Recently, Mochi released the results of the Flash Game Market Survey that we participated in, and I have to say I am a bit disappointed.  The number of responses was so low that I’m not entirely convinced the selection of respondents is indicative of the larger community.  But ultimately, for that, we can only blame ourselves. We have nearly 10,000 registered developers on FGL, and around 4,000 true unique logins a month, yet with us, Mochi, JiG, and Newgrounds participating we only got around 1,000 developers to participate?? Well, for now at least it is what we’re stuck with.

I did like that Mochi sliced and diced the data a number of ways, but I would have liked to see the data sectioned out into different categories.  And there were some other statistics I would have loved to see.   Luckily, since we helped with the survey we got access to the raw data.  So we can look at it any way we want.

However, there is a lot of data, and it is a bit daunting to just dive in and dredge through it all.  What I decided to do was to pick a couple of data points and look for some interesting bits of information, then post it here (and I have, below).  Then I want to ask all of you to give me some suggestions on what types of metrics/data points you’d be interested in seeing.  So, feel free to comment below.

First, I need to give some disclaimers for the following info.  For the age data (and only the age data), I only selected the group of people who entered an age, so those who didn’t are obviously left out.  For the averages I just selected a middle ground on all the age groups and then performed the average calculation (for example, the age group of 25-34 I assigned as “30” to perform the average).  I also think that some of the averages would change drastically if there were an “under 18” option for users to choose, but the data I have starts at age 18 and goes up from there.  Unfortunately there weren’t options for developers to choose “Which services do you use” instead the question was “which forums do you use” so I used that data point to decide if a user was an “FGL user”, “Mochi user”, etc…  Not the most accurate, as many members of all the services do not frequent the forums, but hopefully it is close enough.  The data is also focused on three sites: FlashGameLicense, Mochi, and Newgrounds.  The only reason for this is because they are the closest to a significant sample size to mean anything.  If people want me to section it out differently I can do that.  I should also note that I took out some data that seemed highly suspicious to me, like a user who claimed to make more than $25k a month only using in game ads only.  I actually would have left that one except that the user also said they made over 9million in sponsorships in the notes section (not in the data section). So, with that said, here is some interesting facts:

-          Average ages of users are similar for FGL and Mochi (27), NG crowd skews younger(24) (and remember, no below 18 option)

-          28% of FlashGameLicense users say they work on games full time, 22% of Mochi users say this, and 18% Newgrounds users

-          36% of Newgounders only visit the NG forums

-          14% of users use both FGL and NG forums

-          12% of users use both Mochi and NG forums

-          25% of users use both FGL and Mochi forums

-          64% of respondents only visit one of the three forums (this surprised me)

-          Only 8% of users use all three forums (this one surprised me too)

I realize that there is nothing earth-shattering here, but I just wanted to dip my toes in first.  I started looking at some money stats and that looks much more interesting. Like, on average, developers who get their games sponsored make approximately $1,000 more a month than developers that do not.  But, again, I’d like to hear your suggestions before doing much more.

Here are some ideas I thought about:

-          Money stats broken out by top 50% of earners, top 10% of earners, bottom 50% of earners, and bottom 10% of earners

-          Earnings average by age

-          Earnings average by years of experience

-          Earnings average by number of games released in the past

What else?

Chris