I’ve spent all of 2012 trying to break into the HTML5 mobile game market, and with my financial success of late I feel like I’m in a good position to offer insight to others. While I know developers that have been licensing their HTML5 mobile games to publishers since early 2011, I certainly joined the market when it was young. As a result, I have benefited from the limited supply of content available to companies looking for cross-platform HTML5 games. But just how good does your game need to be to make $100, $1000, or more? Well, you might be surprised.
First though, it’s worth mentioning what type of content these publishers are looking for. Most are looking to establish themselves better in the mobile space so HTML5 is a logical choice for companies that have a primarily web-based audience. Remember that “normal” mobile games are downloaded from a platform like the Apple AppStore or Google Play and then installed on the device, whereas HTML5 games are played directly in a web browser. This means that publishers can keep players on their portal while providing a seamless mobile experience. Given the limited and fading support for Adobe Flash on mobile, HTML5 is really the only option available to web-based game portals that want a taste of the ever-growing mobile audience.
The actual types of games that publishers want vary from portal to portal, but typically family-friendly casual games are what they’re looking for. The HTML5 market mirrors the early Flash market so closely that you could take pretty much any Flash game, copy it, and make money from it. I haven’t resorted to this option myself though as I’m working at an even more basic level.
I’ve spent 2012 recreating common puzzle games, arcade games, and even card games. And they are making money. It’s amazing. I mean, even my sliding puzzle Picture Shifter has made over $2000 now!
Why do these types of games even sell at all? To explain, it’s worth keeping in mind that the game itself is never actually sold to players. No one is going to to pay to play Tic-Tac-Toe. The actual process is simple: the publisher licenses your game for a fee, which allows them to legally place it on their portal, where they direct players to play for free. They then make their money back via on-page advertising or some other method.
But that still doesn’t explain why such basic games are of interest to publishers. Again it comes down to the simple fact that there is not enough supply to meet demand. HTML5 developers can get away with shipping low-end games because there are so few quality games to compete with, and publishers are desperate for web-based mobile content.
This revelation leads us to the last major question: why aren’t developers making high-quality games?
In short, the money isn’t there. While I have extensive access to publishers from around the globe, I only ever pitch my new games to a score of them. The others either pay too poorly or are just non-responsive to the point where they aren’t worth pursuing. But even out of the remaining publishers, few will stretch their budget for a quality game. The best game in my growing portfolio may fetch only a few hundred more dollars than the worst one, or even less!
Consider one of my few public games, Hi-Lo. This obviously simplistic card game was made in just 9 hours and has gone on to make over $3000. In contrast, a small team of skilled developers with access to the same publishers as me spent months creating a high-quality HTML5 mobile game that went on to only make an uninspiring thousand dollars or so.
Publishers do not pay for quality.
At least, not yet. As the market grows in size and larger companies like Microsoft enter the scene more seriously, this scenario will most certainly reverse itself and the HTML5 market will begin to look more like the current Flash one.
The window for making a quick dollar with HTML5 is slowly closing but there is still time to join. The difficulty is knowing where to start. Resources like my upcoming eBook “Making Money With HTML5″ should help with that, though even as the market develops there will be plenty of potential to monetize HTML5. There are currently thousands of games portals that still don’t have a mobile presence. Unless they want to be left behind, they’re going to need one.
Invest in HTML5 now and get ready to cash in on the inevitable flood of demand.
Matthew
Portals generally want quantity over quality because their model is all about having players rapidly churn through multiple games (ads). Since retention on the mobile web sucks, there’s no point in building a large game if players don’t play it more than once. There’s a whole different breed of portals (mostly social networks) that are cracking the retention problem and monetizing with IAP, where quality is actually important.
I’ve definitely considered developing a social game to satisfy that market as well, but I’m not a fan of revenue shares so have avoided them as much as possible.
I totally hear you on the quality issue. I spent too much time on my past project (although I learned a lot in the process.) I’m looking forward to making smaller, casual puzzle-type and/or basic games. Not only are they easier to produce, they’re usually not as heavy on the processor (a plus for mobile devices.) I’m hoping to read more of this kind of content in the ebook.
Dexter recently posted..Aegis… Complete!
Thanks Dexter!
“Publishers do not pay for quality.”
Well, I’m pretty sure they prefer your smooth and polished games over a game with poorly hand-drawed graphics and jerky physics =P
Haha, well polish is not all that’s needed for a high-quality game
I think your analysis is good, but that there’s a little more that can be said about it:
HTML5 is still emerging. Why build something sophisticated when you’re end users’ browser may not support it well? 99% of end users don’t care whether it’s Flash, HTML5, the Unity web plugin, or a traditional desktop app, all they know is “this is how you get to the game to play it” — and browsing to a web page is the easiest thing for them.
Devices and inputs. Someone on a cell phone playing an HTML5 game probably doesn’t want to play Final Fantasy, because it’s too time consuming and requires paying attention to a lengthy and complicated story, and can’t play Galaga or Asteroids very well because they’re not well suited to the inputs available on a cell phone. Simple games that are a fun distraction and can engage the player on a level that doesn’t require deep thinking and strategy, but which they can pick up and put down easily, and which can be controlled well on the device they’re played on, are desirable for this market, and this market is far broader than the market who will be interested in playing deep, sophisticated games.
As your response to one of the comments above alludes, there are differences in perception of quality. Quality to most casual players means an attractive graphical presentation, and not crashing or having other bugs, and is fun to play for a couple minutes at a stretch. Quality to a more serious gamer probably starts involving things like depth, sophistication, replayability, and so on. But if both types of player are going to return the same amount or revenue, and you’re into making games for the money, then it makes little sense to go after the smaller market who wants the more expensive to develop games.
Now, these are basic truths, and what’s hard to accept as a game designer is that people would rather play this sort of game than your groundbreaking innovative idea that you’d really like to spend lots of time developing to show off what a creative mind you are. But if you think like an average user, it makes sense. It’s just a matter of whether you are motivated to make the kind of games YOU want to play, as I imagine many indie devs are, or if you’re motivated by a desire to create popular games that will make you money.
I think you present a strong case for doing the simple games now. It makes a great deal of sense — it’s quicker, it makes you more money, which can potentially fund the bigger projects we’re all dreaming of making, and it will help you hone the skills you’ll need to tackle the harder projects, and accomplish them more efficiently so that when the market is ready for them, perhaps they’ll make you money as well.
csanyk recently posted..Game Maker Studio 1.1 released
Wow, that comment is probably half the size of this blog post
Thanks for posting your thoughts!
it is incredible, you polish your low-quality games and people pays to play them
but i cant understand the payment system
is it something like paypal
“The actual process is simple: the publisher licenses your game for a fee, which allows them to legally place it on their portal, where they direct players to play for free.”
So, I get paid (usually with PayPal, yes) and the publisher gets to distribute my work.
Do you license the same game to multiple publishers? Is it something like 1 year license? Does this licensing work well only for games which are optimized for small screen / smartphones?
Yeah, I license each game so multiple publishers. Typically indefinitely, sometimes for a period of time.