Making money with HTML5 games

It’s been 6 months since the last guide about monetization was written. Considering how fast things are moving with HTML5 games, it’s timely to write a new one. Please note, this guide chooses the path of least resistance to the money.

Chrome Web Store

Probably the easiest to begin with. Host your game, run ads on it. Two ad networks to trust are

If you’re feeling brave, try out Google’s In-App Payments API. It might take an hour to figure out and a few more to integrate with your game. That is, assuming that your game actually functions well with in-app purchases.

Being featured matters a lot in the Web Store.

A normal featured game fetches about 1000 plays/day. A game featured on the front page of the games section, right at the top gets about 60,000 plays/day, or 60x.

Google loves it when you showcase what their engineers have built. If you want to get your game featured, remember to integrate some of Google’s APIs: WebGL, Chrome Fullscreen, Web Audio, etc. You can’t obviously integrate all of them, but having a few will give you a boost over other game devs. Once you’re ready, start pitching playable games to Google developer advocates. You can find them all here.

Costs: your server hosting fees, integration time and pitching time

iOS and Android

Deploy your game using one of the many wrapper engines out there, like appMobi, Ludei’s CocoonJS, GameClosure and Spaceport.

Ludei seems to be the only one publicly telling the world how great their engine is. They’ve got the entire monetization suite ( iAds and in-app purchases ), which is always a bonus for developers.

The upside is, once you manage to successfully master one of the engines above, you get access to virtually 100% of the mobile app market. Whether people will actually download your game is an entirely different topic.

Before launching your game, remember that you have only one shot at this. If your game flops in the App Store, you might be able to save it by doing free-app-a-day promotions/price manipulations. However, the download spikes you get from promotions do not last. Your game will be piled under 1000 new games being published each day. Find your niche, and market wisely via developer forums like TouchArcade. Don’t forget to pitch to blogs like Kotaku, they always enjoy a good story.

Costs:

Facebook

Facebook canvas games don’t get the attention they deserve, but they’re still wildly profitable if done right. The virality from game invites/activities are what you should be focusing on when designing a facebook game.

Ads and virtual goods (Facebook Credits) work well here. Note that Facebook doesn’t allow google ads running, so you need to look for other game-focused ad partners like Ad4Game.

Another caveat: not all HTML5 games will work perfectly on Facebook, because they still have a percentage of users that have older browsers. What to do? Your best bet is to politely ask them to download and use Chrome, or the Google Chrome Frame plugin.

Costs:

Mac App Store

Not as popular as the iOS App Store, but worth a shot. One of the earliest HTML5 games we noticed here was Onslaught Arena.

Google+ Games

Google is a bit picky when it comes to selecting partners, on grounds of maintaning the user experience. You need to have a reputation and a hit game to be considered ( think Triple Town ).

Intel App Up Store

Intel gives you access to the PC app market. No hard numbers on revenue, but they run a small fund to encourage developers.

Pokki Store

Pokki gives you access to the desktop games market. Wrap your game inside their SDK and deploy! We don’t have hard numbers of how well their games monetize. Last we know, they ran a HTML5 games contest which proved lucrative.

Mozilla App Marketplace

Should launch in late Q3 2012. Firefox has about 25-28% of the browser market. Putting your games here should theoretically produce similar revenue numbers to that of the Chrome Web Store. Mozilla has bigger plans ahead, particularly in mobile. Would be interesting to see if this ties in well with the App Marketplace.

Sell distribution rights

An increasing number of publishers are looking to pepper their own game portals with fresh HTML5 content.

These publishers are looking to license games that run on the web and mobile ( yes, games that run on the mobile safari/android). There are a few ways you can capitalize on this:

You are free to negotiate any type of deal with publishers. Most developers prefer upfront payments, but if you think the publisher has impressive reach, doing a revenue split from ads/virtual goods might be a smart move. A top developer recently made 4 figures a month from google ads alone.

Costs

How do I find these publishers?

So many choices

There’s no single best option to monetize your games. Build a team, adopt a shotgun approach, analyze results and seek advice from other developers.

Can I go full-time making HTML5 games?

Yes, you can make a high 5 figures/year by making HTML5 games. This excludes development contracts and funded projects. Snag a few of those, and you might even hit 6 figures.

A friend of ours, Matthew just wrote a book, called "Making Money with HTML5". It's a good read for the indie developer. Proof: in 2012 he made $30,000 alone in HTML5 games. 

Pick your battles, test each market, and keep polishing. The games industry is very competitive, but extremely fulfilling.