Earlier this week I made my 175th BlitzMax Game Framework sale which took total gross revenue to over £5000 (approx. $10,000). This is a great milestone for me to reach! So, a big thanks to all my customers!

Those sales have occurred over the last 26 months, which is an average of $384 per month. One of those sales was direct (via cheque) and the other 174 were made up of 118 Paypal sales and 56 Share-it sales. I added share-it in case people didn’t want to use Paypal for any reason - good job I did! Because my customers are worldwide I made 3 buy buttons so that people could purchase in Dollars, Pounds and Euros depending on what they are most comfortable with (and people do use all three).

In total I’ve spent 387 hours on the framework. The bulk of this was the initial development (lots of development time is now often logged separately as part of whatever game I’m working on currently), and the rest is marketing and supporting the customers.

After my costs (£830), which include Paypal and Share-it fees, VAT, BlitzMax and promotional refunds, I have worked for £10.78 per hour which is not stellar but it’s pretty good considering I just had an idea one day that went “Hey, this framework is pretty good. I wonder if anyone would buy it?” - and the rest, as they say, is history Don’t forget that I needed the framework ANYWAY for my own games, so any money made selling it is pure bonus. Plus my customers have helped me to improve it and fix bugs and I’ve met some great people - bonus!

Just read these stats about the top 10 Facebook games as of June 9th:

1: Friends For Sale! (633,897 active players)
2: TexasHoldEmPoker (553,999)
3: Scrabulous (444,548)
4: (Lil) Green Patch (437, 847)
5: Mob Wars (288, 372)
6: Who Has The Biggest Brain? (279,242)
7: Speed Racing (207, 283)
8: Bowling Buddies (205, 716)
9: Pokey! (202,161)
10: Word Challenge (193, 850)

That’s pretty impressive. I haven’t actually tried any of these because Facebook is EVIL (well, actually it’s just a waste of my precious time, so I don’t bother). I assume these games generate revenue from adverts (I could be wrong) in which case they should be doing pretty well.

Another approach would be to link to download games (or ad-driven online games) on your own site so that users might play the Facebook game and then end up on your site (great for generating traffic especially as some Facebook games generate MILLIONS of unique visitors per month).

It’s been 2 years since I first released the Grey Alien BlitzMax Game Framework. In that time period I’ve sold over 160 units to customers all over the world. I’ve made 3 commercial games with it, the latest being the smash hit Fairway Solitaire, which was released in December 2007 for PC and in February 2008 for Mac. Many of my customers have made commercial and free games with it and there are more in the pipeline.

Also in December 2007, one of my customers kindly set up a forum for framework users. This has been a great success as framework users can now help each other (and me) and also showcase their projects.

I’ve had a great year so far for framework sales which may well be due to the release of Fairway Solitaire. Perhaps it’s due to other factors too like an improved Blitz forum signature. Or maybe it’s just that the customer base has reached a critical mass where recommendations become a real factor. Whatever the reason, I’m very pleased

So, anyway, a big thanks to all my customers for your continued support and help. I’ve received numerous suggestions for bug fixes and improvements from my customers and the Mac support is greatly improved due to help from some very kind users - so thanks very much everyone!