Ideas to monetize HTML5 Games

thanks but, what about facebook games?

facebook games have an option to monetize via

• ads
• virtual goods
• selling rights to publishers

whether a game will monetize or not is an entire different topic.

The two methods I would personally recommend are as follows.

Firstly, sponsorships. Licensing your work to publishers brings in a lot of money, but as mentioned earlier in this thread there are not a lot of them around. However, this means there isn't a supply for the few companies that have the demand, so if you can find publishers you can get a high fee for games of fairly average quality.

Consider that this game took me 9 hours to make and has made over $3000 in license fees:

http://truevalhalla.com/mobile/hilo/

Secondly, if I were to adopt a different monetization method I would create a high-quality game in the style of Tribal Wars, or Ogame; that is, a competitive multiplayer browser-based game.

These types of games can be created much easier using HTML5, and can be distributed very easily through the same companies that pay for sponsorships (and those that rely on ad revenue.) The game would be monetized with in-app purchases or something like an optional subscription model.

I'm actually prototyping a project similar to the above. If it goes well, I'll distribute it through my network of publisher contacts and be able to reach hundreds of thousands of players overnight.

Finally, while I won't be doing this myself, other HTML5 devs find success through contract work. If you can find it, it pays very well.

Awesome article, it makes me wonder where did you sell your license fee?

Now that we are fully into 2013, I am hoping there are some new perspectives on the monetization issue.

I think at this point, we are all pretty much in agreement that none of us are here to become billionaires, but we would at least like to quit our jobs at Burger Town.

This is not to say that one of us won't create the next Angry Birds- I am simply saying that we are curious to see if anybody using C2 can expect to make any sort of money at all. I read the Bottom Feeder article that I was directed to, and then looked at True Valhalla's page.

My goal is to make $2000 a month using C2. I know it won't be right away, and I know it will take some self-promoting to reach that goal.

What I AM asking is this: Am I wasting my time with C2 when I should be using Unity or UDK? And yes, I am a 3D artist, so that's not such a stretch for me. I have seen numerous games on the ios and android store that are "Powered by Unity," but thus far, I've seen nothing on C2.

From the sound of it, some of the folks here are telling me that C2 is simply my way of creating that 2D sidescroller I've always wanted to play, that's it's only a hobby tool.

If so, that's disappointing. I love C2, and I would rather use it than Unity.

Now that it's May of 2013, what are your UPDATED opinions?

havenrocket - the reason there aren't as many C2 games on iOS or android as unity or udk is because they have a huge head start. The first version of unity was released in 2005 and the first version of unreal engine was in 1998, and then opened up as udk in 2009. The first public version of C2 - which was more of a preview, really, as it couldn't make much more than pong - was released in 2011. It's only relatively recently that C2 has gotten to the point of being ready to properly make games with, and now that it is, it's going to take a while for people to make games with it.

C2 isn't only a hobby tool, there are people making money with it already. If you want to make a 2D game, regardless of the genre, C2 can do it. I hear unity is quite clumsy to work with in 2D. I haven't heard much about udk so I can't comment.

Just remember mobile hardware is vastly inferior to desktop hardware, and design your game within those limitations.

Arima

Thank you so much for putting that into perspective. I was beginning to become worried by the negativity in some of the posts I was finding. I won't name names, but some people nearly made me want to give up on designing games altogether, what with talking about third party code wrappers and the futility of trying and whatnot. I feel like I had already given up on Unity and UDK because my strengths lie in 3D modelling and writing. I didn't want to give up on Construct2 as well...

I'm not the world's greatest programmer, so even C2 can be challenging to me. For example, to immerse myself, I'm trying to modify Yann's Simple Simon game so that you can use the keyboard instead of the mouse, but I have no idea where to properly inject the events! After a week of watching the April courses, I feel like I'm getting closer, which is great, because I tried searching for the same thing in Unity and broke down weeping like a little kid with a skinned knee.

After making my earlier post, I was pleased to discover that C2 is working with Steam now, so that's also reassuring. I also saw your game on Youtube while doing tutorials, and I love it! Ria reminds me of my little sister, so of course I would be partial! Loot Pursuit FTW!

(And Making 2d in Unity and UDK isn't so hard- it's really just a matter of locking the camera along a particular axis and building your game along that axis. Things like top-downs and sidescrollers are generally simple, because nominally, you're just shooting things or collecting things. A game like snake, however, is a NIGHTMARE.)