Game Design Secrets

Summary

Here are the key points we covered in this chapter:

• Paying web game customers are primarily between 20 and 45 years old, skewing slightly female. Big spenders tend to be in North America, Europe, and parts of Asia (particularly in South Korea).
• Major sources of revenue for web games include advertising, third-party service providers, prepaid cards, and credit cards/PayPal.
• When monetizing with advertising, experiment by varying your ad network by country and using Google Ad Manager for multiple ad networks. For distributed games, incorporate a large, reliable ad network or stream the game from your servers.
• Small/indie web game developers should go with a name brand payment option(s), reduce payment friction, and offer multiple payment options and multiple revenue streams. They should also reward players for paying, and retain nonpaying customers by making sure it’s fun to play the game for free.
• Kongregate, a leading web game publisher, has about 15 million monthly visitors. Developers who publish their games on Kongregate and attract a good audience can expect to earn about $5,000–10,000 on average.
• When submitting to Kongregate, many developers fail by forgetting the fun aspect of the game, or allowing bugs and other glitches to go unfixed. Instead, when designing games for the Kongregate audience, take risks and be unique.
• Jay Is Games is a leading “kingmaker” site for web games—it has about 2.5 million visitors. A well-made game hosted on the site averages about 250,000 ...