It's been just over six weeks since I released my first attempt at monetising a complete flash game, Pompetaire, out into the wild. This game just had a pre-loader ad attached (no attempts at finding sponsorship were made) and was uploaded to Kongregate (no ads), Newgrounds and added to Mochi's distribution list.

To date the game has earned a grand total of.... wait for it..... $2.37!
$0.85 of that comes from Kongregate from 666 plays (35% of a total revenue of $2.42) all of which were mostly from the first week, with the rest, $1.52, coming from MochiAds from just under five thousand ad impressions. Over a third of the mochi earnings came from a single site, onlinespiele24.org, which only picked up the game over three weeks after the game was first released.

Suffice to say the game never "gained traction", to borrow Metaplace's phrase, with reviews being decidedly average, hovering just above the 50% mark.

So all in all a failure!

But with every failure there are lessons to be learnt, some of which I had in mind when putting together my next game Trinhex.

This is a colour matching game based upon Raph Koster's original game Wheelwright


This time I decided to take the sponsorship/licensing route by using FlashGameLicense.com, which can provide the potential of a few thousand US dollars per game, assuming you can manage to entice a sponsor to put in a bid. So far the game has been available to potential sponsors for just over two weeks now with no solid offers, but it is still considered too early to say how it will do. It may take up to a month or two before the right sponsor comes along.

In the mean time I am working away on game number 3...