So it's been a while since I posted anything about Trinhex and Blockdown, the two flash games I made last year, so it is probably time for an update on how they have performed.

So when I had last posted about Trinhex, back in June, it had just been released after about four months of being available for sponsorship. The game didn't appear to attract much of any interest from sponsors on Flash Game License in the time it was up there; although it did get its fair share of views, it didn't get any bids. This could be as much a reflection on the genre than the game, with colour-matching games not being on the top of many people wish lists. The sponsor I did get was via posting the game over on mochi.

That Primary license went for $400. This was initially for an ad-free release, but a short while afterwards I was allowed to release it with ads. To date the ad revenue from mochi on Trinhex is $22.56, form 51k ad impressions (but of course I'm not likely to see the mochi money for a looong time, as they only pay out once you reach a minimum of $100 with them, and my current total to date is only $35.94, with a recent average of $0.03/day from only double figure impressions. It will take a few new games for them to ever pay out).

The game also sold one site-lock Secondary license, which went for $120.

It also went up on Mindjolt in November, which required adding in their new advertisement system. This put the game up on a number of social networking sites, but the only one of any interest is of course Facebook. So far that has generated over $445, of which $387 was paid out. Mindjolt also only pay out in minimum $100 intervals, so I'll need to make another $42 before I get paid again (and I am averaging about $0.12 to $0.20 a day recently).
Most of this success was from the game being on the main Mindjolt app page, but they also eventually released it as a standalone app on Facebook. This was apparently supposed to have generated a good bit of new traffic, as other games have done very well with it, but I haven't noticed any difference. So again I am unlikely to see the rest of that money unless I submit a new game, or a flood of new traffic miraculously comes in.

It terms of views and plays, Trinhex has totalled 607k views and 707k plays. Of those 388k and 484k, respectively, were from Mindjolt. There is a slight discrepancy in those numbers as Mindjolts own metrics show 532k gameplays, which is a 9% difference from those shown by Playtomic, but a bit a difference is to be expected as Playtomic is an external service and you can't be guaranteed a connection. Incidentally, Mindjolt also show 431k ad impressions, which makes for an eCPM of $1.03, not bad at all!


The last (and first) time I talked about Blockdown it was still available for sponsorship on FGL. Since the game is similar to Trinhex in many respects it suffered the same fate, if not worse (this will be a bit of a theme), on that site. It was up on FGL for longer, received fewer views and did not end up with any serious bids and ultimately went without a Primary sponsorship deal. In the end I got tired of waiting and decided to release the game myself with ads to try and earn at least something.

But that wasn't entirely the reason I decided stop waiting and release. I had an offer from Mindjolt for a site-lock version of the game. This was a deal for $400! But in order to take that the game had to be released. I waited a small amount of time to see if there were any last minute bids, using the Last-Call feature on FGL to get some last minute attention, but none appeared.

This deal meant that Mindjolt would get all ad revenue from the game, whereas if you go via the normal submission system there is a 50/50 split between Mindjolt and developer. This means they would be getting about $2 eCPM and so they needed at least 200k impressions to break even. While I don't have access to the same internal gameplay/impression metrics that I do for Trinhex, I do have Playtomic to tell me that Blockdown has done at least 342k views and 326k plays on Mindjolt alone. So they at the very least have made their money back.

The interesting thing to note about those numbers, which are also reflected in the total numbers, is that the number of plays is less than the number of views. This is a bit odd and indicates that something isn't quite right.
The total numbers are 454k views and 395k plays; meaning that in the non-mindjolt numbers there is a wider disparity.

There were certainly people for who their Flash player wasn't up to date enough and so they could never have played the game in the first place, but still would have registered a view. But that only amounted to about two thousand views.

It could be that people did play but quit very early and so the 'play' never registered (I would have to check the specifics of the version of the API I was using at the time to see if that was a possibility). The 'bounce' rate, how many people quit within the first 30 seconds of a game, was higher for Blockdown, at 22.4%, compared to Trinhex at 14.5%.

It may be that people took one look at the main screen and decided not to play at all.

Or... there was a bug, which prevented people playing at all. It would be unfortunate if it was this.

Blockdown went up on Mindjolt exactly one week before Trinhex, but as you can see did not do as well. It also has a lower overall average play time at 5:30, compared to 12:30 for Trinhex. I attribute this to the fact that as a continuous game (as opposed to Trinhexs 5 matches per level) the game board was too static.

I had made a conscious decision to not have cascading pieces after a match, ala Bejewled, instead just respawning pieces where the old pieces were matched. Another limiting aspect I feel was that you only ever matched four pieces. This ended up making the game too... well, boring.

I have these rectified in a prototype for a different game that uses the same basic matching concept, which I think is much more interesting. Whether or not that will ever see the light of day is if I can decided on a graphical theme that will work.

As far as non-Mindjolt money goes, for ad revenue from the 'primary' release it has earned a whopping $9.35, from all of 35k impressions. So even with a better paying ad system than mochi, 'self sponsoring' a colour matching puzzle game just isn't worth it unless you have your own games portal to pimp, or you have a nice site-lock deal ready to take!

The game also won $100 dollars from FGLs mobile Flash for Android competition. It was really more of a 'taking part' prize than a real 'prize'.


So... all in all the two games have totalled approximately $1,510, of which I've been paid $1,407. After commissions, transaction fees, and various exchange rates at different times that comes to €945 into my bank account.

I think I can be reasonably happy with that and with over 1.1 millions combined gameplays for the two games. But of course there is much room for improvement, and I hopefully those improvement will be made!