Ask HN: Any way to monetize a simple game?
I have a simple math practice game at http://zetamac.com/arithmetic/.
I've had it up for about 5 years now and have never made any money off of it so I was just wondering if there's any reasonable chance of me making anything off of it. It gets played about 5000 times a week (~500 uniques).
I've tried applying to AdWords, but have been rejected because they claim the site is "Under construction". Presumably it's not enough text content, anyway. Are there any ad networks that would be better for this sort of thing? Should I instead look for specific sponsors who can just sponsor a single ad for a while? (Also, about how much would you expect would be reasonable to make from ads from a site like this?)
I've thought about adding features and charging for them, but I couldn't really think of any that would be interesting enough to make me want to pay for them, so presumably most other people wouldn't want to either.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
19 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 55.5 ms ] threadYou could, you know, look around for ad networks.
Hope it helps.
Then it occurred to me that this arithmetic would be much easier if I had built up to it, i.e. I was used to doing sums like that.
So, with that in mind, perhaps you need to offer more? I mean, a lot more. Ways to track my progress as I do build up, ways to give me good places to push the boundaries of my mental arithmetic. I mean, you could go on extending it and making more useful. You could dig out research for the best way to get the user to learn.
I'm thinking along the lines of the "goal" to be able to perform sums like those Japanese students who use abacuses to solve massive sums very quickly even once the abacus is removed.
There are plenty of interesting features you could add to it! Make people grow from it!
I would imagine your target audience would be the younger generation with their parents (schools?) paying their son's education interests. I could imagine every parent seriously considering purchasing if their child was interested.
You could also search for affiliate networks that have some of those categories, but that will probably not pay off as much.
I can't see that you'd be able to make any money selling access to your software unless you added some more benefits and made a full product out of this, where you'd actually be helping the user improve his math skills. Heck, I think I'd use that, my arithmetic skills are really poor (despite being a decent developer) and I'd like to improve them.
Your last option would probably be to try to get some partnership with other companies or offer schools or websites in this category white-labeled version of your software so they can set up a widget of your application on their website for value addition, etc. Come to think of it, that might be your most lucrative option, plus you get more users and can continue to develop and add more value for the user...
I also have a lot of ideas of how you could improve the game aspect itself, but you probably have them as well, you just haven't been developing the app for the last 5 years, right?
I'm currently starting on a iPhone/Android app. I've thought about virtual goods and adds, but so far I have shied away from adds, and virtual goods I'm not sure about. There is also that upcoming Chrome app store which might be a possibility. Any other ideas?
Anyways, good luck spicyj, you're not alone in your quest.
I pretty much suck at this, but it's fun :P
People really love the game for a while, the word "addicting" comes up a lot. But, the long-term retention is pretty low, and understandably so, there are no variations or other features except the main game.
I'm working on making more features/game types/etc to make the game players have better retention, and make it overall more enjoyable for long-time players. Specifically, I'm working on the top voted requests here: http://wikipediagame.uservoice.com
In case you weren't aware.
The article below is for flash games but it shows the difference between popular ad supported games and popular 'premium' (in-app purchases) games.
http://blog.gambrinous.com/2009/10/07/you-should-be-making-a...
I was surprised that I actually got into the game a bit. The problems are challenging enough to make it a real race with the timer. I didn't quite expect it to be as interesting as it turned out.
This might work well as one of those IQ quiz/survey things that seem to crop up a lot in banner ads. You could push it with a slogan along the lines of "How fast is your math?" although you might want to get a bit more creative. Checking just now, I see the domain fastmath.com is already taken. In fact, it looks like there are already some games out there along similar lines. Don't expect to find a lot of low hanging fruit.
That said, I think you might still find some opportunity. I would probably look at hooking the game into Facebook to get it in front of more people, and promotion deals for self-help books targeting math skills.
You'll probably need to liven up the design, though, and you absolutely MUST make it work with Firefox, without telling or expecting the user to do or install anything. I don't know if it's a problem for anyone else, but I JUST freshly installed FF on my Windows laptop, just in case the problem was Linux, and it failed the same way there. Google Chrome handles it on Windows (as I assume does IE), and Konqueror on Linux even knows what to do with it. What Firefox is missing, I don't know, but I suspect that slice of the market is a little bit big to just ignore. You would probably do well to look into it.
Good luck!
UPDATE: Had another look with Windows Firefox, and it's identifying the file as MIME type "application/octet-stream", which is probably what my Linux version considers a BIN file. I'm also noticing that sometimes the browser does seem to dectect the file/MIME type and run the file correctly on both Linux and Windows. Less often than not, though.
At a guess, you're going to need either to set the Content-TYpe (text/html?) explicitly, or give the file an extension. Otherwise, Firefox is unlikely to handle it consistently, let alone correctly, and that's liable to KILL your chances of monetizing anything.
Again, good luck...
You can find a sponsor who wants the advertising to brand it theirs (some sort of school supply or test prep company maybe?)
You could add some advanced features only accessible after pay paling 5 dollars.
Mathogen teaches kids (3-10) addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division through a cute and colorful pattern matching mechanic (faster comprehension means higher scores).
I thought $2.99 in the App Store would be a sweet price but anything over 99 cents seems like a deterrent.
Does anyone have experience making money with their games on Facebook? If I release my game on more platforms, more people will talk about the game and purchase it, right? I would love your feedback.