Do you often play Flash games?

August 30, 2005 1:27 PM

We all know that MeFi likes flash games, and there are many, many out there, but the people that make them earn pitiful amounts of money. Right?
posted by cleverusername (18 comments total)

All's I know is that if I was the dude who created Tetris, I would use my millions to build a ridiculous mansion made out of giant Tetris blocks.
posted by Robot Johnny at 1:48 PM on August 30, 2005

Nice post! The last link also leads to this fairly interesting article about "virtual commerce" and why it is no different from "real" commerce.
posted by voltairemodern at 1:52 PM on August 30, 2005

I hate it when articles bring up Snood like it's jewel of indie-game-design brilliance. It's a rip-off of Bust-a-Move by Namco with much worse graphics.
posted by sonofsamiam at 1:57 PM on August 30, 2005

oh lord, voltairemodern, didn't get that far in the magazine yet... that link is almost NSFW :P
posted by cleverusername at 2:02 PM on August 30, 2005

i don't necessarily agree that "casual games are so far off the industry radar, hardcore designers don't even bother to sneer." games are games, and all game designers i know pay attention to games that get a lot of play. alien hominid is great example of the internet as cheap testing ground for experiments that can't command immediate monetary attention
posted by gnutron at 2:04 PM on August 30, 2005

Can we just have someone do a post highlighting the whole issue each time it comes out? Without fail, it happens each time Escapist comes out.

Here. Sign up yourself and YOU TOO can post a link to it every two weeks!
posted by AspectRatio at 2:13 PM on August 30, 2005

Wow, I'm glad I never got sucked into MMPORG's so much that I began a virtual business. My wife already thinks I spend way too much time on the internets.

By the way, what possible fun can you have with virtual panties? No wait, I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that.
posted by fenriq at 2:13 PM on August 30, 2005

I hate it when articles bring up Snood like it's jewel of indie-game-design brilliance. It's a rip-off of Bust-a-Move by Namco with much worse graphics.

This article mentioned that, I think.

I think that a lot of the market for these sorts of casual games is driven by cell phone and PDA use, which is a relatively new area for game development. There's no reason to believe that, over the long term, game development will follow the same trends here as it did with desktop and console games.

Finally, I think that games like Bejeweled and Snood are so atypical in their popularity as to be useless as examples of the "casual game" world. There are thousands of "casual" games, made by thousands of developers, and most of these will never have a tenth of that kind of market share. This kind of situation doesn't exist in the "regular" computer gaming world because of the expense and complexity of most desktop and console games.
posted by me & my monkey at 2:15 PM on August 30, 2005

Can I mention how annoying the escapist's website design is? It's not print, get over it.
posted by signal at 2:20 PM on August 30, 2005

Escapist has to take the cake, though, for having some of the smallest "articles" I've ever seen. In most places, that amount would be a lead-in.
posted by mystyk at 2:21 PM on August 30, 2005

I think that IS just a lead in. Try clicking on the prev and next buttons on the bottom right.
posted by fnerg at 2:31 PM on August 30, 2005

Ok, that makes me feel considerably better, but in my opinion the layout for the interface is horrid.
posted by mystyk at 2:35 PM on August 30, 2005

Those "casual games" - the puzzles and Mahjongg tilesets and card games and Breakout clones and match-three Bejeweled-type things - are downloaded, and sell, in numbers some game gods only dream about.

then, later in the article:

In fact, though, most newcomers fail dismally. The many reasons include lack of patience, lack of originality (the world doesn't need another Breakout clone), and lack of marketing.

It's like they start out the article by saying, "Lookie! Here's an exciting new market where you can make bank with little to no effort!", then end it by saying, "Well, it's actually not that easy, and relatively few people have made any money at all."

Myself, I get paid for making cheesy flash games all day, but they're all used in an advertising context. They add value to a brand, rather than having any intrinsic value themselves. Casual gaming seems like a bright new wonderland because a few people have made some good money at it, but I don't think it'll ever get as big as "real" gaming.
posted by fnerg at 2:47 PM on August 30, 2005

Itereeeesting.

*rews up compiler*
posted by spazzm at 7:37 PM on August 30, 2005

Myself, I get paid for making cheesy flash games all day, but they're all used in an advertising context. They add value to a brand, rather than having any intrinsic value themselves. Casual gaming seems like a bright new wonderland because a few people have made some good money at it, but I don't think it'll ever get as big as "real" gaming.

So you're the one who designs "shoot the ninja and win an iPod?"
posted by Citizen Premier at 8:30 PM on August 30, 2005

This article got me to subscribe to the escapist. I'll take bad page layout for good content any day. With regard to making money off casual games, I would say that the absolute most important thing is slow growth, as seen in the article. Recently, venture capitalists and game companies started to realize that cell phone games could be worth a lot of money. So they poured money into it and started charging too much for games. No one buys the games. Instead the $1 or $2 simple games sell the most. Large up-front costs in games is becoming less and less attractive. I personally refuse to buy any game for $40, but I have absolutely no problem paying $15 a month for an mmo, and I bet others are the same.

When I pay a large up front cost, my brain associates that with some sort of Good. I want something tangible and long lasting, which games frankly aren't. When I pay a low, recurring fee, I associate that with a Service. I'm paying people to devote their energies to pleasing me, and I feel better about it. I doubt I'm the only person who thinks this way, and this is why I'm very worried about the high upfront cost of new console games (supposedly going up to $70). I don't want Goods, I want Services.
posted by JZig at 12:54 AM on August 31, 2005

We all know that MeFi likes flash games

No we don't. MeFi hates flash games and wishes they would all return to the sump of banality they rose from.
posted by Mo Nickels at 6:26 AM on August 31, 2005

Thanks for that, good article. I, too, subscribed.

Somewhere, I have all those nearly-completely-debugged versions of Breakout, Space Invaders, and Viking Rune Reading games I wrote when I was learning Visual Basic...

(dusts off pile of ancient CDs...)
posted by cleardawn at 2:03 PM on August 31, 2005