New Flash game - Space Control

Space Control is a space shooting game with lot of enemy ships and bosses, various weapons and power-ups. It is time for you to take control over the galaxy, and defeat the evil Tlingom empire!
The game is brought to you by Games to Enjoy.
Post here your feedback about the game, and help us improve it.

Starting your own gaming website

Here is a little article I wrote for those looking for some tips to start their own arcade.

At this point, you are probably dreaming about all the money you could make with your gaming portal. It may not be as simple as it looks like. They are certain things that you absolutely need to know before getting to work. Without them, you will never be able to earn even a buck!

1) First of all, to start off any business, you need some money. You will not go pretty far if you are not willing to spend a couple of those precious green bills. You will need money for the followings:

- Rent a server to host your site (I use IWeb, which provides excellent hosting at a very low price : less than 3$ a month for 10 years!)
- Buy a domain name (10$/year)
- Buy an arcade script (starting at 20$) (I use AvArcade Pro)
- Advertise your site (Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Ads, etc.)

Those are almost all mandatory if you want your site to be successful. Other fees may be necessary, such as hiring people to help you with your website design/logo or to code special or unique features for your site. However, if you have an excellent knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and MySQL, you certainly have a clear advantage over thousands of people.

Furthermore, if you really wanna be serious with your project, you will have to sponsor games. You can start doing this at www.flashgamelicense.com. This will require some investments, but it will always be the best way to promote your website and bring thousands of users to play on it, thus bringing you money (mainly through Google AdSense) and helping you grow your business.

2) Second of all, you need something that is even more precious than money. You need time to invest in your project. That applies to anyone looking for success in something. Running a popular arcade portal does not require only a few hours of work, after what you let it run by itself and start earning a nice income daily. It requires constant work, and only after incalculable hours of work will you see the money starting to pay off for all that hard work. Working on your website design, content, as well on marketing, advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are things that take time and that will be worth it in the long-term adventure.

3) Invaluable qualities that helps building a great gaming website are creativity, talent, curiosity, sense of business, engagement and motivation! Without those, it is gonna be quite difficult to achieve any kind of success.

This was not indented to provide a full guide on how to build your arcade website, but to inform you about the most important things that you should know before starting your gaming portal project. It is now time either to experiment by yourself or go and find other useful information around the net. Here are a few links to help you get started.

Domain name:
http://www.godaddy.com
http://order.1and1.com

Hosting:
http://www.iweb.com

Arcade scripts:
http://www.avscripts.net
http://www.arcadescript.com
http://www.phparcadescript.com

Other useful arcade informations:
http://www.talkarcades.com
http://www.forum.avscripts.net
http://www.flashgamelicense.com
http//www.arcadewebmasterforum.com

Good luck with your online games website and most of all... enjoy anything you are investing time in!

Top Flash Games

Making games not too difficult is important

So for game makers, there one point that I’ve written about before but it seems many game developers, and sometimes even myself, miss out on. We like to make our games difficult and challenging because we think that way players will keep on coming back to them in order to beat them.

However, this is not usually the case. If a game is really challenging, a lot of the players will just give up. People like instant gratification more than ever now and if something is too hard, they will more likely give up rather than try again. Take for instance a game I sponsored in the past — Lightwing. It is an excellent plane shooter game and graphically on par with the Raiden X series, but it had one major flaw — people consider it way too hard. I tried to get the developer to implement mouse controls but he wouldn’t do it because he designed it to be that way. The game ended up doing OK but I think it was denied a chance at going super-viral because many people just got frustrated at the difficulty. As one player put it “I simply do not like games that are all about dying”. Now, the game is possible to beat but it is highly challenging. I believe if mouse controls had been implemented or the game made easier, people would have rated the game a lot higher.

Another testament to the popularity of easy games are sites like arcadeprehacks, which basically take all the challenge out of a game and let players win instantly. Now, you might think that no one would want to play such a game, but in reality, those sites are madly popular. Once again, people prefer instant gratification rather than having to work for something. So next time when designing a game, do not make it too challenging or hard or have difficulty levels were people can choose to make the game easy if they want.

Flash Games

Site-locks — when is it worth it to buy

In the world of sponsorships there are generally two kinds, primary licenses(which you can distribute) and site-locks(which only work on your site). While primary licenses are useful on just about any arcade site, site-locks have very limited use and should only be purchased on certain types of sites.

Basically site-locks are only good for retaining traffic and have almost zero marketing or promotional value – which is what most sites need. Because of that reason, most sites(like 99% of sites) have very little use for them. The only sites that would have reason to buy a site-lock at any price are the big sites. If you run a small or medium sized arcade site(less than 300,000 page-views a day), then you should not buy site-locks, no matter the price because even if they are under $100, it is most likely not worth it. If you go the site-lock route, it only makes sense if all your games are site-locks since a site with some site-locks games and others not still gives traffic away to other sites and would make no sense and be a waste of money. This confines smaller sites in another way. Some really good games(like a lot of the stuff that armorgames.com puts out) are sponsored on an exclusive license or are made in-house so site-locks are not available for these games. Therefore, you will not be able to put these games on your site which could deny you a decent amount of traffic from SEO.

You might think that sites like Armorgames.com or Andkon.com are successful by doing only site-locks and got big that way, but that is also not the truth. Both Armor Games and Andkon were already huge before they started buying site-locks. Neither site has really grown at all because of buying site-lock licenses. Since site-locks have no promotional value, they actually do not bring in any new traffic. They just prevent people from clicking on logos within the game and leaving your site. This contributes only a small amount to the overall bounce rate for a site. Armor games grew because it got into the game early and sponsors on primary or exclusive licenses to attract new traffic. It was already an industry leader before it started buying site-locks. Andkon sprung up suddenly and grew huge because of a massive paid ad campaign a few years ago where almost every single Ad on a gaming site was for Andkon.com. There really isn’t any arcade that grew popular or big because of site-lock buys so it is not good way to initially gain popularity.

If your site is a huge site already, don’t buy site-locks as they are not a good investment. Instead spend the money on directory listings, primary licenses, and even site design. You will get a much better return on investment if you do so.

Flash Games

Avoiding Scam Website Sales

There are many website auction places online today each selling hundreds or thousands of sites. Usually the owner of the site will post traffic figures or show graphics of revenue for the last month or two and post an asking price in the hopes that someone will buy it. However, some of these numbers have been artificially inflated for the last month or two to drive a higher asking price and others are outright fake. This article will help you get the facts and determine if a sale is legitimate or not or if you are just being scammed. It will mainly focus on arcade sites(as that is generally the niche of sites I work with and seen many shady sales for), but can be applied to other Niches as well.
The most popular online website auction site is Flippa, but unfortunately as I've seen, its also where the most scams take place. For many of the auctions I have seen, Flippa does nothing to monitor or scrutinize traffic numbers or revenue numbers that the owner puts up, and as a result, many I have seen in the arcade site realm can be easily determined as fake. Thus, the first step is never to buy or bid on a site at Flippa without doing lots of research first. The best thing you can do is go to a community like talkarcades(for arcade websites) and ask experienced members there what they think of a certain sale. Many of them will recognize scam seller on sight and prevent you from making a bad purchase. Secondly, Alexa traffic ranks are a good tool to determine if a potential sale is a scam. If a site's Alexa rank is above 500,000 and they are claiming to be making thousands of dollars(or even hundreds) per month, then they are probably lying. These are two easy checks you can do to protect yourself. Beyond these two steps, there are a number of more technical steps that I will explain below to protect yourself.

You must look closely at the screenshots of revenue(whether they be adsense or some other source) that they give. Fake stats will look much like real screenshots but they usually have at least 1 small flaw in them. There might be too much whitespace between 2 stats or a column may be aligned completely right. Sometimes you really have to look and ask other people if traffic and revenue stats are legitimate.
If monthly revenue stats look to be legitimate, then you should ask for a history of at least the past 6 months of stats and revenue. Ask specifically for traffic sources. If the seller bulks at this request, do not buy the site as he has probably just inflated his stats for the last month or two to get a high sale price. When you get the stats, looking closely at this for tell-tale signs of large amounts of traffic being bought. Sites with a large amount of non-organic(bought traffic) are simply not worth that much. Some signs of bought traffic include erratic fluctuations on a day-to-day basis for traffic and traffic suddenly peaking in the last month or two. You should also ask for what search engine keywords are major sources of traffic for the seller and how much each word gives.

Erratic fluctuations in day to day traffic is an easy sign that the traffic is not organic at all. Most larger sites don't have such fluctuations. The one exception is between weekdays and weekends where traffic might swing a legitimate 30-40% or perhaps more(if its one of those sites that focuses on school traffic). If you see erratic swings within a week and from week to week not following a more-or-less constant pattern, the seller is probably injecting and buying traffic on certain days to make the stats look better. If traffic has been somewhat steady but has suddenly increased several hundred percent in the last month or two, it is also a sign that the seller is fluffing up the traffic to get a higher sale. Do not buy these sites.

Search engine traffic is the best source for organic traffic and probably the most wanted type. If a site does not have much search engine traffic, its value decreases dramatically. If your seller refuses to give you this information, do not buy the site. When he gives you this information, double check it yourself on Google. If he claims that he is getting 1000 visitors a day from a certain keyword but you don't find him on the top page of results for that keyword, he is probably lying. If he tells you that he did have page 1 results for certain keywords a while ago but doesn't have them anymore but its only a matter of time before the site gets the keyword back, don't believe him. There is a good chance that his site got penalized or more likely Google just recognized his link-farming ways and discounted those links. Either way, the site will not be getting the keyword ranking back and therefore you should not waste the money. Be sure to research and check carefully that all his search engine traffic claims are valid.

In conclusion, do lots of research and ask around in communities first before making a purchase. Try to buy sites with lots of validated search engine traffic and other organic traffic that has been validated to avoid being scammed in a sale.

Archbob, owner of Flash Games and Tower Defense

Fun Learning With Cool Math Games

Mathematics or often called Math is a subject that studies the concepts of quantity, space, structure, and change. In learning this subject, people will also be taught how to analyze patterns, conjectures, and probabilities. It is a very important field of study that most of its concept can be implemented on daily life. But many people find it very difficult to learn or hard to understand. Because of these reasons, many people don't feel like to studying it. Nowadays, there is a great fun way to learn this interesting subject; cool math games.
These games are designed to make Math learning process to be fun and decrease people's fear and worry of finding it difficult. It is a fact that when people have to study it through formulas and numbers, people find this learning process to be daunting. Lots of people even give up before they start to learn it just because they complicated formulas and lots of numbers on the books. That is why these games are well developed in certain ways to enable them learning this subject in a fun way. These kinds of games are available on internet for unlimited options. The approach that is being used is different from conventional learning process. Instead of giving people complex formulas to be understood, the approach is giving people the opportunities in indirectly learning and understanding the formulas through various kinds of games that vary on the difficulties and the form.
There are several benefits with this approach; first, these games help people to understand Math concept with an entertaining games tasks so that they don't only improve their skill but also other knowledge. Second, the games come in simple instructions that make them easy to understand the rules of the games and also give chance to use their logic. Third, the games come in different level of difficulties and different form so that they can learn the subject one level after another. When they are able to pass one level, the difficulties will be increasing. With this, they will be able to challenge themselves to a more advance level. The variety of form games options are also giving many choices so that they won't feel bore when they study and play at the same time. Some options that they can play while enhancing the skill are Puzzles, Graphical Quizzes, and Flash Cards; all are available for free on internet. Those cover almost all concepts like Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Mathematical Analysis, Trigonometry, Calculus, Discrete Mathematics.
For More information please visit Cool Math Games