame. To make it simple let's call the "free" currency "silver" and the "real" currency "gold".

Now you have different options to "sell" your virtual goods but here are the two most common:

A) Some special items are only available for gold - period.
B) Some special items are available for a huge ammount of silver (which takes longer to accumulate) or a small ammount of gold (which is easy to purchase).

Personally I would favor "B" because method "A" can lead to an imbalance and has the taste of "pay to win" since only paying users get the advantage of those special items while method "B" allows everyone to get those items.

This business modell is extremely succesful and also the fairest one, as the original idea is the following:

User A is a student, has little to no money but plenty of time to play - he or she can easily afford everything with "silver" earned from missions.
User B has a fulltime job and more money than the student but less time - he or she can easily afford spending a few dollars on gold to be "on par" with User A.

Regarding ingame advertising: can't recommend that at all - you annoy your users with advertising for very, very little revenue and if its even some sort of banner showing all the time during gameplay, it breaks the atmosphere and distracts the user for a fraction of a cent.

I'm not even going into selling user information to make money, since I consider this highly criminal and unethical.

Btw. I've been working for over 7 years in the F2P browsergame industry with focus on virtual economy, so if you need some further advices, feel free to PM me.

 

Also, one thing worth mentioning is that it is extremely difficult to get a game to make good revenue based on ads alone. I doubt seriously that there are many games that survive purely on ad revenue. If there are it would be fascinating to hear about them

Eventually you will have to get your game players to spend on in game items.

 

Excellent post.

I would just add on to this.
Be extremely careful if you ever plan on making the premium currency convertible into the free currency ie extending the above example, gold to silver. Most games don't have this but I have seen some games that do.

I have a personal experience of a game that had this system. Somewhere along the way they had a glitched quest that allowed the user to get infinite amount of the free currency. Basically you could turn in the quest infinite number of times or something like that and the glitch turned the quest effectively into a free currency generator. If the game didn't have a convertibility system it wouldn't have mattered all that much but since it did, it gave the players a much larger incentive to abuse the glitch in order to get the premium currency and ended up making a royal mess of the in game economy.

 

Thanks

Absolutely correct, I probably should have underscored that more clearly than just with "can not be acquired ingame". Do not allow the conversion from virtual currency to real currency, as Mr.T pointed out: bugs/glitches can literally break your game beyond repair if it's suddenly flooded with "silver" that can be exchanged to "gold". On the other hand it's totally fine to convert gold to silver (real to virtual), to purchase items that are available for silver only.

 

Wow thanks so much for the replies. I think I am familiar with the in game item sales strategy. However I am worried how much can you earn from that, in the face of such high costs to make a game.

 

Exactly.

Premium currency into in-game/free currency convertibility-> Shouldn't be a problem.(Possibly implemented at NPC and not directly from player to player)

In-Game currency into Premium currency convertibility -> Should be implemented only with extreme caution or preferably not implemented at all.

 

Take a look at World of tanks, imo they found a very good way to include A+B without this "pay to win" feeling.

 

+1

WoT is a very polished game on all aspects, but particularly on it's business model (A+B).
Personally, I've started to play this game and buy gold to analyze its economic model, now I'm addicted, but it's another thing...

 

world of tanks isn't a browser game

 

It doesn't really make a difference; the same rules apply.

 

World of tanks is an excellent example indeed.

 

They have earn more money than any other free to play game I think out there yet how they do it is not annoying or game braking.