You see them all the time when surfing the web, advertisements for deathknight.info game sites can pop up just about anywhere, and they definitely have their place among internet users. But the question remains, can you really make money with a Flash games website? The answer is yes and no. While it is possible to develop a working online gaming site that people will like and enjoy, it appears monetizing from this method of online business is tougher than it looks. Here we’re going to look at some of the reasons why you may want to think twice before entering this field, and if you do decide to give it a shot anyways, at least you will be well informed as to what you are getting yourself into.
Like most everything else on the web, Flash game sites are a heavily contested battlefield, in which tens of thousands of publishers online are constantly fighting for their share of a market that continues to grow. However, there are a few problems that will clearly hamper the long term growth of Flash gaming online. Some of those problems stem from the fact that Flash games have no native support for standard PC controllers (in which other online gaming platforms such as XBOX Live and the PlayStation Network do not suffer from this problem), they rely on the Flash browser plugin (HTML5 games don’t! But we have a ways to go with this technology.), and that fact that many new Flash gaming sites popup on the web on a daily basis.
A heavily saturated Flash games market makes the prospect of developing a well ranking site in this field highly unlikely. Besides competing with home gaming consoles, Flash game sites must also compete with high quality games from Facebook, Google+, and other social media platforms. Also, while home gaming consoles are scaled down to a bare operating system that focuses on just gaming, PC’s on the other hand aren’t typically developed just for gaming, and they tend to have operating systems that are weighted down with resources that otherwise could have been used to help render and process games, effectively causing issues such as computer lockups, lag in online game play, etc.
Another problem that makes the Flash games site proposition not so enticing is the fact that the game publishers themselves tend to license out the same games for use to any website who wants to use them, as long as they are allowed to display their in game Ads. That being said, you would need original games for your website, otherwise you are simply displaying the same games that anyone can find anywhere else. This is exactly the problem that Facebook and Google+ have long tried to avoid by implementing games that aren’t available anywhere else on the web. You can get games that are more exclusive to your site, but those games tend to cost money in the form of a monthly lease agreement with game publishers, and they can get really expensive really quickly.
On the other hand, there are a few instances where implementing Flash games into an existing site can have a benefit to users and provide additional forms of entertainment for your followers. Now whether or not you can actually monetize from implementing games on your site is another question. However, diversity in any sites content strategy can only be a good thing. After, it may help to drive traffic to other areas of a website as well, not just a Flash games section.
Either way it goes, if you’re just planning to develop a Flash games site that only focuses on games, just be aware there are already tens of thousands of people doing this, and you are effectively putting all your eggs into one basket! Trying to compete with Facebook’s online gaming experience is unlikely to pan out in anyone’s favor. But again, if you already have a website in place that focuses on other areas of technology, implementing a Flash games section could pan out in your favor. In one case, my “Pacman” page ranks fairly well in Google, but this doesn’t mean I would ever consider relying solely upon online games as a way to monetize online.
