I recently attended the Flash Games Summit in San Francisco. This is the first time the conference was held and for a single day event, it was pretty successful. That is unless you’re a flash developer. Throughout the show, there was a fair amount of frustration focused on how hard it is to make money at flash games. To be honest, the companies like Kongregate.com and Mochi Media do pretty good business but I can’t help but think they do so on the backs of the Flash Game designers. Although there were some stated cases where games created $250 dollars per CPC, in talking to the designers, they said it really ranged from $.12 to $.45 CPC. That’s a lot of sweat and hard work poured into the IP of a title for a meager return.

The debate was very good during the panel sessions but the entire model that they’re promoting at the show is flawed. Almost all the panelists are companies that drive revenue through CPC. The general feedback I received from some designers was that this conference should not be about how to keep flash developers under the thumb of the big CPC driven game portals: it should be about creating a sustainable industry. I admit I left after the panel on Monetization and Business Models because It became clear that the big drive is to keep flash designers under the control of the big flash portal players.

As an industry, Flash games have been the red-headed step child of the games industry. They've had to be very creative in how they monetize and made money off their IP, which I think is very cool. There have been lots of great concepts and models developed here (advergaming and ad placement ect) that have now been picked up by the rest of the games industry. The big change is that the flash games coming out now are really brilliant, standalone game titles that have great playability and are downright fun. But instead of selling them first and cpc'ing them after that initial burst of demand, the flash portals grab them up. These flash game portals need this new content to drive their CPC engines. The flash games industry will continue to be treated as it has until it grows up, takes itself seriously and starts demanding payment for its IP. And I don't have a lot of confidence in the Flash Game Summit being the vehicle for this evolution as its sponsored and headed by those companies that are heavily invested in that CPC model. There was a couple times durring the show where I thought I was back at the ShareWare Industry Conference 6 years back. Eerily familiar...

My company has created something new for the Flash Games industry. We've created a DRM and License wrapper that allows Flash Game designers to wrap their product and sell through (non) flash game portals. This could get them into PopCap, WildTangent, Playrix ect but unfortunately, not very many of the designers are interested in selling flash games… Again, its that dependency on the existing flash game monetization model. The truly odd part is that customers don't give a hoot about what language the game is coded in. They just want to play it, if its good. And some of the titles these teams are putting together are bloody good.