One question I am often asked by beginning flash authors is "How do I make money off my game?" There are many traditional ways to do it, and quite a few newer ones popping up all the time. Flash games are a hot commodity right now, and if you can build a good one you deserve to make money off it.

One of the hurdles many developers face is that Flash is relatively easy to pirate, this recently became a fairly big issue when the Beijing Olympics featured pirated games on the official Olympics home page. This really got me thinking about the issue, and for a while I was quite discouraged by it.

Then I was shown the site FlashDen.net and it got me thinking about an approach you could take right from the moment you start building your game. Plan to make money off both your game AND your code. FlashDen allows you to upload and sell code snippets, so if you made certain that while you were building your game you were properly documenting it, you could release version into the wild that has Mochi Ads and at the same time upload the code to FlashDen. This way you have a cheap and legal alternative for the people who are going to rip off your game anyway.

You could use your game as an advertisement for the source code. Include a splash page right in the game that says, "Buy the source for this game for just $5" and link to your page. With the prices being reasonable on FlashDen, someone who might have pirated your game before might be inclined to spend the $5 to legally download the source instead of spending the time to rip it off and figure it out.

Well, I am excited to report that there have been two reviews for FluxWord, and I have to say I am happy with the feedback so far.

The first review came from the site BestFacebookApps.com:

"FluxWord is a refreshingly unique idea for a Facebook Application. It is both useful and fun. Many writers seek feedback for their work, but are perhaps too shy to ask. The FluxWord forum could make criticism easier to take for the writer, and make giving an honest assessment easier for the reader."

The second review comes from FacebookAppReviews.com:

"If you want to talk about an application that covers all the bases, FluxWord is it. It has categories, ratings, critiques, discussions, and even a forum for users."

Very exciting stuff! Of course, both sites also had things they didn't like, and I will be focusing on addressing these issues as soon as possible.