Few days ago I was checking what domains about game portals were free to buy, and I noticed that GoogleGames.Com was free. That is weird, how could they forget about that domain? Looks like Google is interested in casual games advertising, but not in developing them, or in building a portal! Will be a hard time for Mochiads or GameJacket. This is a great news for Developers, even because, honestly we are not earning very much with this system right now, but actually the guys from Mountain View are pretty slow, the market is fermenting right now. At the Casual Connect of Seattle Bernie Stolar said: "I'm going to be very clear right now, Google is involved in in-game advertising. I'm going to say it one more time, in case there's any misconceptions here: in-game advertising. This is an area that Google believes will have tremendous growth over the next number of years. ..." "No Gbox, Bernie?" asked Google's Greg Schaffer. Nope, no plans for a console, Stolar said. And no "Google Live," no video-game portal, and no video-game search, he said. Later, Stolar reiterated, "We are not going to be a publisher or a developer or a portal for games, at all. That's the jobs of everybody here. That's why we want to partner with you." That means game publishers will be able to use the Google system to put advertising in their games, and advertisers will be able to work through the Google system to buy ad space within games. They didn't show how the ads will appear but they plan to offer targeted video ads before and after a game, as well as in the middle during breaks such as when a player clears a level, said Eva Woo, a member of the Google games advertising team in a separate briefing for press. We just hope these ads wont be too annoying for users, and possibly that they will pay a lot!

These last 3 weeks have been very successful for me, I just won 3 contests with 2 of my games on Nonoba. The first one was Connect4 Multiplayer, the classic Connect4 game with something more, the possibility of playing together with people from all over the world. It won the weekly contest of $500 and the Monthly Contest of $2.500, generating 160.000 users in 2 weeks. The game was made in about 2 hours, which means I worked for 1.500/hour, pretty good no? The other game is Bombators Multiplayer, a remake of Atomic Bomberman in Multiplayer with the chance to play with 4 players in real-time. It got the front page of the most important game websites as Newgrounds and Minijuegos This is a video of the game. This game won the weekly competition of $500 and its on the first place for the monthly competition of July. But the amazing thing is that in the first 3 days it has generated 70.000 hits and 7.000 new subscribers thanks to the game. This game was made in about a week. The weirdest thing is that any company contacted me yet to create games for them… I think they haven’t seen it yet… However, while trying to distribute my games, I found many problems. People from other portals didn’t like to have the Nonoba logo in the game, and so they decided to not publish the game on their websites, probably they were scared Nonoba was going to steal them users? LoL Anyway, if you want to try to make a Multiplayer thing, the first important thing is to know AS3 very good. Then go on Nonoba Developers and download the Multiplayer SDK. I suggest you to start with something very simple, like a card games or a board games. Let me know if it turns in something good

The War for the best In-Game Flash Advertisement is just started, the biggest company right now are know by almost all the developers, MochiAds and GameJacket, but, does everybody know all the details about them? Lets analyze their features searching all the Pros and Cons to understand what is the best choice for our game.

MochiAds

Pros: - It is very easy to set up, just put a AS file they give to you in the same root of your game and put their code on the time line. - The game is accepted very fast. - When the advertisement is displaying, the game loads in background. Which is very important if you want to avoid a too heavy loading screen. - After the advertisement is displayed it automatically disappear. - Support Inter-Level Advertising, I don't suggest it because gamers hate it. - If you need it they provide you a very nice Leader Board to set up on your game. - You can personalize the colors around the advertisement. - You can upload your games on their server and use that space to show them on your Site or Blog. - The distribution of the game is good, but they could do better.

Cons: - The eCPM (The effective cost per 1000 impressions) sometime is ridiculously low. It happened to me last month to notice that my eCPM was of 0.02 cents, this means that to earn 1 dollar I had to show 50.000 times their advertisement... of course I sent them a mail to understand why my eCPM was so low, the answer was: ...in your game you can see that most of the impressions are coming from Brazil and Thailand which do not currently monetize very well... - The statistics system is very cute but not very functional.

GameJacket

Pro: - The eCPM is always at least 0.50 cents which is the highest of its category. - The smaller size allowed is 300x250 (With MochiAds is 300x300). - As MochiAds they send you the payment via PayPal 28 days after the end of the month in which your earnings reach $100 (actually MochiAds is after 30 days). - If your game has never been published and they like it they give you $1000 advance in advertising royalty. If you earn more than $1000 in royalty, you keep that too. This means that if a game is very good you will earn $1000 instantly plus a minimum of 50 cents every 1000 times your game is played. - If you need it they have a team to help you to distribute your game on the other portals. - If your game has a bug and you have to fix it, but you already submitted it to a thousand of games portal, it's not a problem, you just send it to GameJacket and it is automatically fixed everywhere.

Cons: - To understand how to set up it you have to make some tests. - The statistics system has lots of options but sometimes it doesn't work. - After the advertisement is displayed you have to click on Play to move on and usually it appears a screen without anything for 3-4 seconds before to show you the full loading screen. - I think GameJacket has some problem with the AS3 script, because sometime the Advertising Loader does some mess with the frames of the time line. - The advertising is not exactly on your SWF file, you have to submit them the file, then they give you another file of 10 Kb size which loads your file loaded on their machine, this means that if they go down, your game goes down with them. - Sometimes the game doesn't preserve the background color, so you have to create a square on a level of the game with the color you want to be sure it wont be lost. - The colors of the advertisement are just 2: white and gray. I think they are both very strong, for some aspects MochiAds looks better, but my personal experience says that with GameJacket you can earn more. I am still using MochiAds on some of my games though, just because for some reason they don't work on GameJacket.