It's been about a month since I released the Flash version of Treasure Tower, and since then, I've developed a hopeless addiction to the MochiMedia statistics pages that are graphing my life out Dave Gorman-style. The trouble with them is that you can see exactly what's happening to the game and where it's getting views from as it spreads around the world, and so I can hardly tear my eyes off them. I included their adverts in it as well, which pay you a fraction of a cent each time the game is viewed. Here's what my latest obsession looks like:


This is the summary graph that shows the views per day - it doesn't directly indicate money made on that day, because the payment made per thousand views is different depending on how expensive it is to buy advertising in the country that the game was viewed in.

There's a pattern to the graph as it gets submitted to various sites, resulting in a spike of views that then diminishes over time as the game makes its way off the front pages and down into the archives. In the beginning, I submitted the game to be distributed by Mochi and also put it on Newgrounds, and most of my views came from Newgrounds at first - today there are six thousand views there in total, which is a completely unprecendented figure for my EXE games. However, after four days, China and then Korea got hold of it, and the view count rocketed to 15,000 per day (but, as I mentioned above, this didn't mean I was rolling in it because the money made from adverts there is very little). I've no idea what the next sort of gentle curve is, because it's notably un-spike-like - but just as it seemed to be going down again, the game was featured on a site that's visited a lot by people from Argentina and Spain, and that caused another spike with a bit more revenue to go with it.

As you can see, it's not a replacement-career-level money maker or anything, but it's nice to get a little extra back from putting a game out on to the Internet, and also to be able to see just how many people are playing something that I've made.