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!

12 comments

  1. Dave says:

    yea there are too much adds in the game xD like every 2 minutes some random add pops up and i have to click that little X button on the bottom, but anyway the games still awesome. keep up the good work :D

  2. Jarod says:

    Hopefully very shortly means just that… :/

  3. smurph says:

    you wouldn’t happen to have a timeframe for when this will come out would you?

  4. graham says:

    personnally i didn’t find the ads too distracting.

  5. Omegafrost69 says:

    I’d have to agree with graham. Quite honestly how’d you guys start deveoping games? It’s been one of those dreams of mine to make zombie real time strategy/first person shooter survival horror video games. I don’t even know the first step into making the games. Any advice you have I would greatly appreciate it.

    • Jay says:

      We both worked together making PC games for a few years, about 10+ years ago. Just start from the beginning and teach yourself (or get someone else to teach you) how to code/draw and go from there. Flash games are great because you can make simple games on your own. For Zombie Outbreak Sim and C3O, I’d never animated pixel art before or really drawn much either (my thing was 3d) so I’m learning as I go as well.

      Good to know some people don’t hate the ads! :) Cheers.

  6. Ryanbru says:

    Jay man you gotta get this game up and going been looking at the sites evry day for ages huwwy ups pweezz

  7. Jarod says:

    I’m there with you Ryan, haha..

  8. DannyDaNinja says:

    Lol… $2 Donation

    This is useful for amaetuer flash game developers like me to see what it’s like to make money from ads

  9. Michael says:

    Me three

  10. PWNER1000 says:

    this game freaking ROCKS NUFF SAID

  11. darren says:

    on your next upgrade maby could you add a safe house or some way for the humans to protect houses and another thing is can the peaple after somenumber of zombies start working togther to survive

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