Other ways of making money from html5 game except selling to sponsors

[mazoku]

Can we list all ways of making money different than just selling the game to a sponsor. 

For example ads on site or in game, porting to mobile, in game transactions. Is this all? Anything else that I am missing?

[gonzos]

I would like to discuss about this also. I have 2 games  (html5) and I'm in doubt should I start with some kind of sponsorship or try something else. 

I would like to know are the web ads recommended or players rather avoid that kind of websites. 

[dimanux]

Yeah, it would be cool to have this.

We use in-game ads and in-game rewarded video at the moment for our games because they are embedded on many game portals via iframe. We tried some ads networks but the result is not good - about 2k$/month (CPMStar network). Mostly because of low ecpms of our traffic. But it's better than selling non-exclusives.

Also we have android/ios versions, they do 30$/month 

[imerso]

One possibility is to pack the game for Android and publish into Play Store, a free version with ads and a paid version without ads. If the game is nice and there is some luck, it might be successful and generate revenue.

If it has in-game micro-transactions, an alternative is to put it on a website and try to make it known up to the point it starts generating revenue.

 

[imerso]

On 5/25/2017 at 11:59 AM, dimanux said:

Also we have android/ios versions, they do 30$/month 

 

Just curious, if you see this reply, to know if you meant really 30$ or 30k$ and forgot the "k"... =)

[kahootbird]

[redacted]

[imerso]

3 hours ago, kahootbird said:

(...) All of these strategies have risk and of course are much easier said than done. Then there's the fact that sometimes it takes making bad games to get to the good ones and figure out what people like, and a lot of time.

 

And there are cases like Flappy Birds, those little games which can be programmed in like 1..2 hours but end up taking worldwide mass support, rewards, media coverage and lots of money. Go figure.

[yagerGames]

13 hours ago, kahootbird said:

"I would use caution with upgrades. Look up the case of lodsys suing app developers over an upgrade button a few years back."

Don't be a scardy cat... My partner company went and sued Zynga over infringement of one of my games.

Lodsys was just a patent troll and ran scared as soon as they saw they were going to have to fight it out in actual court. I use to be in affiliate marketing, and controlling territory involved continually sending out cease and desists. Rarely did you actually need to file a lawsuit to get people to back down.

"All is fair in business and war."

[away168]

I see some companies benefits from HTML5 game as playable ads, so I guess that works too.

[dimanux]

On 27.05.2017 at 4:23 AM, imerso said:

 

Just curious, if you see this reply, to know if you meant really 30$ or 30k$ and forgot the "k"... =)

Only 30$/month really 

[Jammy]

On 2017-5-28 at 7:45 PM, dimanux said:

Only 30$/month really 

Can you tell us a bit more, seems very low for the "holy grail" app stores

[dimanux]

On 29.05.2017 at 10:42 PM, Jammy said:

Can you tell us a bit more, seems very low for the "holy grail" app stores

Sure, please see the screenshot

We have 10 apps in total with Admob for in-game ads. There is no any promotion of these apps except the links on our website. So the traffic is very low and the revenue is low too

[Jammy]

@dimanux cheers for the screenies and info, so would you say its a traffic/promotion issue on the mobile stores? whereas on portals i guess you're getting a lot more traffic across tons of different sites

[dimanux]

37 minutes ago, Jammy said:

@dimanux cheers for the screenies and info, so would you say its a traffic/promotion issue on the mobile stores? whereas on portals i guess you're getting a lot more traffic across tons of different sites

Sure, the games were made for portals and not for app stores. So mobile players don't like them  And buying of traffic/promotion will not help maybe, but we didn't try it.

[Daikrys]

i think the cross promo thing that FRVR did might be useful if you want drive more traffic to the appstore. i mean the appstore is a messy place and the only visibility you get is if you drive enough traffic there yourself or paying loads and loads on advertising to get your users and this is only valuable if you're one of the big players. but like i read you only convert users that are recurrent which makes sense. so you can see beforehand if it makes sense or not if you use any kind of analytics

@dimanux you said you tried some ad networks which havent been to useful in the past. do you serve your ads directly through admob?

[away168]

Nice screenshots. I guess from what I see, seems like either Play store gives a better visibility, or the user base is so big and diverse that you get more impressions than App Store. Seems like a simple game with ad is likely to survive in Play Store.

Just some doge analysis.

[ozdy]

Ha, I have 9 games on Google Play, and they also do total of slightly under $30/month

[mattstyles]

Huge competition for iOS app and Google Play store, plus the bar is ridiculously high, html5 games are still generally (maybe always?) a way off the quality of 'native' games (this is certainly true of iOS but I imagine its the same for Android). It's not solely the platform (html5 vs native) its that you're competing against some huge companies. I'm not a fan of many mobile games, I play a few whilst travelling but have a real hard time finding ones I actually want to play, but still the quality is very high.

I have heard of some success stories from targetting smaller app stores and smaller markets where the quality is more comparable and competition is less.

[dimanux]

9 hours ago, Daikrys said:

i think the cross promo thing that FRVR did might be useful if you want drive more traffic to the appstore. i mean the appstore is a messy place and the only visibility you get is if you drive enough traffic there yourself or paying loads and loads on advertising to get your users and this is only valuable if you're one of the big players. but like i read you only convert users that are recurrent which makes sense. so you can see beforehand if it makes sense or not if you use any kind of analytics

@dimanux you said you tried some ad networks which havent been to useful in the past. do you serve your ads directly through admob?

I think we'll try to setup something to redirect players to app stores in the future.

Yeah, we tried few ad networks on the web. I've posted some result here:

But we use only AdMob at mobile. Sure it would be cool to test other networks but with a lot of traffic.

[BdR]

On 31-5-2017 at 0:30 AM, dimanux said:

Sure, the games were made for portals and not for app stores. So mobile players don't like them  And buying of traffic/promotion will not help maybe, but we didn't try it.

I downloaded your Top Shootout game for Android and it runs surprisingly smooth on Galaxy A5. Is it developed with three.js I assume? How did you package it as a native app and get it to run so smoothly?

One tip I have for releasing games in app stores, is that you should incentivise your players to leave an app rating, by unlocking a little extra that is a nice-to-have but not necessary to the game. So have a button "rate this game to unlock the special hat" or bonus level or whatever. This will usually result in more ratings, which will boost your app in the app store lists, search results etc.

Technically, you can not check if the user actually leaves a rating but I have found that it is enough to have a button that simply links to the app store, and just assume they will leave a rating if they press that button. For itunes the URL should be something like "itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/apple-store/id1234567890?mt=8" and for Android it is "market://details?id=com.mycompany.myapp" or something like that. You can subliminally suggest a good rating by displaying 5 stars on the button

[Gamedistribution]

You should think about adding your games to Gamedistribution.com. We offer developers a revenue share of the ingame ads. 

Feel free to join: http://gamedistribution.com/joinus/

[bambo]

On 16.08.2017 at 0:11 AM, BdR said:

you should incentivise your players to leave an app rating, by unlocking a little extra that is a nice-to-have but not necessary to the game

It's not allowed by Google policy:

Developers must not attempt to manipulate the placement of any apps in Google Play. This includes, but is not limited to, inflating product ratings, reviews or install counts by illegitimate means, such as fraudulent or incentivised installs, reviews and ratings.

https://play.google.com/intl/en-GB_ALL/about/storelisting-promotional/ratings-reviews-installs/

But I guess it might be just a theory and many developers create such incentives without getting punished by Google in any way

[borngamer]

Years ago when I was in the Flash game development scene I used to sell my own ad space directly to advertisers. Most of the time it was to smaller companies sold through e-Bay but in the end it was a win-win situation for everyone. I'd make more money from the advertising and the advertiser had a much higher visibility in my games. If I had extra space in my inventory I supplemented it with Google Ads or another ad network.

If you are effective in your approach and you have popular games, you can work with your customers to offer some in-game branding or other perks that your advertisers pay for and your players may enjoy. An example may be a prize wheel between games sponsored by your advertiser where the play wins some in-game items such as an upgrade or real physical promotional items through your advertiser.

When I do get further along in my new game I'll be looking at attempting this again to see if it still works. It will of course all depend on how popular the game is as nobody is going to pay for a game with 500 plays.

John

 

[BobF]

3 hours ago, borngamer said:

I used to sell my own ad space directly to advertisers. Most of the time it was to smaller companies sold through e-Bay

Interesting idea! Out of curiosity, I tried to find ad space auctions on ebay but I didn't see anything. Maybe I wasn't searching for the right term.

[b10b]

Sell local.  Record the game to a C15 (or CD if you want to take half the fun out of it) and list it in a classified ad in the local paper.  Let me know how it works out for you!