Over the past two years, we have been working together with developers and platforms around the world to remove barriers to the web game publishing field. Through this trip, our team learned a lot and I want to share some of these results and organize these highlights in a series of articles. We are going to talk about distribution, minetization and web games.
In this first post, I want to talk to HTML5 games and where to sell them. This is our first competition on this complex issue, and if you find it useful, be the latest with the rest of the series.
So you have a game, ideally multiple, and all of them are hosted on a platform. A couple of platforms may be. Usually when we talk to developers, these are the reasons they give to choose specific hosting services:
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Organic Traffic – This platform has many users, who are discovering our game and spends a lot of time with it.
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Thanks for the weird positioning of our platform we are getting extra eye hair in our game!
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No marketing costs-We spend no money on marketing, which is a kind of insanity in mobile stores and more saturation. This is, clearly, a dream.
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Minatization – We are now receiving taxes here.
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Easy-We can create a hyper comfortable game under a month and start earning immediately.
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Web – can start playing on any device at any time using the platform.
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There is no restriction in the area – there are no questions. It only works where I live.
Well, so it’s all right and dandy, but still the question remains, what do I do with all these games? Do I just keep running them forever? Well, there are always some challenges for this, here are some:
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The long tail is not long.
There is no way to go down. We have learned this difficult way. Most of the graphs (which they hesitate to show you) will mostly look like this. A spike and then slowly death.
Photo by the author.
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Hard moderation and competition
It is becoming more and more difficult to publish a new game on our selection platform. The increase in requirements and sanctions is mostly due to the growth of competition. More and more games are being uploaded on the platform every day, and our games are still squeezing.
You can say, “Well, I’m just going to create a new game, and I’ll continue to build these new sports, grab the waves and take advantage of them.” However, creating a new game requires time and money. Even if you work alone, it will still take time and there is no guarantee that your idea is going to work.
The fourth reason is that you do not know what is going to happen. You just don’t Instead of keeping all your eggs in one basket and expecting the best, why not diversify, and help yourself make more money in new places.
Let’s summarize. You have a lot of sports, they are local in English, and can work on the web. You know they are profitable, you know that there are plenty of maintaining and ad, and you know people like them. So here comes the next question – what can you publish?
Where can we publish?
I’m not going to waste the air to please you to make a game for the web. However, I want to give you some numbers to use because you see Fit appropriate to find out what to publish.
Development time: 1-3 months. Including testing.
Cost: Less than $ 10 000.
Competition: Monkey Mart (300 meters plays), Level Devil (83 meters plays), Stackman Hook (574 meters plays), subway surfers (1b drama).
The last row of numbers was taken by Poké Poki Rap from the offer presented to the Defold Community. Yes, subway surfers are present, but the other games on the list are very few. Although they have good quality of quality, so remember, try to continue – when you go older.
Where can we publish?
I consider the web game distribution market as an ultimate pyramid.
Photo through the author/related brands.
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Here is a top -Tier that includes platforms like Poké and Crazy Games. Pokée has about 30 million monthly active users (MAU) – this is the matriculation that is traditionally used to calculate ordinary platform audiences. 700 billion gameplay/month on Poki. Similar numbers are played in 30 Mao and 300 million games monthly in the Craise Games.
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The middle layer is all kinds of other platforms. This includes the choice of Y8, Congridate, and New Grounds.
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And then these are the gatherings, such as gamonites, gampics, game distribution. For example, there are more than 2000 web publishers on the game distribution platform.
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. This Ultimate Pyramid is what the platform you want to think about about the web game market, so you don’t go through this platform. The fact is that under this peak there is another place for web games that has been hidden for years.
Photo through the author/related brands.
Again, let me take a moment to break it.
First we have websites. See the graph from the status quo below. In the year 2021, the 1.88 billion website was launched. All these websites launch and die, a large number of them growing, maturity and gradually reduce their influence. This last part of their journey is something we are most interested in!
Photo through the author/related brands.
When businesses believe that their website life is close to their end, they need to find ways to resurrect their user base. Another reason for pushing them towards sports – they need to find new ways to display ads. Games often become an excellent source for it, attract consumers and increase the return on advertising costs (ROA). It is not only becoming part of a strategy for small websites, but also a major media platform like the New York Times.
Social media platform, chat platform, streaming platform – all these places are embracing sports! Decard has games, Viber has games, even LinkedIn they have games. It is possible to thank HTML5, and the way this content can be easily integrated into any online service. Even places like Wikipedia can potentially find a place for sports.
Note about mobile stores
In addition to these common platforms, there are also web app stores, such as the Chrome Web Store, where you can potentially distribute sports. To this, you can use packaging tools like electron. You can also go to mobile stores like App Store and Google Play. Currently there are 250,068 mobile games on Google Play, with large publishers supporting the top earning with deep pockets.
This is mathematics for you. If you post on mobile, you need to invest at least 25 % of the budget in marketing, as well as pay 15-30 % service fee for each dollar income. If you choose to sign up with a publisher, be prepared for 30/70 spillets, where 70 % of the publisher pockets. This cost is completely impossible for many developers.
Keeping this in mind, the basic opportunity seems to be very high. With billions of websites and easily smooth integration all over the world, why do we restrict ourselves to selected platforms, and not diversify our distribution?
Beyond this path. How do you get this sweet new audience on the web?
The challenges of self -publishing
It should be easy on paper. You go to Poké and crazy sports, they approve your game, and you get benefits. However, practitioners will know that almost Immediately will be immediately subjected to denial, or they will only ignore you and will never return. This is mostly due to quality problems.
Moderation on these platforms is generally done at two levels: technical compatibility and IP compatibility.
Technical requirements are usually quite strict, and they require key features such as safe system, player development, advertising minetization (banners, sales, award -winning), sports shopping, social features (share, invite friends, add information, add information, add information, and etc.).
IP Compatibility is an overview of all the content in your game. The platform needs to ensure that there is no material that violates the rights of their legitimate owners. It can be quite limited, especially for titles that have no original material.
It is worth noting that even if you go through a moderate process on a platform, you still have to do for the competing: big and small. The more you go, the more the requirements are reduced, but the risk is so high that the project will not make any money.
Don’t lose opportunity
It doesn’t matter how you are going to deal with these challenges, I will encourage you to do this. The main reason you wait for, the more opportunities you are going to miss. The way the web games are developing today, the new markets have the potential to become a wonderful new adventure for the gateway and the industry.
How to do it – this is another question. I see three options so far:
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You can do it yourself Get a separate employee, or be an employee, who will attack each platform, see every store and collector and try to get there yourself. It’s time, but you will learn a lot.
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Publisher publishers are expensive, you will lose a lot of money, but if they pick you up, you believe your game is worth it and you will be making money. But note that the publisher will probably take more than 70 % of it.
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Sports distribution and minetization platform. To work in such a wide and scattered market, new and effective tools are essential. At Playgama.com, we are raising such vision. It is a united platform that connects the entire web and serves as a wider potential network gateway to distributors and platforms around the world (we talk about thousands of people), both gaming and non -gaming. I believe this is the future, and it’s coming very soon.
We enter a new phase in the method of recreation. This new phase will not only interfere with the way of accessing sports, but also in the ways that we make and distribute them. We are on the brink of a major explosion for game developers and publishers. Pie is bigger than you think!
Photo through the author/related brands.
