Lately I’ve been writing articles giving sponsors advice on how to sponsor and get the most out of their game. I, however, have also made many many games myself and learned quite a bit from my experiences there. This article is geared towards giving advice to beginning developers(or non-beginning ones) on how to eventually make a passive income that is great enough to be a salary without you having to work much at all. This article will focus on using CPMstar(although you can use Mochi as well, it will just take longer) to achieve this end. It will include tips on sponsorship through FGL and long-term income through in-game ads. This strategy focuses on the non-stop production and promotion of games until you have a good number of them(think several dozen, not 3 or 4). If you are looking to make your riches on one game and score big off of it, you should probably stop reading right now and go buy a lottery ticket. One game will not set you up for life.

One mistake I see developers make on flashgamelicense is that they are indifferent about in-game ads on FGL if they have a good sponsorship offer. This is a big mistake. Many times, in-game ads, if implemented right will make you more than the original sponsorship offer. For this reason, you should always demand in-game ads. If the sponsors don’t want Mochi, talk to them about CPMstar, because CPMstar gives sponsors part of the in-game ad income as well.

The first step is to find a sponsor that already has CPMstar activated. The only way for a developer to get CPMstar ads is actually to get a game sponsored by a sponsor that wants CPMstar ads in-game. Don’t forget to negotiate terms with the sponsor. Sometimes you can get a better deal for yourself even if he is the highest bidder. For me as a sponsor, I usually won’t budge on the initial amount but I will offer performance incentives. My incentives are usually pretty touch to reach and are given for games that get 1,000,000 views or more in the first 30 days. They are not great, but for games that do go viral, they are something extra that you would not have gotten if you had not talked to me before we closed the deal. There are of course times when I won’t agree to incentives like if I bought your game at the BIN price you listed or if your game has already been released elsewhere. As a side note, I generally think setting a BIN price is a bad idea because it sets a ceiling for how much your game can go for. However, I have to admit on some games if the BIN price is only $50 or $100 more than what I would have bid for it, I would just take it at the BIN instead of bid so it might help you there.

As a general rule, some genres of games simply get more sponsor views than other genres and will draw higher bids. There are huge niches for tower defense, racing, zombie shooting, boxed2d, and other niches. I myself, give high preference to tower defense, strategy, and puzzle and generally will pay more for such games. So if your thinking of what kind of game to develop, you should keep this kind of information in mind.
You should also know that first impression for a sponsor is very important. Many of us will look at a game for less than 2 minutes before decide to bid or not to bid on it. There have been many games where I just made sure all the key commands work and then made a bid on the game without even playing it. There have also been games where I just backed out and not bid on a game because the main menu looked like crap. First impressions are really that important. As a sponsor I like to see a game with levels and a endless high-score mode. That gives the chance of many level-plays for addiction and a reason for the player to come back once he has finished the main story. I am much more likely to bid on a game if I see 100 levels on the menu instead of 10.

Almost as important as the first impression is the thumbnail. I prefer an actual in-game shot for the thumbnail. But if the in-game shot sucks or looks like it has crappy graphics, a lot of the times I won’t even look at it. You need a shiny thumbnail of polished in-game graphics. For some games, a thumbnail from the menu art will look better. You have to make your own decision on that. In getting a game sponsored, don’t just put it up and expect to get huge bids. Unless you have a huge reputation, that generally will not happen. Email sponsors or PM them on FGL. Also, go into the chatroom to see if there are sponsors there. Usually there will be one or two in there. I have myself, bid on quite a few games directly from the chatroom from developers who asked me to look at their game(thats part of the reason I go in there). So, in short, be vigilant when trying to sell your game to sponsors.

After you negotiate the deal and get the up-front payment, its time to concentrate on in-game ad revenue. In general with CPMstar, you will want the pre-roll ad and an inter-level ad(with mochi you don’t want the inter-level ad because mochi’s inter-level ads are much more annoying). Don’t skip out on the inter-level ad, you will be foregoing a lot of income if you do. In general more than half my income has come from the inter-level ads from CPMstar. This said, games with multiple levels, especially those with an RPG element, usually make the most with star. Also use Mochi-bot or the paid service SWFSTATS to track your games performance. SWFstats is paid per game but if you have a large game, the detailed stats will more than give you what you paid for as it gives detailed engagement report and level stats.

To actually calculate a correct CPM for CPMstar, you can’t divide how much you earned by the total number of load impressions and inter-level impressions you get. You have to take the total of what you earned by the total number of loads Mochi-bot or swfstats gives you. That actually tells you how much you made per game play. The other measure is really a little less than how much you made per each level a player played the game, which really doesn’t mean anything.

Remember the key to this strategy of eventual passive income to live off of is developing games that are the most money per time spent, which much of the time is not the same as the highest quality game or the most innovative game. Long-term income via CPMstar is the thing you are focusing on and not the direct sponsorship amount. You should also have your own portfolio site with adsense ads on it so you can self-sponsor if you don’t find an adequate bid from a sponsor. A portfolio site is also good passive income. Some sponsors will let you have a small link(or even more) to your portfolio in sponsored game. I personally have allowed small links and even splash screens of developers in my sponsored games. I just want to make sure my branding takes the main stage over theirs. After all, I am paying you to promote my site, not your own.

After you integrate the ads and release the game, be prepared to promote it. This is where having a good sponsor who also knows how to promote helps. You, as a developer, should compile a list of sites to upload to(some examples are newgrounds, kongregate, nonoba, fizzy, mindjolt, etc) to and a long list of both USA and foreign portals to submit by email to. Do not neglect the niche-specific sites and blogs for your game. That will indeed drive quite a bit of traffic to your game. It will take time to build up a list and build up connections, but in the end, it is well worth the work.

The most important portals are Newgrounds and Kongregate. Newgrounds is the most important portal to rate well on. It makes games go viral more than anything else. A game that gets frontpage is going to get decently distributed throughout the web. Any game that gets highlighted in blue(rating 3.6 or higher) will draw the attention of many portals. Despite some people saying Newgrounds rating is overrated, it is still by far the most important portal to do well on. If you get into Kongregate weekly top 5, it will also help a lot. As a rule most users on Newgrounds do not like games that have a overly large amount of instructions or are too complex. If your going to error, error on the easy side for game difficulty. Also shiny graphics and presentation help a whole lot at Newgrounds.

Most games will get huge traffic for a few weeks and then drop off. However, a decently successful game will continue to get 4-5k plays a day for basically forever and that is what you should be focusing on, the continuous income you get from that tail traffic built up over many games that eventually will be a nice salary.

Using CPMstar both on pre-rolls and inter-levels, getting $1 eCPM is not that hard to reach. If each of your games can achieve 4-5k long-tail plays than each game will make $4-$5 dollars per day for practically years to come. Although not all of my games that I have made get this many long-tail plays(mainly because I made a lot of games in a day or two), there are several games on my dashboard that do get these stats. 10 games would be $40-$50($1200-$1500) per month and 30 games would be ($3600-$4500) per month. I’ve seen many games that get these kind of stats be made in 2-3 weeks or less if the developer is working 8 hours a day, five days a week. Games using Box2d, tower defense games, and some puzzles can achieve these stats while using simple game-play mechanics. It should take no more than 1 and a half years for a decent developer working full time to get a passive income of $3500-$4500 a month($42,000-$53,000 per year) from the long-tail CPMstar ad revenue. This income does not count the initial sponsorship amount nor the initial release amount for ads which for many developers is huge. Of course, if you make a lot of games that aren’t that good, you can still achieve this income, it will just take you a lot more games(but you should be able to make those games faster). Generally for a sponsorship, you should at least try to get your production costs(art and sound if you hired people) covered and a little bit extra for yourself. Of course if you are a really talented developer like LongAnimals, you can expect to make a whole lot more. This is a long term plan so do not expect to achieve it overnight.

This walkthrough is for the game Factory Balls 3

So, I think I will write an article about starting to sponsor with those that do not have a very large budget. At the end I will show and explain some of my successful sponsorships. Now before you start to sponsor, I suggest having about $2000 and being very, very careful with your sponsorships. With less than $2000-$3000, it will be hard to keep sponsoring things. A few key things are:

1. Looking for excellent value in fairly low priced game ($300-$700 range)
2. Using CPMstar shared revenue as the advertiser
3. Knowing which games to bid on and not getting caught in bidding wars

This article is mainly focused on getting good deals off FGL(flashgamelicense.com).

First of all, if you only have $2000-$3000 to spend, you should not be looking for a single high-dollar value game to bid on, you should be focused on getting 5-6 games around the $500 range. In my experience and when you do number crunching, you generally get better value off of 10 $500 dollar games(if you choose well) then 1 $5000 game. Most of my games are gotten for bids around that much and on average for a $500 game, I can get about 350,000 plays(via mochibot) in the first month. For a $5000 game to get the same value, you’d have to get 3.5 million plays in the first month. While there are some $5000 games than can indeed get that much, there is by no means a guarantee that it will. I’ve seen plenty of high-dollar games flop. With 10 $500 games, you will generally get better performance and reduce your risk due to the diversity of games you will sponsor(meaning 1 flop can be made up with another success). This way one flop will not kill you like a flop on a $5000 game would.

There are plenty of games around the $500 area that are really good deals, especially if you get CPMstar shared revenue, which shares in-game ad revenue with sponsors. Their eCPM is generally much higher than Mochi’s so even with the shared revenue, the developer usually makes a higher CPM with CPMstar(if they implemented the advertisements right). A large portion of the strategy is to make back what you spent on sponsorship via shared ad revenue within a 6-month period, so you can keep sponsoring new games and grow your business(and in the process get a larger budget and sponsor more games). This strategy is not viable if you do not sponsor with CPMstar. If you are good at picking games, you should be able to be self-maintaining within 6-9 months(meaning using the money you get from shared revenue to sponsor future games).

Step one is to play each potential game for a long time before you decide to sponsor. Things to look for are:

1. Genre of game
2. Graphical presentation and first impression
3. Fun and addicting-ness factor
4. Replay-ability

The first two are more important than people give credit for. Some game genres just have more sites dedicated to them than others. The graphical presentation and first impression are extremely important for big portals like newgrounds that can make a game go viral. The last two are self-explanatory.
In general, don’t sponsor a game unless its fun for you to play or you’ve seen a game like it that has been fairly successful before. Your resources are limited at $2000-$3000 to start, so you must be picky and careful as what you spend your money on. Generally I sponsor mostly strategy and some puzzle games as my distribution abilities tailor-fit those genres much more than others. Games with zombies, physics(box2d), and other popular themes do tend to get more views than other games of the same quality because of the fan sites dedicated to them so you may want to pay special attention to such games.

Now, in the course of your sponsorship, you need to build a good distribution channel. When you get an email asking you to add a game to your site, reply back and say that you’ll add their game if they add one of your games. This can have big payoffs. I do this with several sites and it guarantees I get my game on at least 6-7 decent sized sites. If your doing sponsorship with CPMstar, this can be greatly beneficial. Also when you sponsor games, require the developer to use the heyzap distribution system as well as the FGD distribution system. This will not be a huge boost usually, but every view counts. Talkarcades.com also has a gamesfeed that you will want to submit your game into.

You should also compile a list of portals that take direct uploads as well as the emails of several large foreign and domestic portals to submit every game to. I have a very large list myself(which I am not inclined to share here) and submitting to this list yields good results. Don’t think your job is over once you put the game on your site and submit to Newgrounds and Kongregate, because that is just the start. You will be missing out on a lot of views if you do that. This takes a lot of time, but success almost always does.

I would also suggest finding a specific genre or even niche to sponsor from(even if your site is a general flash games site) at first because it helps a lot to find specific fan sites dedicated to that kind of game. Good places to start would be tower defense games, difference games, physics games, or puzzle games. There are several sites dedicated to specifically these genre.

When actually looking at a game, I would look for games with multiple levels(more room for interlevel CPMSTAR ads), highs cores(to keep players coming back), and variety for replay-ability. Map-editors and other such features are great, but not a must.

When you first start bidding for games, you will not want to get caught up in bidding wars. If you bid $500, and someone outbids you and does $1000, DO NOT go and spend all your money on a $2000 bid, that is not very smart. First of all, you are generally not going to be able to outbid the bigger sponsors and second of all, putting all your eggs in one basket is generally pretty dumb when you first start out. There is no guarantee that any game will get you a good return on investment so its better to diversify at first. Once you start getting a solid $1000 or $2000 via CPMstar on shared revenue, you can start taking bigger risks(although I still would not recommend it). Spending all your money on one game(around $2000 for a game at first) is akin to going all-in in a poker game with middle-pair on the flop with 4 other players still in the game, which is generally not a great thing to do.

Also if you have a bid on a game and you see someone else have a bid of the same amount, PM the developer and try to work out a deal. Offer a performance bonus incentive(not too big of one though) and sometimes that will seal the deal.

One last piece of advice is that just because a game is a sequel of a successful game, don’t rush to bid 3x or 4x what the original sold for the sequel. Most of the times(of course with exceptions), sequels aren’t as big of hits as the original game. Do not bid an unreasonable amount for sequels.

So that is it for my general advice, now I will show you some games that have worked very well for me and give an explanation they are in the top 10(plus Elite Forces Defense because that was a definite success). All these games are under $1500.

*Note that earlier games sponsored with CPMstar shared revenue such as Gabal and Super Castle quest did not have optimum placement of ads so did not earn as high of an eCPM as later games.

*These numbers also do not include the amount of money I got(which is in the thousands per month) for the traffic they generated back to my site. This is actually the primary reason people sponsor games, not the shared revenue. Many people go by the $1ECPM for 1,000 plays rule in addition to shared revenue for the real worth of a game. I do not go by such a measure. However, the number of plays(and clickbacks you get via them) from a game is a large part of the game’s value.

1. Flash Empires(http://www.flashninjaclan.com/zzz414_Flash_Empires.php) – This game will probably always be first on my list because it is the game that really convinced me that doing portals for a living was viable(by the ways, it is viable, I make a good living off of it now). I sponsored this for $500 and it has well over 10,000,000 game plays in the 2.3 years since I sponsored it. I allowed Mochi-ads in this one because back then CPMstar shared revenue did not exist.

2. The Last Frontier(http://www.flashninjaclan.com/zzz4314_The_Last_Frontier.php) — This was a really awesome deal for me. Surprised that hardly anyone else bid on this game over at FGL. Cost me $1150 overall and has made me over $1700 on shared-ad revenue alone(developers get 2x what sponsors get under the CPMstar shared ad revenue model so I don’t think he’s crying either) in less than 3 months. In overall numbers, this has to be my most successful sponsorship. Its like I got paid $600 to sponsor a game that got over 3 million plays in the first three months(and a lot of click-throughs) to my site.

3. Blockboard(http://www.flashgamesnexus.com/flash-games/Blockboard.php) – Its been roughly 6 months since I sponsored this little game. Its not impressive in terms of absolute amount of money made but in terms of ROI, its unbeatable. I bought this game for $40 and in shared ad-revenue its made me $170 plus its gotten almost 600k views web-wide since I sponsored it. Thats an unbeatable ROI.

4. Glass Tower(http://www.flashninjaclan.com/zzz3874_Glass_Tower.php) – I bought exclusive source to this game for $150 I think from the original developer(who also developed this game for i-phone). Outside of the 1 million+ impressions with game has gotten, I have also made over $200 off the in-game ads on this game in about seven months.

5. Hotel Defense( http://www.flashgamesnexus.com/flash-games/Hotel-Defense.php ) – Bought exclusive source code for $200 about 7 months ago for this game. Its gotten about 890k views over the web and I’ve earned about $153 from in-game ads so far(I used Mochi and CPMstar for different versions of this game).

6. Ants Battlefield ( http://www.flashgamesnexus.com/flash-games/Ants-Battlefield.php ) – Almost a month since I bought a primary sponsorship on this game for $600. It has gotten about 600,000 views across the web and has made me around $490 is shared ad revenue. This is a definite win.

7. Highlord TD( http://www.flashgamesnexus.com/flash-games/Highlord-TD.php ) — Been about 3 weeks since I sponsored this game for $700. It has gotten roughly 415,000 views online and has earned me around $450 in shared ad revenue. Another win. Both this game and ants battlefield are still going very strong in shared ad revenue.

8. Ninjas vs Pirates Tower Defense(http://www.flashgamesnexus.com/flash-games/Ninjas-vs-Pirates-TD.php) – This game would be higher on the list if the original person I paid to create this game didn’t copy the code from another game. That resulted in me having to pay another person $500 to completely re-write the engine before re-releasing the game. Overall, this game cost me $1150. This game has been out since January of last year(about a year and a month) and has over 4.8 million views across the web. It has made me $684 off of mochi-ads(didn’t know about CPMstar’s in-game ads then) and $250 off of a non-exclusive engine sale for a total of $934.

9. Gabal ( http://www.flashgamesnexus.com/flash-games/Gabal.php ) — This game cost me $300 to sponsor about half a year ago. It has gotten over 700k views web-wide and has made me $187 off my my shared revenue.

10. Super Castle Quest(http://www.flashgamesnexus.com/flash-games/Super-Castle-Quest.php) – I got this for $200 about 7 months ago and it has over 550k views across the web and has earned me $169 in shared ad-revenue.

11. Elite Forces Defense ( http://www.flashgamesnexus.com/flash-games/Elite-Forces-Defense.php ) – Got this game for $1000 about 2 years ago. Would be way higher on the list if it had CPMstar shared ad revenue. However, back then it was all Mochi-ads. Game has well over 10 million plays. A good deal, but did not give me the bang that flash empires did for my site.

Note that these are not by any means all the games I have sponsored. I have had many flops, but the successful ones have more than made up for them. These numbers also do not include the amount of money I got(which is in the thousands per month) for the traffic they generated back to my site. This is actually the primary reason people sponsor games, not the shared revenue.