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What’s in a (Flash) game?

Or rather how much money can you get from making Flash games? Italian Flash developer Emanuele Feronato is currently performing an experiment to try this. He's not become a millionaire yet, but it's starting to pay off.

Emanuele is a skilled developer (or PROgrammer as he prefers himself) with a good imagination and eye for games. His experiment seeks to find a lot of things such as the best ways to promote, monetize and even make games. Everything earned and learned are posted on the site (much in the style of John Chow), so if you are a budding game developer, make sure you browse the archives to find some gems about promoting games and other things.

For now, Emanuele has created 5 simple games (one-day games). He will test out all the available means of monetization and also test if creating more advanced / richer games will pay off. He has spent 22 hours developing and 3 hours promoting the 5 current games. From this he has made almost $350, so his average hourly rate is up to $14/hour. Not much, but an Italian freelance programmer can expect $44/hour, so he could get there with some patience. That's the nice thing about web games - a good game can last a long time.

We asked Emanuele how he got the idea: "The idea of the experiment came some months ago, when every (and I mean **every**) good and not-so-good Flash game I played was sponsored by some... let's call it "Flash Software House".
I was intrigued by this, because it reminded the old times when programmers in they rooms/garages could develop a game from scratch and have people playing and having fun with it, while making some money. So I started the experiment to understand if coding some quick games can make you earn some money"

Most of the games in the experiment come with full source code on Emanuele's blog and reading other peoples code is a great way to learn how to build games. If you develop Flash games in some regard, this is a great blog to add to your favorite RSS reader.

Visit Emanuele Feronato's blog