Processing Blogs

About 3 weeks ago, I’ve released a little Flash game named Drifts. I’ve decided to post a bit of data on the amount of traffic the game has generated so far, and on other aspects of publishing a casual game that I find noteworthy.

First off, flash games use a lot of bandwidth. In three weeks, Drifts has had almost 200.000 hits. My statistics don’t indicate unique hits for single pages, but judging from the contrast to my usual site stats, I’d estimate somewhere around 70 percent of the visitors to be unique. On average, people played for about two rounds per visit. (I know this because of the amount of hits on the highscore list, relative to the amount of hits on the game’s page.) However, it’s clear that a lot of people played much more. I know from someone who once held a highscore of around 2.000 points, that he had to play 40 minutes without losing the game, to attain his score. The current top score is over 15.000.
So far, the game – which is about 1 MB in size – has generated just over 70 GB of traffic in total, with peaks of 14 GB per day. I consider this a good place to refer you to my service provider, DreamHost.

Traffic has built up over the first week, multiplying in size every day up to around 10.000 hits per day. Initially, I had posted the game on a well frequented forum, generating around 400 visits. From there on, it spread out over various blogs. After a few days, I contacted two large casual gaming themed blogs, which quickly added to the traffic the game experienced. More importantly, though, these blogs (notably Jay Bibby’s “jay is games“) attracted the attention of rather large gaming portals, which brought the site’s traffic to a peak of over 30.000 hits per day for three days, the largest referrer contributing around 10.000 visits per day.
Since then, “Drifts” has gradually been replaced with newer games on these sites, and has more or less linearly decreased in frequency to around 6000 hits per day, around which it has been in stable orbit during the last week or so.

During its peak popularity, I decided to put up a PayPal button, allowing people to donate for my bandwidth costs, as another prolonged traffic peak could very well bring me expensive overage charges. I believe it’s worth noting that this measure is not of much use – less than 1 in 50.000 visitors makes a donation (of course, this is not a reliable statistic, given the sample size). This is pretty much what you would expect, considering that most people come for a quick game, play for a few minutes and then leave. In the same vein, the number of people who look around the rest of the site is neglectable – a couple hundred extra hits on the main projects page during peak time.
On a positive note, I was surprised to see that only three attempts to hack the highscore script were logged. I had expected much more, and two of them were actually from the forum I had initially posted the game to. (On a side-note, the highscore script bans any ip address that has been associated with attempted hacking.)

While not a lot of people showed interest in other work, I received a good amount of positive e-mail, which is always a good thing. I also received “offers” of gaming sites to mirror the game. Some of these did not bother with formalities such as having a name attached to them, and most of them did not write back once I used the word “license” in my reply.
A lot of the portals link to the game in an iFrame, allowing them to put their advertisement banners next to my content. Since they provide a large number of visitors, I have not taken any steps against sites where the frame is large enough to provide for my donation message and e-mail link. If my bandwidth usage gets out of hand, I will add a script that breaks out of the iFrame, probably causing these sites to stop linking the game.
There are also a couple of parasitic sites who hotlink the swf file directly, circumventing any other content I may put on the page. These are usually put on a blacklist to receive alternative content, as soon as I notice them.
If you’re planning to write your own web-based game, I think it’s good advice to stress the importance of provisions against people copying the game for their own profit, assuming you don’t want your work to end up on the likes of ebaumsworld. Drifts does this by checking for the domain that launches it and refuses to launch from any place but repeatwhiletrue. Additionally, the highscore list refuses submissions coming from other sites than my own. This will probably not stop a good dedicated Flash developer for long, but it seems to be a good enough means against kids running online gaming sites with illicit copies.