Flash Tactics #3 – The Challenge of Branding Flash Games

Branding is extremely in the entertainment world.

A solid brand will give your game an established identity. That identity will help your players relate to the game. That relationship will give your game legs and make it easier for players to spread the word about your game. As a result your game will have more players and have a greater chance of becoming a franchise upon which other games can be built.

Many will say that you can’t have a successful piece of entertainment without effective branding.

While everyone can recognize that branding is important in the traditional gaming world, branding in the Flash world is not so black and white. The primary reason for this is that in most cases, the only tools you have to sell your game are a thumbnail image and the game’s name.


To stand out from on the crowded landing/search pages on Flash portals, a Flash game needs solid branding.
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Flash Tactics #2 – Making money from a free Flash game

The the most common question I get after “You’re doing WHAT?” about why I’m making Flash games is ‘Can you make money doing that?’, or even funnier is when a hippie artist type asks me ‘How are you monetizing your content?’

In the traditional games industry, we are so tied to the business model of “Putting a game on a box on a shelf” that the simple idea that money can be made from games in any other way is completely outlandish. The real “radicals” in the traditional industry are doing ‘digital download’ on XBLA and WiiWare.

But the times, they are a changing. And I love free stuff and I believe that the future of entertainment media is that everything we create will ultimately be available for free in some way, shape or form.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

While I was on the free bandwagon long before Chris Anderson released his book Free, Anderson helped me cement my ideas and gave me the courage to move forward with my dream of being an indie developer.

I believe that the future of digital media is free. I make digital media for a living and also like having a roof over my head and food in my belly. WIth all of this considered, I decided it was time for a change of tactics in how I approach the business of video games.

I asked my self (and continue to ask myself): What can a game developer do to make a living if their games are free?

Flash and the web are wonderful and fantastic in this regard and in this article I’m going to dip my toes into a few different ways a free Flash game can make money.
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Flash Tactics #1: The Most Accessible Gaming Platform in the World

The decision to leave a job running a video game studio to go out on my own and make Flash games has caused a lot of my friends and peers to shake their heads.

A lot of people just don’t get it.

Flash Tactics is a series of blog posts outlining why I believe that Flash is not only a great game platform, but how I believe developers can find success on a platform that is dismissed by so many developers.

Flash Tactics Part 1: The Most Accessible Gaming Platform in the World.

For me, it’s as simple as this – no other gaming platform in the world has the install base, accessibility and reach that Flash has.

As a developer, my goal has always been to get my games in front of as many people as possible. With this goal in mind, Flash became the only real option when I decided to go out on my own.

The Flash Player install base is huge – in most markets, it’s north of 98%, meaning that for almost every player there are no barriers preventing them from playing your game. They simply have to go to a webpage and play the game.

No trips to a store, no logging in, no credit cards, no download or installs – just go to a site and play.

This sort of access is unheard of on all other platforms and it multiplies your audience by a tremendous margin.

Consider that a ‘hit’ PC game will sell 1 million units in the first year of release, before it’s removed from the shelves. Through the long tail of digital download services like Steam and D2D, you can probably tack on another 500K units sold at extreme discounts through the lifetime of the game. In addition, it’ll probably be pirated an additional 2 million times. So if you make a hit PC game, you’ll hit 3-4 million people. Not bad.

Compare that to a good Flash game, which can get 1 Million plays in its first week. A hit Flash game can get close to 1 million plays/day. It’s not unheard of for a hit Flash game to have 50-80 Million plays in a year. And these numbers don’t fade in the way that traditional games do.

A twitter search for ‘Flash Game’ will reveal mentions of ‘classic’ flash games like Desktop Tower Defense and Fancy Pants Adventures alongside 2009 hits like Canabalt and Crush the Castle. People are still discovering these games for the first time and they are sharing them with their friends.

When most games have faded from peoples memories and sales dwindle, Flash games are still out there, building an audience for your game.

Flash is free, Flash is everywhere and new people are discovering Flash games every day.

As a game developer, this is simply too tempting an audience to pass up, and that’s why I chose Flash.

In upcoming Flash Tactics posts I will answer the second most common question I get: “How do you make money giving your game away for free?” (and I’ll try not to quote Chris Anderson’s book on the subject too much…)

Other Flash Tactics Posts:

Flash Tactics #2: Making Money From a Free Flash Game