The Blazing Games site will be closing down

 

What is going on?

Blazing Games Inc. operated from April 2003 until September 2014. As it doesn’t cost much to keep the site running, I did so after the company was dissolved. The problem is that in the last three years, Java has pretty much been removed from browsers and an end-of-life for Flash has been announced. This means that most of the games on this site will no longer work so there is no real point in keeping the site alive. I have therefore decided to set a going dark date for the site. April of 2019 will be when the Blazing Games site goes dark.

The original plan for Blazing Games was to have simple games regularly appear on the site to draw people to the company while creating larger scale games that could be sold. This plan never really worked as planned with the larger-scale projects not really materializing and no where near enough ad revenue to keep the site going which is why I closed the company down. There are a lot of good games on the site but most of them are not really monetizable. Porting them to HTML 5 would not be overly difficult work but it would be time consuming work.

As Blazing Games is essentially just a hobby the saving of these games is something I want to do. I decided to do an inventory of the site to see what games had monetization potential. While I thought of several projects that could earn some money, even those were a stretch and would likely result in less than minimum wage results. This is the reason I decided on having a vote on which games to save.

Voting

I have gone through the site and added a vote button to all the Java and Flash games on the site. The idea here is to let visitors vote on which games they want to see ported to HTML 5. You are welcome to vote for as many games as you like but please don’t vote for every game as that is not helpful. To prevent spamming of votes, I am tying votes to the IP Address of the voter. This is not a very reliable way of doing this (often people have dynamic IP addresses) but should reduce the more overt attempts at voting multiple times. This information will be deleted when the site goes dark and will be strictly used for seeing which games were voted for at a given IP Address.

The rank of the games when combined with the monetization potential of a game or collection of games will be used when determining which games that I am going to work on. I am thinking of offering porting of specific games as backer rewards for my crowd funding efforts so reward games will take higher priority than voted games. While I doubt that I will be able to earn a living wage from the monetization efforts, it would be nice to be proven wrong and be able to work full time on resurrecting these games instead of in my limited spare time.

What is going to happen to the games

I am going to be moving the ported games to my Spelchan.com site once the site goes dark. If through some miracle there is enough interest and money coming in, I may change my mind about closing the Blazing Games site but don’t think that this will likely be the case.

Many of the games have been released as open source. As the copyright holder, I am not obligated to keep the games open source but do plan on keeping many of the games open source. In fact, I may switch to a more open license such as the Apache or MIT license for porting these games. This will be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Crowdfunding

As mentioned above, several games or collections of games have some monetization potential. I will be looking into some crowdfunding sites to attempt to get some money to help develop these projects. As a funding incentive, I will offer larger funders the ability to pick from a list of games without monetization potential to be ported. These would take precedence over other non-crowdfunded work.

I plan on completing a campaign, unless it fails, before starting a new campaign but may start a campaign just as I approach finishing the previous campaign.

The results of these funding efforts and how well completed projects perform will be used to determine how much of my time to dedicate to restoration efforts. While I have no problems working for less than minimum wage on projects that I own, if nobody else shows interest in my work then my time would be best spent elsewhere.