Time for a new developer competition! This is a contest to see who can make the best game in 24 hours. Your game must revolve around a special theme, which will only be revealed when the contest begins.

These contests are always a lot of fun, and they’re a great way to get a new game prototyped fast. Plus, the first-place prize is a copy of Adobe Flash CS5!

We hope you can make it! Get all the details here.

Hi guys, thought I’d share this since it recently came up in the Suggestions forum. Here’s a breakdown of games that accepted bids, broken down by their Editor’s Rating. This is for 1/1/2011 to 4/16/2011.

And here it is in tasty pie form:

One of the odd beliefs is that only games rated 8+ sell, which really isn’t true. Games rated 8 do have a somewhat higher chance of selling for a satisfactory amount, but there’s nothing magical about the number.

Also, an unusual anomaly is that there are no games rated 5 that got sold in the last four months… usually there would be one or two. But in general, it is rare for a game rated below 6 to get a sale — if your rating is below 6, we recommend you improve your game before trying to sell it.

This data will eventually be part of an automated report, so you can break things down per month.

Update: as always, stats beget more stats… commenters want to know how many games are in each rating and what percent of each rating sells. I can’t use the date range listed above for that because it’s too new — it would indicate that games put up yesterday “didn’t sell”, whereas we don’t consider a game unsold unless it’s been up for at least six weeks. So here’s a longer-range breakdown, for all of last year and the first couple months of this year.

Let’s see how horrible pasting from Excel looks…

I’ve talked about these stats on the blog before, and most recently you would have seen these if you used the pre-review system — it uses statistics like these to predict whether you will get a sale or not. E.g. if your pre-review score is a 6, the email will tell you that you’ve got a 20% chance of getting a sale unless you improve your game.

The biggest issue with these numbers is that the half-point scores started being used in the middle of the reporting period. (They were phased in over a multi-month period so there’s not a specific date to use.) Generally speaking, our average rating went down by .5, so what used to be an 8 is now a 7.5, etc. So this data captures a slice of both the old and the new rating scales at once, which makes the percentage of sales a little suspect, but nothing’s perfect.

It’s also worth noting again that we get lots of games that would be rated below 6, but we simply tell the developer not to bother unless they improve the game, as they don’t sell and we don’t want to give people false hope. And generally speaking, our reviewers can help get a “4″ or “5″ game up to a “6″ with extensive feedback, but not always… so the games rated below 6 are people who couldn’t or wouldn’t keep improving their game to get it a higher mark.

And as requested, you can discuss it here in the forums.

In the last post, I reported that 33% of games are made with AS2 (over the past six months on this site). HansaW wondered how well the AS2 games sold versus AS3 games. Interesting question, so I dug that up:

Here’s another angle:

Yep, definitely making less money. But these are a little misleading, at least to me, since there are fewer AS2 games versus AS3 games overall. So I crunched a different stat: assuming the game sells at all, it will sell for 18% less on average if it’s in AS2 versus AS3. However, I think that disparity is more about the quality (and simplicity) of the average AS2 game, as opposed to an effort by sponsors to pay less on AS2 games per se.

In fact, anecdotally, it seems like some sponsors aren’t really paying attention to the AS2/AS3 status on the game before they bid… even if they can only use AS3 games! I just got another email about a sponsor pulling out of a bid because they didn’t notice it was AS2 before bidding. Strangely, that’s two this week. Sponsors, please note this before bidding, if that’s important to you!

FlashDevelop: How Was It Recorded?

The other big question from my last blog post was about how people using FlashDevelop are recorded in our stats: several commenters said they use Flash Pro only at the end of development, to bundle the game with a preloader, so they were incorrectly reported as Flash Pro users even though it’s not their main development environment.

I made a small effort to detect this case, actually. The “other” category includes some games that seemed like they only used Flash Pro briefly. If elements were dragged onto the stage instead of placed there via AS3 code, that was one indicator — another was whether there were a lot of non-default symbols in use, since I assume people who actually develop in Flash Pro end up creating a lot more named things (such as frames and symbols) than pure AS3 games do. But that was largely a guess: I poked at a couple games I knew were one way or the other, and made some simple heuristics based on what I saw. I don’t know how accurate they are.

So at the end of the day, it’s true: if you’re using Flash Develop or the command-line, you can assume you were incorrectly reported on that chart. I suspect a lot of the Flex users are actually not using the Flex Builder environment. I do kind of doubt there’s a huge number of incorrectly reported Flash Pro users, but I don’t really know.

Does it matter?

But on the other hand, for the most important use of that chart, it doesn’t matter!

When a sponsor asks us whether they should prioritize their development kit for Flash Pro or for Flash Builder or what, we’ll still probably tell them to prioritize for Flash Pro. Even if you don’t develop in it, the 55% number shows you at least have Flash Pro, and can make a build in it. Thus, more than half of all developers have access to, and skill with, Flash Pro.

So if someone had to choose between providing a timeline-based library or a mxml-based library, the timeline one could be integrated by more developers, it seems. (That’s a pretty terrible example… we’d never tell sponsors to make an API based on either of those approaches! But some people have multiple legacy libraries and have to choose what they will keep supporting.)

Again anecdotally, I know Adam has long been telling people that Flash Pro is underrepresented, and it seems that I interact with more Flash Pro users than FlashDevelop/etc. users.  That may be because I deal with people who have technical problems, and one could argue that that the average Flash Pro user is less technically savvy than the average FlashBuilder user, perhaps. Hard to say, really. I’ve met some amazingly skilled Flash Pro users, too.

When CS6 comes out, I’ll try to make time to create a permanent report tool that digs a little deeper on the heuristic analysis. (The chart from the last post uses several heuristics, but they are mostly unverified… in other words, they’re pure guesswork on my part.)

We’re mostly back from FGS and GDC! During the conferences I was asked for a couple of pieces of information. They’re pretty interesting, so I figured I’d share them with everybody. These stats are for games uploaded in the last six months.

AS2 versus AS3

As you can see, AS2 is still holding its ground quite well; it’s been at 33% for over a year. But nevertheless, several big sponsors told us that they are phasing out AS2 support this year. (Yes, we did plead your case: there are a lot of great AS2 games still being made!) In the end, it just costs too much for them to support two completely different code-bases, and when these sponsors try to do new and clever things with their libraries (like integrate with Facebook for scoreboards), they are running into technical limitations of AS2.

I know that AS2 die-hards don’t want to hear this (and personally, I think AS2 is a much cooler language for non-programmers to make games in), but I think the writing is on the wall. Make 2011 the year you switch to AS3!

AS3 Development Environments

If you develop in AS2, then you pretty much have to develop in Flash Professional. But there are a lot more options if you develop in AS3. Which is most popular? Well, we can’t tell that for 100% certain, but there are telltale indicators for most of the popular IDEs embedded into the SWFs they make. So by examining these markers, we are able to tell approximately how popular each development environment is:

One very interesting thing to note is that the various versions of Flash Professional are responsible for 55% of the AS3 games on our site (along with 100% of the AS2 games, of course)! This is definitely not what big companies expected to hear. Even some Adobe employees didn’t realize that Flash Pro was still so popular for game development. Most of the mega-corporations we’ve talked to assume that Flex or pure AS3 games are the vast majority, with Flash Pro used only to create assets. This just isn’t true. We’ve been educating companies about this for a while.

We don’t have enough historical data to tell if Flash Pro use is waning or waxing, but my guess is that the newest Flash Pro’s excellent mobile-device support will keep it pretty high.

So even if sponsors phase out AS2 support, they will continue to need to support both .FLA-based games and pure AS3 projects in their leaderboards, preloaders, and so on. (This is much easier than supporting both AS2 and AS3, though, so there’s not too much worry there.)

A note on these numbers: these stats are based on the final SWF uploaded to our website… so if you used Flash to do animations and then embedded them in Flex, your game counted as a Flex app. These numbers are based on the SWFs uploaded from August 2010 to today.

We’re Back In Action!

As Chris mentioned when we left, game reviews basically stopped during GDC week: the entire FGL team (all thirteen of us!) were at the FGS and stayed for some of GDC. (It seemed the smartest thing to do was to put games on hold that week, since 17 of our top 20 sponsors, and who knows how many other sponsors, were away at GDC… not buying games!)

But our game agents have now returned to work, and are digging through the backlog of games very quickly: we’re down to 91 pending games as of this writing. If you just put your game up for approval today, I would guess you have about 7 days before your game gets approved. At that point we’ll hopefully be caught back to normal in terms of the queue.

Adam, Chris, Steve, and I have a million emails to catch up on, so if you mailed us recently, we’re digging as fast as possible. If you need something urgently, please remember to put in a ticket for it from the “Contact Us” menu item, we’re addressing those items first before tackling the privately-sent emails.

This year’s FGS was the best yet, with some really incredible pieces of news (such as Unity compiling to Molehill SWFs! Holy crap!) and some really exciting new game technologies and partnerships coming up.

As we were leaving for our planes, Adam mentioned that he hasn’t been this excited about the Flash scene since the first month we opened FGL. This year is going to be really exciting for FGL, for game developers, and for players too.

We’ve turned off the pre-review system for a couple weeks, as we work out some kinks in the system. If your game is already in the pre-review queue, it will still be handled as normal. But new games won’t be able to enter the queue.

Thank-you, everybody who’s done a pre-review so far! We’re using your feedback to make the process more straightforward. It will be turned back on shortly!

Hey Everyone,

We just wanted to update you all about the Indie Giving package.  The deadline to take advantage of this package is January 25th!  Make sure that you sign up via the website: www.IndieGiving.com.

Be sure to jump on this as you get a ton of great stuff with the package:

We anticipate 20 minutes of down-time tonight and tomorrow night around 11pm EST. We’re upgrading a subsystem, and don’t anticipate it will take terribly long.

(We normally show this sort of info on the Dashboard page, but it seems lots of people aren’t checking their dashboard, and these are short-notice, so I wanted to give a little more visibility.)

The FGL 2010 awards are about to wrap up! We will end voting Monday morning. Please vote, if you haven’t yet!

If you’ve been living under a rock (okay, how about “if you haven’t been trawling the FGL forums”, which isn’t quite the same thing), you may not have heard about the 2010 FGL Games Awards. This is an idea developers created and promoted, and is very much in the spirit of “for developers, by developers.” We’re happy to help with the vote tallying, but all the nominations have come from developers. Even the ad we’re running on our website was created by our own jjwallace.

The winners of this contest will get cool medals attached to their account profile (also created by jjwallace, and they are badass), along with some goodies that we  put together. But the biggest win? Having other developers tell you that your game is the best. It’s a pretty great feeling. Please help out by voting on the nominees! Anyone with an FGL account can vote.