About two weeks ago, I took part in Ludum Dare #23, the 48-hour game creation challenge. Despite all odds, I managed to finish a game, Tiny World War. I decided to upload it to Kongregate, a portal for web-based games, and see how that goes.
Kongregate is a popular portal where people play mostly Flash games. It’s very easy to submit your own games to Kongregate, and since I heard that they’re very good at generating revenue from those games I had wanted to try them out for a while.
I didn’t expect the game to do well there. It’s unpolished and not very accessible. My motivation for doing this was mostly information gathering: Getting some first-hand data on how many people play a new game on Kongregate and what kind of revenue I can expect from that.
Two player version
The game was originally built for two players, both sitting at the same keyboard. This is of course a big hurdle for players since they’ll probably not have a friend with them when playing games on Kongregate.
Unsurprisingly, the game didn’t do very well. As of today, it has been played 404 times. This has generated a total ad revenue of $0.75. My share is 40% of that ($0.30).
Not enough people have rated the game, so it is still under judgement. This means the average rating is not yet published and the game still shows up in Kongregate’s “Under Judgement” list.
Singleplayer edition
The only feedback the two player version generated was a comment expressing the wish to be able to play the game against the computer. I hadn’t considered this before because I thought of it as not feasible. But the comment got me thinking and the next day I hacked together an AI for the game out of nothing but cheap tricks and some random numbers.
I released the resulting singleplayer edition as a new game on Kongregate. Of course this version had the same flaws as the original one, but at least it could be played without a friend in the room. As a result, the game generated much more plays and quite a bit of feedback. As of today, the game has been played 1391 times. This generated a total ad revenue of $2.62. Again, I get a share of 40% ($1.35).
The feedback generally fell into one of the following categories:
- “Interesting concept”: Quite a few people seemed to actually like it, which honestly surprised me. I expected this to be a throwaway experiment to get some insights into Kongregate.
- “I don’t get it”: No surprises here.
- “It doesn’t work”: Until I discovered Sauce Labs a few days ago, I really wasn’t set up to test with any browsers except Chrome and Firefox on Linux. This really showed, and a lot of people couldn’t play the game due to bugs that only surfaced on a few browsers.
- “Too easy”: As I implied, the AI runs mostly on good will and duct tape. This, combined with the fact that the game’s balancing is a bit off anyway, makes it really easy to win every game once you know how.
I tried to be as responsive as I could, answering comments, fixing bugs and making simple improvements.
The game came out of judgement with a score of about 2.5 of 5 stars. Enough to make the 2.0 cutoff (games with a rating of lower than 2.0 are basically hidden from Kongregate and are unlikely to see a lot of traffic). This is not good but definitely better than I expected.
Conclusions
Ad revenue doesn’t seem to be a good model to earn a living off games, which is pretty much what I expected. It might be okay, if I could crank out a decent game every few days (which I think is possible, but damn hard), but I don’t think that’s a way to get rich (wait, you’re telling me indie game development in general is not a way to get rich?).
Publishing a game on Kongregate is pretty much how I expected it to be: You get some initial plays by showing up in the “under judgement” list and once you get your rating, further exposure depends on the quality of that rating. I’m looking forward to uploading more games to see how they compare.
The only non-positive thing I can say about Kongregate is that they don’t offer a lot in the way of analytics. Since I didn’t collect any myself, I don’t really have a lot of data beyond what I talked about in this article.
One thing I found interesting: Not a single person complained about the graphics, which are not very good (I did them myself). Maybe that just didn’t come up because the game’s other flaws were too glaring or maybe people on Kongregate are very tolerant when it comes to that. We’ll see how that goes in the future.
The future
Since you read this far, I guess you have some interest in me and this humble start into my indie game dev adventure. I’ll definitely release more games, maybe even a polished sequel to Tiny World War. If you want to hear about it, feel free to subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter.
