For most people, Gamemaker is a fun way to explore a game development hobby, and little more. Of course, Gamemaker can very easily be used to release full-fledged games on various consoles, but most people use it as an educational tool. There is an easy way to release your Gamemaker games for multiple popular platforms on the cheap, though. Even better, there’s an easy way to monetize these releases too. It all comes down to HTML5 and Google Adsense.
Now, if you’ve used Gamemaker before, you know that you basically have to pay for a license for each platform you want to release your game on. This means you need to pay for the ability to publish on iPhone, Android, Windows, and Mac to reach a basic level of multiplatform compatibility. Since that can get expensive, I propose a new solution: HTML5. If you release your Gamemaker games in HTML5 (which you also have to pay for, unfortunately), people on any computer or smartphone will be able to check your game out in their browser. They won’t even have to download anything, so it’s an easy way to increase the reach of your game.
Now, you might be thinking that it would be a bit of extra work to code Gamemaker games to be controlled by both a mouse (on computers) and a finger (on smartphones). Gamemaker, however, automatically considers a finger tap as a mouse click, so anything you code as a response to a mouse click will also be triggered by a finger tap. In other words, you don’t have to do anything extra to make your games equally compatible for your computer and your smartphone (assuming you make games controlled entirely by mouse clicks).
If releasing games for smartphones and computers all at once sounds appealing to you, all you have to do is setup a website (or a page on your website) where you can host your game. This is where Google Adsense comes in. If you want to monetize your games, it’s easier to do so with HTML5 versions of your Gamemaker games than other versions. This is because you can simply add Google Adsense ads to the website that you’re hosting your game on.
In other words, if you want to start monetizing your Gamemaker games, all you really have to do is:
- Make a Gamemaker game with a Gamemaker studio with HTML5 capabilities
- Export your game to HTML5
- Set up a website using WordPress or your favorite CMS
- Sign up for Google Adsense and add your website to your profile
- Host your game on your website, put ads on the same page
That’s it! In just five steps you can upgrade your game development from a hobby to a revenue stream. Of course, since you’ll be self-releasing, it’ll be up to you to bring traffic to actually play your game. Like I said, though, it should be easier to get people to check out a game they can play in their browser without downloading anything.
