When a few of you suggested I put my Flash games on Kongregate, I was skeptical at first. For all of you not familiar with Kongregate, it’s a Flash game site where you upload your games and are paid a portion of the revenue that they receive from the ads on their site. It starts at 25%, goes up to 40% if your game is exclusive to their site, and ratchets up to 50% if you implement their API. Additionally, they have weekly and monthly contests with fairly significant cash prizes, with the top prizes being $250 for the weekly contests and $1500 for the monthly contest.
Before posting Bureau of Steam Engineering, my first Flash game, I decided that whatever little money I made I would donate to charity; after all, Kongregate doesn’t even pay out until you’ve earned over $25, so it wasn’t likely I’d make anything. While BSE didn’t fail, it didn’t exactly flourish; to this day I’ve only made about $37 from it. The Codex of Alchemical Engineering, on the other hand, did a little better, bringing in around $300 by mid January, in addition to the $250 I won in the weekly contest at the end of December. Needless to say, I was quite surprised.
It took me a long time to find a suitable charity, but in the end I settled on Freedom from Hunger. From their website:
“Freedom from Hunger brings innovative and sustainable self-help solutions to the fight against chronic hunger and poverty. Together with local partners, we equip families with resources they need to build futures of health, hope and dignity.”
They’re big on microcredit (since 1988!), and tie it to education and health support to help the borrowers succeed, with the goal of bootstrapping people out of poverty. They’re also not very large, so I like to think the money might mean more to them than a larger charity.
I received the January payment from Kongregate today and fired off a $500 donation to Freedom from Hunger, which when combined with my job’s charity matching program, resulted in a whoppingly awesome $1,000 donation. I want to thank you guys for playing my games and giving me a reason to make them, as well as suggesting I put them on Kongregate in the first place.
zach that makes me fucking happy. you have given me faith that i too can better the world in my free time by harnessing pure awesomeness into charitable contributions.
You may want to advertise a Link to free rice .org, while I don’t know if they realy make it, it is certainly another feeling-warm-and-fuzzy-inside maker.
On another Note: You might struck it big if you press R
You should make more flash games 😀
How about a Silicon Foundry type thing where you build the ultimate computer and you try to hack people and protect your computer from hackers. And you build all the additional hardware components in a similar way and you use the hardware components to make other hardware components, and so on. I’d enjoy that and it would make you mad moneys…
Axoren,
While I’ve never seen any games out there besides Ruckinenurs 1 and 2 that have the electronics hacking stuff, there is already a game out there where you hack other people’s fake computers and try to keep them from hacking yours. It’s called SlaveHack, and I think it’s a browser-based game, though I’m not sure. It sounds like it takes a lot of time to play, and I don’t have that much time. The only way I’m able to work on COAE is because of the save feature.
However, I do agree that you should make more Flash games, Zach.
Also, now that I know what the benefits of playing on Kongregate are, I’m not going to be coming here for COAE anymore! I’m going to Kongregate to click on a couple ads before I play!
wow that’s f*cking great! 😀
your flashgames are awesome, alchemical engineering is soooooooooooooo fun to play
you definitaly need to make more flashgames 😉
Archie
Gabriel there is a fullprice Game (~10 or 15$ on Steam) called UPLINK: Hacker’s Elite / Trust nobody
That has no building of Parts, but you can buy and configurate a Rig to Hack.
Zach – I think what you’re doing with your income from the game is outstanding. Your Codex of
Alchemical Engineering game has a lot of fans at jayisgames.com where I first became aware of your great game making talents. They reviewed Magnum Opus in this weeks Link Dump. I’ll be sure to add a comment to let them know how you’re distributing your earnings.
Please post the Kongregate links here that people should be using for your games.
If only more people would listen to me, the world would be a much better place to be 😉
Nice work, this game is how I came to your website and discovered all your other games here.
Love them all, me and some friends at school spend our IT lessons playing manufactiod.
@Gabriel
Slavehack is an awesome game, but it is time consuming and a bit hard to get a grasp on.
@payjack
Uplink is heaps of fun to play, until me and my friends hacked it and created a supercomputer that costs -$1000. Kind of wrecked the game a little. Crack any password in half a second… 40 processors FTW! 😛