We just uploaded a new version of C3O with a simple survival mode, give it a go and tell us what you think!
http://www.class3outbreak.com/zombie-games/c3o/
Cheers,
Jay
Archive for Binary Blog
Survival Mode added to Class 3 Outbreak
BSG’s sponsor search and Flash Game License
About a month ago we finished the first version of our zombie game, Class 3 Outbreak, and began pimping it to a list of sponsors. We decided to first try and contact a list of 20 or so via email, since I have the spare time to be able to talk in depth with sponsors myself, and being the cheap penny pinchers we are, we wanted to avoid giving FGL any money! FGL (Flash Game License) is a service which helps flash developers find sponsors for their games. So a few days later I got a few bites, but nothing that ever eventuated. For some reason, as also happened with ZOS, we got some sponsors saying “great game, how much?”, followed by no response afterward. Pretty strange, but I guess they mustn’t have wanted it that badly.
After that dismal little failure we decided to put the game on FGL and see what sort of action we’d receive. Over the course of a couple of weeks we got bids that started at $300 and eventually reached $5000, funnily enough one of the high bids was from a sponsor that we had emailed but who never responded. It seems like a lot of sponsors are now just depending on FGL and ignoring emails for sponsorship, unless this was just in our situation and our game, its hard to say. FGL’s bidding system is very easy to follow, and the transparency of who’s bidding and how much is great to help drive your price up. The percentage FGL takes is very fair – in our case we had no offers and ended up with $5k, I’m not good enough at maths to make up a % increase for that, but maybe something like lots%?
After chatting with Adam a bit and exchanging emails, I also found that they actively hunt down sponsors and market your game to them, something that I didn’t expect to see. We certainly came away from it feeling that we had been well taken care of and that every single sponsor possible had seen the game.
In the end we actually decided not to take a sponsorship at all. The two top bidders both had attractive offers, however one of them wanted a 700px version of the game (too small for our taste) to fit their portal, and the other one we felt suited a more traditional banner advertising/cost per click sort of model, and that ultimately fell through as well. Also for $5k we were still a bit on the fence as to whether we could make that in advertising and donations, and felt a little uneasy about giving up some money if the game did exceedingly well. Judging from ZOS, we “only” need to get a few million plays to make $4-5k, and Saxon and I both agreed that since we were making this game for fun, we’d prefer to go the riskier, more fun approach of self sponsoring. We also felt that we may gain more newsletter subscriptions, forum members, search engine rankings, and facebook fans this way, and we would really like to build a community around the game.
Once again we’d like to say a huge thank you to FGL, we were thoroughly impressed in every way! I can’t recommend them enough. Something else I’ll quickly touch on is FGL’s great First Impressions service. We submitted our game to First Impressions, and quickly got 20 really well thought out and highly varied opinions with detailed feedback and suggestions. Well worth the money.
Stay tuned to find out whether our self sponsoring was a good idea or not :) We have already appeared on Digg, but it was nothing compared to the landslide of traffic we had for ZOS. Funny, since C3O is the playable ZOS! I’m also emailing a few games websites and press, however it seems that a lot of them only cater to ‘downloadable indie’ games. Some specifically say no flash games, which I feel is possibly due to the glut of low quality flash games out there which make some people think that they’re all going to be poor. Really, whats the distinction between a flash and downloadable game apart from how you get hold of it? Anyway, I was trying to end my post, not start rambling about something else :)
Thanks for reading,
Jay
Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal |
Tags: Binary, binary space, business, CPM, developer, development, FGL, flash, game, Games, google, host, mochi, mochiads, monetize, selling, sponsor, sponsorship
Class 3 Outbreak, Released! Buh-rrRaaAaAiiiinNZ!
All Saxon and I can say is, “finally!”. After many delays with things like sponsorship, flash game portal versions, and ZOS itself, we are super happy happy, joy joy to announce that Class 3 Outbreak is sitting on our server now, ready for you to engage the zombies on their terms (you’re going to lose, its just a matter of how badly!). So after around 14 months, the first version of our baby (think the zombie baby from Dawn of the Dead, ok?) is out! It’s amazing it’s taken us this long for a game which appears quite simple on the surface, but being part time indie-ers, thems the breaks! Feel free to crush our spirits or pat us on the back for a job well done, as long as its constructive then we are happy. We also welcome the inevitable comments like “FAIL” and “this is such win-ness”.
For the first week or so the game will be site locked to class3outbreak.com, but then we will remove that and let it spread to the games portals that support 800×600 games.
From here on, now that much of the ground work has been laid, we look forward to putting in some of the really fun stuff. Feel free to head over to our forums and chat with us, we are always watching!
We look forward to following the response over the coming weeks. Thanks for supporting and following our game!
Jay and Saxon
Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal, Games |
Tags: Binary, binary space, developer, development, druce, flash, game, Games, jay, release, saxon, space, zombie
Zombie Outbreak Simulator Earnings Report
Greetings readers, I thought tonight I would contribute to the number of flash game earnings reports circulating on the www.
Since release on November 23rd we’ve had roughly 520,000 plays of Zombie Outbreak Simulator on the Class 3 Outbreak website. Today is Feb 24th, so that’s over the course of 3 months, with a good 200,000 plays being in the first few days, petering out to between 5-10k hits a day for the next month, finally settling down to around 1,000 plays a day now. Since we didn’t expect anywhere near the traffic we got, we probably missed out on around 100,000 hits worth of revenue in the first day, since we had no adsense or mochi ads ready.
As I just said, we decided to go with primarily Mochi Ads and Google Adsense, and according to most people you’d have to say we spammed our visitors with mochiads while they ‘played’ (watched) ZOS. We figured that since there was no way we could interrupt the game, we would opt for an ‘ad heavy experience’. We copped a bit of flak for it, and reduced the number slightly, but still not enough for some people as we continued to get some flames. Our feelings weren’t too badly hurt though so we continued on!
We placed google adsense adverts above and below the game in the common format you see most portals using, and adsense has earned us about double what mochi has. I have to mention and remind readers that this is from having the game played only on our website. Those figures would likely be far different if we had spread the game across the internet via portals. It’s hard to know how our adsense profits might have suffered, but I’m sure we would have made a lot more in total if we spread the game.
We released on Kongregate 6 weeks ago too, to see how traffic would go and also see what their revenue sharing was like. We’ve had 43k plays and earned $55, not a bad CPM at all.
After a couple months we also gave CPMStar a go, to compare it with Mochi.
So the totals so far have been:
Mochi: $373 @ 40c CPM
Adsense: $754 @ ~ not allowed to say, but “good”
Donations: $2…
Kongregate: $55 @ $1.1 CPM
CPM Star: $166 @ 27c CPM
Total: $1350
This is all on paper, since (and this could be important if you plan to make a living from flash games) payments are delayed usually by one month.
Why were donations so low? Perhaps because we were ‘ad whoring’ in the game? Hard to say.
We have spent probably 90% of that on various things, we weren’t exactly spend thrifts… we spent money on hosting, a copy of FLStudio, domain names, and a business name. We opted for the best host we could find, which certainly costs us too, but we didn’t want to have everything break down at the most opportune time. Goes to show that even a successful game can’t make much from ads (at least if only released on your own site). Still, we consider ZOS to have been a big success, and have high hopes for C3O when we do release it on portals.
It’s hard to know what sorts of play numbers we may have reached had we spread the game to portals, but due to the google maps API, the game is domain locked, which means great difficulty for portals getting a copy of ZOS working quickly and easily.
We will continue to post, next time on C3O’s financial status, a few months after that is released. C3O is currently being shopped around to sponsors and will be released very shortly. Stay tuned!
Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal |
Tags: adwords, Binary, binary space, business, developer, development, digg, dugg, flash, game, Games, google, hosting, marketing, mochi, mochiads, monetize, zombie
Half a Million
A couple of days ago Zombie Outbreak Simulator reached the milestone of half a million views, around 10 weeks since it was released.
I thought it might be interesting to post where all those views came from.
According to Google analytics, around 25% of the hits were from returning visitors. So that makes around 375,000 unique people who’ve played Zombie Outbreak Simulator.
Almost every country in the world has had a play (yellow means no plays from that country):
The top ten countries are:
- United States – 44.0%
- Japan – 18.7%
- Canada – 6.4%
- South Korea – 6.2%
- United Kingdom – 4.9%
- Germany – 2.2%
- Australia – 2.1%
- France – 2.0%
- Spain – 1.9%
- China – 1.6%
Over 2700 sites have now linked to us, with most of our traffic coming in bursts as popular sites link to us:
ZOS has been successful way beyond our expectations – considering we just thought it would be an interesting preview for our real game, Class 3 Outbreak. We hope C3O will do even better – now we just have to finish it…!
Category: Binary Blog |
MechWarrior: Living Legends, the power of mods
My PC died the other day (don’t worry, its just the video card!), so I ended up discovering and playing Mechwarrior: Living Legends for about the entire day at my brother’s place. I loved it so much and was so impressed I felt the need to write a short post here.
MWLL is a total conversion of Crysis, so if you own Crysis, you can download and play MWLL for free. I can’t say I get into FPSs much these days, and so I don’t own it, but as soon as my PC returns, I’ll be getting it just to play the mod. MWLL has such high production values and is so well designed you will swear you are playing the next retail MechWarrior title. I haven’t been so pumped about a game in a very long time. The mix of spectacular Crysis graphics, professional, super high quality artwork, equally good sound and a brilliant mix of Mech’s, tanks, planes and battle armor (little dudes) makes for a highly entertaining and epic experience! It is quite like Battlefield 2, but it has a very real feel to it, like a Flight sim but for Mechs.
On the business side of things, I think this game is a great example of how powerful mods are for extending the life of a game, and even bringing in new customers. I would have never bought Crysis, even for $5, but after seeing a few youtube videos I was sold for $30.
Give it a go, there’s even full servers of people playing in Australia. It’s a little painful to get the game running but its so worth it! MechWarrior: Living Legends.
If any of the team is reading this, I’d just like to say a big congratulations and thanks, I’m a huge MechWarrior fan, and a fairly jaded gamer for the most part, and its great to get this excited about a game again!
Jay
Class 3 Outbreak V1, what to expect!
Hello eager brainz hungry zombie fans. The first release of Binary Space’s zombie RTS, Class 3 Outbreak is not far off now. We have been following fan feedback all over the internet and are keeping a close eye on feature requests on the forums.
We realised that people have little idea of what to expect from the first release, so we thought we’d share with you a bit of a feature breakdown, so that your hopes and dreams of some infinitely complex zombie RPGTSMMORPG aren’t horribly crushed!
The first free game to be released in (very) approximately 3-4 weeks will be a fairly simple flash game, much like a playable Zombie Outbreak Simulator, called “Class 3 Outbreak” (C3O). We will be distributing it across flash games portals, which we hope to make ourselves some decent money from sponsorships and advertising to fund the sequel.
C3O will be an RTS with 1-2 maps, 1 unit type (police) and your basic terrifying zombies. We hope to give you a fun game in which players are tasked mainly with crushing outbreaks as they occur across the map. The challenge lies with quickly reaching outbreak sites and efficiently taking out all zombies before they can spread out of control. There will also be an escort part of the game which was featured in the trailer. We wont give away everything that happens though! If you’d like to get yourself tactically acquainted with the next outbreak locale, we have chosen Leicester, England in a classic suburban area that we feel that many people will be able to relate to. The Washington DC map will probably return as well.
To create some competition (against yourself and other players) we will be tracking the players score, which is affected by the amount of outbreaks you control, how many zombies you take out, how many people you escort to safety and so on.
What lies ahead after this first iteration of Class 3 Outbreak? That all depends on how the first one goes! It will almost certainly be a premium, pay version of C3O, probably with a free demo version. The only things we can guarantee at this point are lots of fun unit types, new maps and zombies :) There is a certain feature that has been requested many times that we are very excited about, but in game development you never know what will happen, we make no promises! When will it come out? For now its probably safest to say “sometime in 2010”!
Saxon and I look forward to bringing you the first version of C3O soon-ish!
Thanks to all the fans for following us, and I’ll see you on the forums, and facebook, etc!
Jay
Zombie Outbreak Simulator now on Kongregate
Saxon just finished making a version of the game to be accessible on Kongregate. Should be interesting to see how its received there. Check it out: http://www.kongregate.com/games/BinarySpace/zombie-outbreak-simulator
This version has no mochi ads, and we receive 35% of ad income from Kongregate’s ads. Will soon find out what the difference is! If you yearn to play the game ad free then go forth and play there :)
Category: Binary Blog, Development Journal |
Tags: Binary, binary space, developer, development, flash, game, Games, jay, journal, mochi, mochiads, monetize, saxon, space, zombie
Class 3 Outbreak Trailer
Check out the trailer for Class 3 Outbreak on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-YQ-svmjjQ
I know the sound is wrong but I mean, would you rather a half decent trailer now and the game sooner or a highly polished trailer which delays the game? :P
Category: Binary Blog |
