Has anyone heard of the WordPress Arcade Plugin?

[stevefromio]

They are located here: http://myarcadeplugin.com/

 

They say you can download 70,000 games from places like Spil Games, etc. My question. Why would Spil Games, or any other vendor allow you to put there games on your arcade game site?

 

Is this legal?

[AhmedElyamani]

It's legal.

[dev]

It's legal. There's actually a lot of websites and scripts like that, a culmination of a decade of flash technology creating a huge marketplace for publishers, developers, advertisers and facilitators. 

 

Generally you don't have to worry. Close to 100% of these portals are completely flash-based and will completely fail to work on mobile devices which is where we're seeing increasingly larger traffic (not just in absolute numbers but also as a share of all traffic), particularly in western countries where a visitor is deemed to have value in terms of advertising. (most portal owners will value a visitor from most Asian countries at $0 for example, very few understand the market potential here and can grab it). 

 

Furthermore, the number of portals are in the tens of thousands, no joke, each with a few hundred or more commonly a few thousand flash games. None of these games have unique descriptions even, they're all the same, and thus have a very hard time competing for organic traffic in search rankings. (and if you don't have organic traffic, you fail, there's generally no money in advertising a website where you advertise yourself simply due to basic algebra. If you pay and receive the same amount for an average visitor minus e.g. Google's cut and the CTR, you lose money). 

 

So most of these websites make very little money and they're usually pumped out like crazy. You can buy your own portal with 2000 games for a few hundred dollars, but search engines are extremely biased against duplicate content, they've gotten smart. So it's very hard to get 10k thousand visitors a month which will generate a little less than $10 usually, not enough to pay for your domain+hosting, let alone recouperate your investment or make any profit.

 

As for why Spil, well they get paid for the premium packages, and there's ad-integration as well as generating brand awareness and free exposure. I think it's a clear sign though that Spil is investing 5million into HTML5 though. But it's important as developers to be vigilant about contracts which allow Spil to integrate our HTML5 games into such portals in the future. Getting paid a one time $350 amount like I've seen some here accept from Spil for them to be allowed to include the game in a script-package that's used by 50k wordpress sites is ridiculous. Spil has noted that it will be adding HTML5 games to these packages, so make sure to check your contracts before signing them and set the price accordingly.

[stevefromio]

Great. Thanks.

[plicatibu]

I use MyArcadePlugin Pro. If you're planning to start your own arcade site it is the best script you can buy.

It is extremely cheap and the easiest to use.

Regarding unique content, you can either change game descriptions yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

I don't know whether we are allowed to cite other forums so I won't write about it here but PM me if you want to be part of a forum exclusive for arcade sites webmasters (not developers)

And competition is very tough in arcade sites.

[Biggerplay]

It's legal. There's actually a lot of websites and scripts like that, a culmination of a decade of flash technology creating a huge marketplace for publishers, developers, advertisers and facilitators. 

 

Generally you don't have to worry. Close to 100% of these portals are completely flash-based and will completely fail to work on mobile devices which is where we're seeing increasingly larger traffic (not just in absolute numbers but also as a share of all traffic), particularly in western countries where a visitor is deemed to have value in terms of advertising. (most portal owners will value a visitor from most Asian countries at $0 for example, very few understand the market potential here and can grab it). 

 

Furthermore, the number of portals are in the tens of thousands, no joke, each with a few hundred or more commonly a few thousand flash games. None of these games have unique descriptions even, they're all the same, and thus have a very hard time competing for organic traffic in search rankings. (and if you don't have organic traffic, you fail, there's generally no money in advertising a website where you advertise yourself simply due to basic algebra. If you pay and receive the same amount for an average visitor minus e.g. Google's cut and the CTR, you lose money). 

 

So most of these websites make very little money and they're usually pumped out like crazy. You can buy your own portal with 2000 games for a few hundred dollars, but search engines are extremely biased against duplicate content, they've gotten smart. So it's very hard to get 10k thousand visitors a month which will generate a little less than $10 usually, not enough to pay for your domain+hosting, let alone recouperate your investment or make any profit.

 

As for why Spil, well they get paid for the premium packages, and there's ad-integration as well as generating brand awareness and free exposure. I think it's a clear sign though that Spil is investing 5million into HTML5 though. But it's important as developers to be vigilant about contracts which allow Spil to integrate our HTML5 games into such portals in the future. Getting paid a one time $350 amount like I've seen some here accept from Spil for them to be allowed to include the game in a script-package that's used by 50k wordpress sites is ridiculous. Spil has noted that it will be adding HTML5 games to these packages, so make sure to check your contracts before signing them and set the price accordingly.

It does bring up the question then of why set up a arcade site at all now?

[dev]

It does bring up the question then of why set up a arcade site at all now?

 

Hehe, because everyone thinks they can still make money out of it. I mean at the end of the day you can set up a site like this with the best arcade package, hosting for a year and a custom theme for under $300. It's a small investment for your own portal with hundreds to thousands of games. If you can market it well, curate the games well, write some unique descriptions for some of the popular games, build a viral campaign, build links, integrate social stuff and drive traffic, you're essentially able to make money in your sleep. 

 

Some are quite succesful. Plicatibu for example mentioned he has well over 50 thousand unique visitors per month. If a unique visitor plays 8 game sessions and looks at 10 refreshed pages in a month, that's 500k pages served, with 2 ads on a page that's a million ads. With an eCPM of say $1 that's a thousand dollars a month in income. A great place to start investing in more marketing, new websites, better content etc.

 

The problem is, all that really is very difficult. It's definitely not as popular to do as it used to be and I see a lot of people make very little money and then end up selling their site for $50 or $200. It takes a long time to build up the right numbers and unique content. I'd rather stick with building games, but it's definitely an interesting career

[Biggerplay]

@Developoid

 

I think that's pretty much it, it looks like it's something which is very easy to do because it's fairly easy to set up, but because of that lots of people have done it, leading to a saturation in the market, which then means it's all about marketing/SEO etc which is not easy.

 

Having said that, I would of thought game developers have an advantage because we can make our own content.

[plicatibu]

@Developoid Life is not so good

 

Usually users don't play many games at once in the same site because almost all games are from 3rd parties and all of them contain a play more button. Most users just click in this play more button when they finish the current game . As soon as they do this they are redirected to another arcade. At this moment you can say bye-bye user, bye-bye any probability of revenue.

 

Also the eCPM varies a lot based in the country your visitors come from (my eCPM currently is around $0.30). Also the amount of ads you show to users doesn't matter that much. What matter is when the user clicks in the ads. Other than that you won't earn anything.

[Biggerplay]

@Developoid Life is not so good

 

Usually users don't play many games at once in the same site because almost all games are from 3rd parties and all of them contain a play more button. Most users just click in this play more button when they finish the current game . As soon as they do this they are redirected to another arcade. At this moment you can say bye-bye user, bye-bye any probability of revenue.

 

Also the eCPM varies a lot based in the country your visitors come from (my eCPM currently is around $0.30). Also the amount of ads you show to users doesn't matter that much. What matter is when the user clicks in the ads. Other than that you won't earn anything.

So all the revenue is generated via CPC rather than CPI?

 

This might seem odd, but would there be any point in using Flash games to drive users back to a HTML5 arcade site?

[plicatibu]

In flash arcades you're paid per click because usually these ads are from other arcades trying to acquire traffic.

Currently I am redirecting all mobile traffic from my flash sites to a site only with HTML games.

The amount of mobile traffic on my HTML site is not that high because almost all my traffic of my flash arcades come from my flash games.

You can try the same thing: create a flash arcade site in order to bring traffic to your HTML games but bear in mind you will have to expend some money.

From 2012 until now I will expended more than $12,000.

[Biggerplay]

In flash arcades you're paid per click because usually these ads are from other arcades trying to acquire traffic.

Currently I am redirecting all mobile traffic from my flash sites to a site only with HTML games.

The amount of mobile traffic on my HTML site is not that high because almost all my traffic of my flash arcades come from my flash games.

You can try the same thing: create a flash arcade site in order to bring traffic to your HTML games but bear in mind you will have to expend some money.

From 2012 until now I will expended more than $12,000.

That's just on your html5 mobile site or for all your arcade sites? I have a number of Flash games using Mochi ads that I can replace with my own ads to direct traffic to my own HTML5 when I get it up and running, which is something I guess.

[plicatibu]

It's value was expended on all arcade sites (but 99% of this money just on main site - plicatibu.com).

 

I did the same thing you're planning: I showed my own ads on my flash games to direct them to plicatibu.com.

 

But as all my games already have a play more games button that redirect them to plicatibu.com I prefer to show ads and make some extra money.

[Mauno]

plicatibu thanks for your tips.