$100 per day with online games?

[pixlepix]

thats because making a good browsergame takes aot of talent.

[jannesiera]

thats because making a good browsergame takes aot of talent.

Well, more likely a lot of hard work and persistence. Persistence most people don't have.

[Chris]

thats because making a good browsergame takes aot of talent.

Well, more likely a lot of hard work and persistence. Persistence most people don't have.

And a lot of luck too

[Mufasa]

I think luck is needed to go HUGE... but $100/day? Easily obtainable with consistency and a good product.

[Sunchaser]

I think luck is needed to go HUGE... but $100/day? Easily obtainable with consistency and a good product.

I am very interested in what you are saying; do you think so that with a good product and persistance, a single or a team of two people can achieve this result? this will be awesome.

[Winawer]

I think luck is needed to go HUGE... but $100/day? Easily obtainable with consistency and a good product.

Easy if you have a good product, but making a good product isn't easy.

[Mufasa]

I think luck is needed to go HUGE... but $100/day? Easily obtainable with consistency and a good product.

I am very interested in what you are saying; do you think so that with a good product and persistance, a single or a team of two people can achieve this result? this will be awesome.

Yes, I 100% believe that. Aside from some artwork, I'm the only person working on prisonblock. Though going forward, I'm bringing folks on to help with future game rollouts.

I think luck is needed to go HUGE... but $100/day? Easily obtainable with consistency and a good product.

Easy if you have a good product, but making a good product isn't easy.

Yes and no. I see lots of threads on this board where people toss out some purely awesome ideas... the problem? None of them go forward with it? It's like intellectual porn or something. No one wants to go past the foreplay, it's like the actual full act scares them or something?

There are some pretty bright and creative minds here, and I bet if they went full in on creating a game instead of just kicking ideas around or "perfecting my framework first", they could easily achieve a $100/day game.

[Chris]

Making online games is my full time job and I never, even at best times, got near $100/day.

How many players you need to get that kind of earning?

[Mufasa]

That of course depends on your monetization and such.

[pixlepix]

thats because making a good browsergame takes aot of talent.

Well, more likely a lot of hard work and persistence. Persistence most people don't have.

Sure, you could take most people off the street, teach them coding, and get a fairly good browser game, eventually. But to get the kind of browser games that would earn 100$/day, I doubt that most people could do.

[edmazur]

Sorry for necro'ing this thread, but I wanted to share my game's numbers:



The left axis is for the running total and the right is for the 7d/30d daily averages.

My game is called bots4 and it is a remake of a game that shut down in the beginning of 2010, bots2. It's a text-based robot fighting game where you can collect items and fight people.

I collect money by selling what are known in my game as "stars". Sales are automated via PayPal and cost $10 each, the main benefits being extra inventory space and the ability to order items. Normally you buy items in the shop which refreshes every 60 seconds. Each item has a certain probability of appearing, so rare items can take awhile to get. Stars enable you to place item orders so that you don't have to camp for items. More stars lets you order more items and at faster rates. Some people have bought upwards of 50 stars. There are also little 70x25 logos next to usernames that show up if you buy stars. There are different logos for different numbers of stars and you can choose a custom logo if you have at least 9 stars. Stars are transferable (both temporary and permanent) too, so they're often lent out to clanmates and such or used as motivators for performing well in a clan.

I haven't done much in the way of promotion. I'd been around awhile in bots2 and ran the main fansite for that game, so staying in contact with bots2 players then wasn't hard. I'm friends with the former owner of bots2 as well and he put links to the new game on the now-defunct bots2 homepage. So between those things and a Facebook group/page, it's spread almost completely by word of mouth. I did have a free $100 for Google AdSense, so I've been using that, but that accounts for a relatively small amount of traffic.

Timeline:

Dec 2002 - started playing bots2
Oct 2005 - registered domain for my bots2 fansite
Jan 27 2010 - bots2 gets hacked, owner calls it quits
Feb 2010 - bots4 coding begins, I work on and off for awhile
Sep 29 2010 - bots4 closed beta begins, reaches 198 accounts
Mar 7 2011 - bots4 open beta begins, reaches 5,798 accounts
Mar 15 2011 - began selling stars
Jul 1 2011 - bots4 released

Stats:

Accounts: 7,205
Active (past 24h): 560
Active (past 7d): 1,121
Active (past 30d): 2,466
Absolute unique visitors (July 2010): 6,774
Pageviews (July 2010): 4,580,762
Costs: $400 or so (~$20/month VPS hosting at Linode)...and quite a bit of time invested
Revenue (total): $9,240
Revenue (daily average over past 30 days): $112.67

[Marek]

Thanks for posting your stats, that's really informative!

You made $2000 in the first few days of sales? That's impressive.

Is there an explanation for why sales picked up so much in July?

[edmazur]

Yep, I was lucky enough to break $2k on day 4. At that point, the closed beta had just concluded and the open beta had just started, so people were excited and wanted to show their support. In general, it's been a very supportive community. Plus they don't like camping for equipment.

Sales picked up in July because I "released" the game on July 1. Activity had tapered off a bit towards the end of the open beta because people knew everything would be reset for the release, so most people weren't interested in investing too much effort before then (or playing at all yet in some cases).

[chrisjenkinson]

Thanks for posting that edmazur - very interesting.

[AltarofScience]

wow, 100$ a day? that seems pretty insane to me. i expect that if i eventually set up donations i will get like 10$ a day.

[ajacksified]

Awesome, thanks for sharing. My online game, Neflaria, sees about $140 / day; I'll see if we can get some numbers together and post stats as well.

[edmazur]

I'm no longer breaking $100/day, but here's an update:



Since the above post in August, the 30 day average dipped down to around $80/day, rose back to its previous highs around $120/day, and has since plummeted to $75/day.

I'm not really sure what to make of these trends other than it just being the natural variance seen in a relatively small userbase. I only recently crossed the 10k account barrier and things are somewhat stagnant in terms of visitors per day. Depending on the day of the week, I'll see 450-650 visitors a day.

Going forward, my plan is to focus on advertising the game more and recruiting new players. Things look mostly steady and players are interested in the game, but there is an ever-so-slight downward trend in activity. Realistically this won't be a problem for quite a long time, but I would still like to have the exact opposite: slow but steady longterm growth, so I can stop having to go to my real job everyday.

[BlackScorp]

your game has a nice idea but i think you have to buy nice graphics and add some javascript effects or animations in this game, so more player would play it.

[ajacksified]

your game has a nice idea but i think you have to buy nice graphics and add some javascript effects or animations in this game, so more player would play it.

Assuming you're talking to me - yeah, we're working on a major infrastructure update for November that will make it easy to add more modern features. We probably won't get to doing that until after we've released a totally awesome project we'll be working on over the winter. More details on that project soon

[BlackScorp]

i was talking to the dev of bot4.net but as far as i know, everythink is about graphics nowadays, those Stupid Farm Games wouldnt be that successfull if they were build with tables only:D