Flash Game Ad Manager – Coming Soon!

In July of last year I wrote a post titled Monetizing your Flash game. Serving your own ads? In it I discussed ways Flash game developers could monetize their games through common methods such as sponsorship and ads. I also proposed a method of ‘self serving’ ads in ones own games. I successfully implemented such a method in the two games I’ve published to date, Knight of the Dead and Picross Forever. While I personally have had limited success with privately selling ad space in both games I believe there is definitely value in putting control back into the hands of developers so they have complete control over ads displayed in their games.

In the next week or two I will be releasing an AS3 based class library called Ahrooga Ad Manager dedicated to the remote switching and management of in-game ads. Specifically this will allow game makers to use ANY available ad provider’s code in their game rather than being locked into just one. For example, you could have ad code for Mochiads AND GameJacket embedded in your game and remotely switch between them at your leisure. Want to disable ads all together on a specific domain? You can do that too. It also handles the loading and display of custom ads, either SWF or image based.

Part of my motivation for creating this is to get flash game developers excited about the ‘network potential’ their games have. Flash games, even mediocre ones, can often have an uncanny effect of becoming viral very fast. The more sites a game spreads to, the more eyeballs will see your ads. Makes sense right? Now imagine you’ve released 10 games over the last year which have then spread to hundreds of sites each with thousands of daily plays collectively. What you effectively have here is your own games ‘network’. Imagine the benefit of being able to feed in your own custom ad across all 10 of these games. One obvious benefit of this is to promote your newest game and funnel those ad clicks back to your own site.

I have tried to put a lot of emphasis on abstracting away a lot of the nitty-gritty stuff so a developer will only need to drop a few lines of Actionscript into their document class and then listen for events to trigger to know which ad system to instantiate. The way it works is when your game is initialized on any website it immediately ‘calls home’ to your server and fetches an XML file you have hosted. The XML file contains information as to which ad providers code to instantiate or alternatively, a path to your own custom ad which the ad manager will load along with a customizable preloader.

Overall, Ahrooga Ad Manager has the following planned features, most of which have already been implemented:

• Easy loading of custom ads
• Remotely configurable ad duration for custom ads
• Switch between embedded ad providers remotely
• Simple but customizable preloader
• Disable ads altogether on a per-domain basis
• XML loading failover, add multiple XML paths in order of priority to avoid unreachable servers
• Garbage Collector friendly

These are just a few of the features which should be available when the code is released soon. If anyone has any questions please leave a comment below.