Types of Revenue
Flash games make money primarily by generating web traffic. But there are a number of ways that the potential traffic from a game can become revenue. Let's look at some of the most common methods.
Branding
Branding means modifying a game so that the game itself represents an advertisement for its sponsor. Often this involves incorporating logos, splash screens, high score links and a 'More Games' button. The goal of branding is to bring people back to the sponsor's website.
Usually we talk about sponsors and branding, but a game without an external sponsor is still branded: it represents an advertisement for its developer and will usually include the developer's logo and links to the developer's webpage. However, it is often more lucrative for a developer to sell branding rights to an external sponsor.
Branding is the cornerstone of a traditional exclusive license, and until just recently was the most common licensing deal for Flash games.
Advertising
While a branded game serves as an implicit advertisement for a developer or sponsor, Flash games can also include direct advertisements. These ads might display before the game begins or between levels.
Rather than arranging each and every advertisement separately, most developers integrate a system of rotating ads supplied by an in-game ad network like CPMStar, MochiAds, or GameJacket. Ads like this generate revenue whenever the advertisement are displayed, whenever the game is played, anywhere on the Internet.
Site Licenses
Both branding and advertising do best when the Flash game is distributed as widely as possible. But sometimes a sponsor just wants to publish a game on their web site in order to draw players to their site directly.
Licenses like this are called site licenses or site-locked licenses, because the Flash code is modified so that this version of the game can only be played on the one particular website. Usually other modifications are made to the game as well. For instance, the sponsor may want the developer to integrate their scoreboards or to support site-wide avatars or medals. Often the sponsor will display advertisements alongside the games on their website and so they will ask the developer to remove any in-game ads.
Site licenses are also called non-exclusive licenses because they are almost always non-exclusive. It doesn't make much sense to develop a game and then sell it to only one portal site when you could leverage it across the entire Internet! But developers do need to be careful that these non-exclusive licenses do not conflict with other licenses they might have sold.
