Tentacle Wars (flash) – Postmortem

Six months ago Tentacle Wars was uploaded and featured on Gamezhero.com. I would like to share some stats about the game.

At this moment TW’s got more than 11 millions game plays worldwide. And it still gets about 15 thousands daily. Mochibot is here.

The major distribution events are:

• G – published and featured on the sponsor’s site – Gamezhero.com
• NG – published on Newgrounds.com
• Kong – published on Kongregate.com

The most interesting thing here (I was surprised) – to be featured on Gamezhero means a lot for the distribution. The game was featured also on Newgrounds and Kongregate. But the highest peak (see the picture) happened before NG and Kong. But wait! Gamezhero isn’t as big as NG or Kong (these are huge portals), but it did probably even more for the game distribution (at least not less). I’m not sure if Gamezhero did some extensive distribution work to make it happen. As far as I know they didn’t.

Sponsorship & Money

I’ve learned that you should always try to get performance deal. Performance is fair for both: you and sponsor. If your game becomes a mega hit with millions game plays – you get money for every million. You are happy – sponsor is happy. Because, as you know, game plays are converted into a sponsor’s portal visitors. If your game fails – you don’t get a lot of money. You aren’t too happy. But your sponsor isn’t happy too – no visitors – no money. This is obvious. But…

The most important thing here is that sponsors don’t want to risk and pay upfront a lot of money even if they really like your game. Since they never know if the game will become a hit or not. Sometimes you can get a bit more for a “bad” game in case of sponsor’s prediction mistake. But most likely you won’t get a lot of money upfront for a game that will turn into a super hit later. I think Steambirds story is very uncommon. Don’t expect this scenario. Or you should borrow good luck from Andy Moore

What’s next?

Play the TW level pack with smart purple microbes (TW: The Purple Menace).

Also read: Tentacle Wars coming to iPad and iPhone.