

Ask HN: Any way to monetize a simple game? - spicyj

Hi,<p>I have a simple math practice game at http://zetamac.com/arithmetic/.<p>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).<p>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?)<p>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.<p>Any suggestions would be appreciated.
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_Lemon_
I clicked and gave it a run, hitting the defaults I was presented with "752 /
8". My mind just lost interest (it is almost 4am mind you) and I closed the
tab.

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.

~~~
arnorhs
ffr. 752 / 8 might look hard, but it's actually just 800 / 8 - 48/8 = 94

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vkdelta
Currently your game looks Bland. Focus on a niche(may be kids 3-10). Add bit
of bright colors. You could either ad support it using HTML5 webapp for ipads
and iphones. or built an iphone/ipad app.

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clemesha
Ideas monetizing this game I built: <http://thewikigame.com>? It has ~1500
players per day, w/ average time on site ~10mins.

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.

~~~
arnorhs
Nice game :-) I've been playing for half an hour and registered my username.

I pretty much suck at this, but it's fun :P

~~~
clemesha
Awesome!

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>

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athom
Well, Firefox doesn't seem to know what to do with a BIN file called 'play'
when I hit the 'Go' button. I don't know why, but you might want to look into
that. That could be a sizable slice of the market to simply ignore.

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...

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arnorhs
Your best bet is probably to talk to some company that's selling arithmetic-
improvement books and mind-skill books, even mind-improvement software and
offer to advertise for them. Just tell them up front what they will have to
pay etc..

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...

~~~
arnorhs
Btw. Is your leaderboad supposed to work? Because it's not working for me...
I'd like to see where I rank compared to other people.

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?

~~~
spicyj
No, I took it down a while ago because of vandalism. I guess I forgot to
remove the link! It'll be fixed soon (I was working on moving it to a new
server today and fixed that in the process, just haven't changed the live
site).

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spicyj
(Clickable link: <http://zetamac.com/arithmetic/>)

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DeeNiri
I'm still trying to find ways to further monetize my iPhone math game:
<http://www.mathogen.com>

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.

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kreek
You have to get crazy traffic and plays to make anything off of ads. In-app
purchases are really the only way to make money from a game and, as you
mentioned, that requires compelling content that one would want to pay for.

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...](http://blog.gambrinous.com/2009/10/07/you-should-be-making-a-
premium-flash-game/)

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slig
I know a site (gamesforthebrain dot com) that runs affiliate ads of this site:
<http://www.lumosity.com/partners>

Hope it helps.

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trizk
[http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/make-money/101-ways-to-
moneti...](http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/make-money/101-ways-to-monetize-
your-website-or-blog/)

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gte910h
You could install openX and sell your own ads

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.

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rolloutroad
iPhone/Android/WebOS/Windows Phone 7 app.

You could, you know, look around for ad networks.

