Yet there is money to be made designing Flash games. Sometimes there's a great deal of it, says Chris Hughes, a former Flash game developer and a co-founder of FlashGameLicense.com.While Flash games may not make money from game sales, they can generate a lot of web traffic. The greater the web traffic, the more money hosting websites can charge for advertisements on their site. Portal sites are willing to share their advertising money with designers, because a single top-tier game can generate more than 100 million plays, Hughes says. Additionally, according to an industry report, about forty percent of internet users worldwide play Flash games..Hughes has been using FlashGameLicense, or FGL, to connect designers with sponsor host sites - and money - since 2007. Flash developers can showcase their games on the site; host sites can preview games and bid on them. If a game sells, FGL takes a small cut. To date, the company has brokered nearly 6,000 deals and given $8.6 million to developers.
As for developers, the amount of money they makes varies tremendously, both due to the terms of the deal and the success of the game. At FGL, one or two games a month - roughly the top one percent - might sell for between $20,000 and $30,000, and a similar number of games might sell for half that amount. The average price for a game sold is closer to two or three thousand dollars, but many games sell for much more - or significantly less - than that price, Hughes says.
