If you made something that was used by over Ten Million people, would you/it be a success?
Over the last 10 years I have made countless Flash games for various agencies and independent artists. I do the job and move on. Sometimes they barley rise to any notable or worthy existence and other’s get viral and do well for a while.
From time to time I perform various searches out of curiosity to see if anything still lives. Today I thought I would hunt down a game I made back in 2007 for Brooke Valentine called Celebrity Girlfight. It’s a boxing game where you battle against Paris Hilton, Jennifer Lopez, Lindsay Lohan, Lil Kim, Beyonce Knowles and Ciara. I was stunned to see “About 691,000 results” from Google.
Clicking on the first result brings me to y8.com. It’s one of those Flash game sites that collects them and offers them up for free, surrounded with advertisements. On this one site the game had been played 2,371,316 times with 110,043 positive votes (87.15%) vs.16,224 negative. Over two million, wow!
I continued through one whole page of Google results, 10,000, 9,000, 20,000 plays, on and on and on. I bet if I was to go through more of the sites, the count would exceed ten million. That’s awesome I thought.
Now in most situations, the Flash programmer does not put his name on the game and remains anonymous. That’s fine, I realize the focus here is the artist, but I thought it would make an interesting blog post from the perspective of a developer. If I had 1¢ for every time it was played I could have made upwards of $100,000.
It’s food for thought.
