Let's talk WebPlayer monetization.

It almost seems like WebPlayer monetization is a taboo subject, because you can't find much information on it anywhere. Everybody (Including Unity) is more than happy to shove you out to the land of "raining cash" for mobile devices, with their new(ish) Applifier partnership. There's hundreds upon thousands of tutorials on how to add advertisements or a store into your mobile games.

The truth is, you're probably making a web-player game, because you're not very good with marketing, or you don't have an advertisement budget. You're probably going to post your game on a few portals(Kongregate, Facebook, etc.), then get on your knees and pray for a little attention. However, what if you want to turn that small amount of attention into a small amount of revenue?

I've yet to find any information on web-player monetization, I haven't found any advertisements you can embed into the game, I haven't found any "Assets" or "Packages" that allow you to easily add an in-game store to your game, which leads me to a separate question (Is it possible to load a web-page inside of Unity, IE display a webpage like a built in web-browser) if so you could do this and have a website that has a store of some sort, and people can make purchases there (Through pay-pal, or whatnot).

What if you wanted to sell items through Facebook? Would your game have to have a Facebook specific version? Or could these items be shared through Facebook and Kongregate? Is it possible to send Facebook purchase information to a back-end server to process things?

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For those of you that have had ANY success in monetizing a web-player project, please post some input. I'm not a marketer, and I'm not a designer. Things others can think of will probably never cross my mind. I've seen hundreds of questions asking how, but never an answer.

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tl;dr - Post your WebPlayer monetization success stories, and how you did it, what experiments and trials you took to get those results.

 

I actually don't know much about potential webgl/webplayer monetization, so it's an interesting subject for me (watches thread).

 

I've seen some sites, like game portals etc, where they just show various ads outside of the game window, you know, like google adsense or whatever, which might advertise other games or related stuff. It doesn't necessarily have to be 'inside' the webplayer... unless you're going for fullscreen or something?

 

The problem with ads outside the game window is that AdBlocks and other NoScript will deny you from those.

You really need to take this into account if you are going to go full "free with ads", because the portion of people using those is not negligible.
Be it because too many sites drawn you in ads, or because too many ads just flash and/or play sounds that make the internet a bit of a strain, or just because some don't want ads at all.

To me, that's enough reason to think about including the ads directly in the game itself.

 

There are plenty of us who don't use AdBlock. I actually like ads that are relevant to me. They turn me onto things that I might not otherwise find.

I think you need to look at people who refuse advertising the same as software pirates, They were never going to buy the software in the first place, so it is fruitless to try and address their needs.

Also, let me rephrase my prior post in a more politically correct post twitter, trigger warning free way. Take an issue that people on the internet get angry about, and start hash tag campaigns about. Make a game that really ticks those people off. Then your game will get all over TheVerge, Polygon, Kotaku, Vox, and Jezabel, and they will give you loads of free advertising. There is a whole counter-counter culture that is looking for content that upsets the editors and bloggers at those web sites. I tried posting a specific example, but my post didn't take for some reason. Msg me privately, I have a notepad full of ideas, that will get you massive free publicity.

 

"They were never going to buy the software in the first place, so it is fruitless to try and address their needs."

In any business that depends upon sales, you just have to factor in a certain number of people who are never going to buy anything from you. The point is to spend as little time dealing with in worrying about those people as possible, and to focus on pitching your product to as broad of an audience as possible because that ratio of sales vs. no sales is going to be the same no matter what, so bigger audience more sales.

But taking the attitude that its pretty much pointless so nobody should try... Good luck out there hahah

 

If you got the time in the chops for it you could technically use Web Player as a way of advertising your products. While you're playing my goofy little web game did you know that I also made this....?

It all depends on how skilled you are in your strategies

 

Hum, I don't know, some sites and ads really overdo it, and there was even a time where they would put worms and other nasty things into some ads.

I know of many people that install ads blocking as a default, and then add the ads back on a site by site basis.
It doesn't mean that they are trying to rip off site owners, for most of them, it's just a defensive reaction on the ads overdone that we had all over the place not so long ago.

Same with that viral strategy you gave, it works, but as time goes, it will become less effective, as people tends to get bored when there are outcries every other day, even making the ones we should actually worry about as consumers.

Well, each one of us is free to do things our ways, as long as we don't break laws and license agreements, but I personally think that if you need to rely on that kind of techniques, you don't show much confidence in your product.

 

Let's not start that whole "if your game is good enough you don't have to advertise it" thing. Opposite is true, if you don't feel like telling the entire world about it..

 

Also as far as trying to put some sort of a shop in the web player game... You really need to start thinking about what is the security situation like on these websites, how on earth are you going to ensure people that their money and their information is not being stolen. I don't think that you can I don't think that you would even have that level of control. You have to think of web player games the way you might think of a newspaper or a magazine, always gotta be supported by advertising because people are either going to pay nothing or very very little for them

Edit: I was thinking that you might be able to sell a subscription if you had a really really good web player mmo game, but I mean so many great games are free to play...

I suppose you could create your own store and your own basically entire account system billing system etc on your website and then you could retrieve information from your servers about user accounts for items and stuff that they might have bought. But I mean holy crap, that's a lot of work

 

Sadly I think we need to code our own Unity In-Game Ad Solution, but the trick is finding an Ad Network that will work with us to provide the actual ads, and pays us ofcoarse for user activity.

I actually plan to Intergrate something where players can select an Ad video to watch and earn virtual currency In-exchange. Only I need to find an Ad Network that can provide an API for this.

We can definatly plug something in that is PHP based but probably the Video Ad will need to launch In a seperate window.

With WebGL coming up, I think we will eventually start to see established Ad Networks supporting Unity WebGL in-Game Ads. I'm betting http://ad4game.com will be among the first as they are the only one so far that I have seen some support for Unity Webplayer through their Ad Preloader Offering.

 

Moved this topic to Gossip. And I'm interested to see where it goes. In my opinion, someone should have solved an instant, 5 min integration of Google Interstitial ads for web deploy. If they do, I host most of my products and give them away! With no need for a middle-man store!

Gigi

 

Does Unity ads work with web deploy? Never tried it.
Gigi

 

From what I've seen, accounts are managed usually in a seperate secure web page. And players can top up virtual currency from this secure web page, and when they return to the web player, its updated.

The other alternative is to have an IAP window in the web player, and when the player clicks on a coin pack, they are taken to a link on PayPal or a link to the seperate secure web page in a new browser window where they can buy the pack directly.

You won't see any 'IAP plugins' for web player as we all know it doesn't support plugins.

 

Taking this and running with it a bit, as I really like the idea as an alternative to pasting the site full of ads. It would be possible to create a server backend based on your favorite database and programming language for the server, and open a JSON API where each game could poll the user account for available coinage and make use of that accordingly. The purchasing of all currency would be handled via a secure page from their account management page, which combined with the API would allow this currency to be used in any of your games.

Now sadly a major downside I see to this is, that it might end up becoming more of another game portal and further remove you from your role as a game developer to having to run and maintain this system constantly. Though if a few of your games were pure gold, it might be more than just plausible to have this pan out for your games only.

 

Looks like you could use Adsense for Games using their preloader to popup the flash ad player over the top of the Unity webplayer (or the HTML5 game when Unity 5 comes out) whenever you want to display an ad:

https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1705831?hl=en#n3

 

Kongregate has it's own site currency which can be used for ingame purchases.

Here's a sample game (in unity webplayer) that uses it:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/freerangegames/freefall-tournament

The security and purchasing stuff is all handled on the site, and the game probably uses some API to comunicate.

The fact that it's connected into a larger network is a huge advantage too. I confess to spending a teeny bit on that game

Integration is the watchword. Kongregate kreds, steam walleet, whatever. look for existing systems and get into them. of course the system owner will take a cut but it's probably better than going alone unless your project is really really really huge. And then you probably already have your own website to handle that stuff.

 

I've built and integrated a Unity web player game on Kongregate that uses their IAP API (www.kongregate.com/games/scarybee/tap-tap-infinity/). It was pretty easy to integrate despite their poor documentation (largely helped by the fact that they have a support email system staffed by helpful people!)

The way this works is that on attempting a purchase you call a JS API and that then pops up the Kongregate purchase dialog over the Unity game. There's a callback to Unity from the webpage on success. They take 30% (same as Apple and Google) of the purchase.

On top of the IAPs they give a percentage of the ad revenue the page generates, seems to come to about $1/1000 plays and this could potentially be doubled by making your game exclusive to Kongregate and integrating their statistics API.

I hear rumors that you can do much the same on Facebook but haven't taken the time to look into it yet. I'd also like to be able to host the game on my own website so found this thread in the hope for a simple Unity web payments plugin. Currently can't find anything that looks like it would work though

 

How is the IAP on Kongregate working out for you? Are people actually making purchases, or is it more ads driven?

 

@Aurigan - Can you tell us more about the integration? Googling "Unity + Kongregate" didn't help that much, and I'd LOVE to hear more of the nuts and bolts of making this work.

Gigi

 

Currently purchases are making many times what the ads are, very much worth doing.

 

Hi - not took much to it really! The integration is really basic, this is how it looks in my code (I've stripped out some custom error handling for ease-of-reading ... kongregatePurchaseItemId's are the same item ids as used for google/apple i.e. com.scarybee.taptapinfinity.50infinitytokens, IAPPurchased(itemId) is my code to unlock/grant whatever needs to be) :

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2.     void InitializeKongregateAPI(){
3.         Application.ExternalEval(
4.             "if(typeof(kongregateUnitySupport) != 'undefined'){" +
5.             " kongregateUnitySupport.initAPI('"+gameObject.name+"', 'OnKongregateUserKnown');" +
6.             "};"
7.         );
8.     }
9.  
10.     public void OnKongregateUserKnown(string userInfoString){
11.         string[] parameters = userInfoString.Split('|');
12.         username = parameters[1];
13.         Debug.Log ("kong user: "+username);
14.  
15.         //restore purchases
16.         Application.ExternalEval(
17.             "kongregate.mtx.requestUserItemList(null, function(result){"+
18.             "    if(result.success){" +
19.             "        for( var i:int = 0; i < result.data.length; i++ ){"+
20.             "          var item:Object = result.data[i];"+
21.             "           kongregateUnitySupport.getUnityObject().SendMessage('"+gameObject.name+"', 'RestoreKongregatePurchase', item.identifier);" +
22.             "         }"+
23.             "    }"+
24.             "});"
25.             );
26.     }
27.  
28.     public void PurchaseKongregateItem(string itemId){
29.         kongregatePurchaseItemId = itemId;
30.         Application.ExternalEval(
31.             "kongregate.mtx.purchaseItems(['"+itemId+"'], function(result){"+
32.             "   if(result.success){" +
33.             "       kongregateUnitySupport.getUnityObject().SendMessage('"+gameObject.name+"', 'OnKongregatePurchaseResultSuccess',null);" +
34.             "    }else{" +
35.             "       kongregateUnitySupport.getUnityObject().SendMessage('"+gameObject.name+"', 'OnKongregatePurchaseResultFailed',null);" +
36.             "    }" +
37.             "});"
38.             );
39.     }
40.  
41.     public void RestoreKongregatePurchase(string purchaseId){
42.         IAPPurchased(purchaseId);
43.     }
44.  
45.     public void OnKongregatePurchaseResultSuccess(){
46.         IAPPurchased(kongregatePurchaseItemId);
47.     }
48.  
49.     public void OnKongregatePurchaseResultFailed(){
50.         kongregatePurchaseItemId = null;
51.     }

 

The best way I see to do this is to run with the store API of the game portal you are running on. Kongregate has such an API. As does Facebook. Facebook is pretty evil, but its too big of a market to just ignore.

Kongregate and most other game portals will give you a share of the ad revenue. Kongregate is kind of like YouTube. Any body can put up a game, and 99% of their content sucks. But the good games get to the front page and get plays. The Kongregate API is pretty decent. Their developers section has pretty good documentation. My game there has made about 50 cents from about four hundred plays. Nothing big, but with a better game you would see better results. Kongregate will block any attempts to inject your own ads into the html. And as far as I can discover only a couple of small german firms will actually pay for in game ads.

Facebook on the other hand will display ads next to your game, but will not give you a cent of revenue for it. That definitely counts as evil. Especially since the ad serving creates a noticeable lag spike in even simple games. Facebook does allow you to inject your own ads into the page, that's less evil. But at the same time they disallow google ads, back to being evil again. Facebook's Unity API is pretty poor. In fact Facebook's API in general is poor. You need to write your own code to do something as simple as getting pictures of the users friends into Unity. Facebook's Unity API will also not work on the webplayer outside of the Facebook canvas page. Again, there is a Facebook provided in app purchases option.

In general I would advise against collecting payments directly from users. Let the host site do it. People are more likely to fork over credit card details to the host site. Its also less liability on your part if something goes wrong. Communications between the webplayer and the web page are not particularly secure, you really don't want to be casually entering credit card details into a webplayer game.

 

There are some heavy requirements on Google AdSense for games:

• Have a high volume of games content, i.e., greater than 70% games content with over 2 million games impressions monthly.

I've been searching ways to monetize unity web game since 2012, there are really few options to go. For now I'm using a standard google adsense banner at right side of screen (you have to be careful with adsense rules, minimal space and so on, or google will ban you forever). Comparing with gains from tests with Ad4Games and with Wooglie, AdSense proved to be the best (at least in my tests), followed by Wooglie.

I really hope that the webgl deploy bring more options to us. Maybe a web version of UnityAds.

 

You can use CPMbox to integrate ads in your Unity web games
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/monetize-your-unity-web-player-games-with-ads.313843/

 

You should really add more information to your site and more about supported platforms and how your systems works.
I certainly don't see any reason to sign up on your site based on the lack of information.

 

Hello

There is another way to make some money off your WebPlayer game.
You can try to sell the game to a sponsor over at http://www.fgl.com
Though it's mainly a platform to sell flash games, unity games still get sold from time to time.

How it basically works:
You put your game up for auction and Sponsors (Portals like Kongregate, Armor games and so on) bid on it.
After you've found a Sponsor you put in his branding (Usually a Logo on the Splash screen, and logos during gameplay) That link to their Portal. You hand over the branded version to the sponsor and they usually handle the distribution.

Might be tough to sell a unity game on ther and you really need a great and polished game to have a chance. But it might be worth a shot.