2019 with Construct 3. Is there a way to monetize web based games out of the box?

well yea impressions would not be easy to sustain.. more specifically, I'm looking for IAP support. Many many web games out there leverage this ability. Web ads / banners are not likely to be big money makers for say, an RPG.. but rewarded ads? opt in commercials / surveys.. etc. These would likely be able to yield better results.

Seeing how prevalent this form of monetization is, I would imagine that Construct itself would offer a recommended path.

Even tying itself to a single platform would be great if that could help insure that making a successful web based game. Kongregate for example (i would imagine) would be a great option to explore.

They host a number of games that Construct could absolutely do, but can't realistically be expected to be explored if there is no reasonable way to make the game profitable.

I am just surprised that there has not been something natively provided by Scirra, or that there hasn't been more of a demand for this possibility with a platform that literally makes WEB GAMES.. lol :)

In that case, there are other possibilities. I know Google play support IAP and I assume others like the Microsoft store does. But, you're talking about pure web based games so, here's one option.

PayPal, and I assume others, have what's called and Instant Payment Notification. The way the IPN works is, the customer clicks on the PayPal button and it takes them to the PayPal site to make the purchase. Once that transaction is complete, PayPal contacts a URL that you designate. In my case, I have it contact a PHP script. With the data that PayPal sends, I generate registration keys for some software that I sell and then, add all that data to a MySQL database.

Google also offers something like this with Google Pay

support.bluesnap.com/docs/google-pay

So essentially, there are payment methods out there that you can customize to do pretty much whatever you want, it just takes the skills to make the back end work.

As for locking into one particular payment method, I disagree. One of the axioms of the internet is that nothing lasts forever. The minute you lock yourself into one provider or source, your success is bound by their success. The minute they fail, so do you.

Might make a feature suggestion, or vote for this one:

construct3.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C3-I-239

That's cool. Paypal would be nice. Also I agree locking into just one is not ideal, but what I would hope is that C3 itself could offer a solution so we don't have to get into PHP and other technologies. Like I was saying, I know it CAN be done with the right know how, but many of us do not have that know how and are not likely to ever get it.. that's why we're using Construct. :)

I mean heck.. Scirra already has an arcade. THEY could make their own platform and allow us Construct users to make games for it and have a home grown IAP system that works with Construct!

I know Scirra might throw up their arms and say "we don't want to get into that" but they already have the platform. we're just talking about having 1-2 web revenue solutions. I'm not downplaying that the feature would not be trivial, but you gotta admit it's not revolutionary either in terms of complexity. This is very tried and true technology.

This opens up a seriously exciting new space for existing construct users and future construct users to realize they could make their own web games.. either porting existing mobile games to web with IAP or understand now they could make web games that give them a hell of a lot more space to work with than mobile..

Even comparing it to Steam it's a whole other dynamic.. no longer requiring a local installation or having to be used through steam.. games that could be accessed from anywhere (even mobile, if done right) so yea I'm finding very few downsides to this feature consideration.

Well, one thing you may not be considering is that once a company gets into processing money transactions a whole new can of worms open up. You essentially become a banking institution. And that requires a whole new team of experts to manage and a whole new set of constantly changing regulations to keep up with. I'd rather the guys focus on what they're good at, making a programming IDE.

And yes, I understand that learning other languages like PHP and JS for that matter can be a daunting task for those that have never written code. However, you write code any time you use Construct. If you've made even one game you already understand the logic of booleans, for loops, while statements, string variables and a whole host of other programming standards. Learning a new programming language is just a matter of syntax. When I first learned programming in BASIC on a TRS-80 Mod 1, it involved me sitting in a high school chemistry room closet with the computer and the manual for six weeks. And many of those terms above, I learned from that experience and still apply to languages today.

Construct will never be a end all be all solution. It can't be. No IDE is. Even high level languages like C# still need external resources to function. The program I told you I sell, it's written in Delphi, a flavor of Pascal. But I still need PHP scripts on the back end to handle everything from registrations to help files. The game I'm working on now, it requires a PHP back end to handle registrations and send HTML back and forth to the client. And most likely, I'm going to need to learn how to create a WebSockets server for the chat feature using either C# or node.JS.

You can create a game in Construct. That's what it's designed to do and it does it well. If you want to get serious about this and make it a livelihood, you'll need to crack open a few books.

Well, Scirra has admob/mobile ads plugin, so it's kind of absurd that they don't have anything like that for HTML5 games Why not a CPM Star plugin which was the main ad provider during Flash days and it worked extremely well.

You can put Adsense on your own site, as long as it adheres to their placement policy.

Not especially easy to do with a web game of course.

Most platforms have an owner - for example Android is owned by Google. On these platforms the owner usually provides a store with payments, ads etc.

The web has no owner. In other ways this is a big strength, but on this point, it means there isn't one organisation who provides a store with payments, ads etc. Instead there are dozens and dozens of different organisations and services all vying to be "the app store of the web" or some other equivalent, but in practice it's a highly fragmented market with nobody in any dominant position.

We only have a few developers, and integrating services can be a huge amount of work and then have high on-going maintenance costs. For example integrating Facebook Instant Games was a big project taking months, still doesn't cover the entire available API, and occasionally requires us to drop everything and go and quickly fix something that got broken because they changed something about their service.

Given our very limited resources and the vast array of services out there, it's simply not feasible for us to cover even a fraction of them. This is exactly the purpose of the Addon SDK: it allows third-party developers to come along and integrate Construct with their services without us even having to be involved.

There are some addons out there already, such as for Lagged.com. In other cases you can ask the organisation to write their own addon with our SDK, or if you have the capability, write an addon yourself, or hire someone else to do it.

All great input and your point about it opening a can of worms is noted, but if they leveraged a service like paypal which granted is a single solution, is reasonably safe to assume isn't going to go away anytime soon.

and let's just be clear about the purpose I have in mind. I (and i imagine others) want to make an rpg game that players could play for free and offer IAP. Alternatively rewarded videos would be a nice alternative as well. Not talking MMORPG. A single player game possibly with some leaderboards but that's not critical and not part of the scope of this proposal.

I would think a service like paypal would keep that heavy lifting out of Scirra's hands.

Yes this is true that using construct does teach the basic principles of coding to us and this does help, but it's still a detraction from making the game. ideally i'd like to think i could put all of my energy into the game and allow Construct / Scirra to help smooth the edges of monetization on web games just like they have for mobile and to a lesser extent PC (because steam is an option to sell a game that way)

I do see your point though about the scope of Construct, but I still say that Scirra could do well to create their own platform and give the entire community the power to make deeper games outside of mobile and that's really what it comes down too.. what I'm asking for isn't something Construct can't do.. it does it with mobile.. I'd just say that if they could leverage a service like paypal, they could give us a powerful new platform to develop on.

To the other points about addstar and such.. yea i'm not so much thinking of casual flash games that could be propagated and shared. I remember mochiads and had a few flash games back when that was a thing. I don't want to make a game that requires impressions to make money.. rewarded videos would be nice though. Though I see that being more like IAP where upon completion of ad, you get some kind of currency for your time.

One issue with IAP is you have to have a backend, and that requires server storage, and that's a whole other can of worms.

Speaking of currency, something like Facebook's Crypto currency might be a viable option.

Screw bitcoin though, that stuffs toxic.

You could also take a look at HTML5 AdSense for games from Google: support.google.com/adsense/answer/7170212

It will require a bit of JavaScript, but now that is also possible to use inside Construct 3 without plugins. Note: I have not tried using this myself.