I created a few javascript card games, most of them in late 2011, but they really started earning this year. So far have made Spades, Hearts, Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Shithead and a couple of solitaires. Revenue has been steadily rising, and is a nice little side income now. http://www.spades-cardgame.com is one, the rest are linked from there.
Yes, I'm kind of amazed at it myself. I rank fairly well for some of the most relevant keywords now, and that's where almost all the traffic comes from.
What I think I'm doing right:
* Simple to start. As soon as you enter the page you see the table, you just need to press Deal and you've started. No "enter your name", no choosing options before starting, no nag ads.
* Single page sites. The rules for the games are on the landing page, which means it has more content and is likely to be ranked higher by Google.
* Keep it simple. As a programmer I had the urge to create high scores, multiplayer, logins, track results etc, but at the end of the day most people just want to spend 10 minutes playing, and leaving out those things also means it's maintenance free, and frictionless to get started.
Just played Spades for 1/2 hour. Fantastic work! You did the right thing in allowing the player to jump straight into the game upon landing on the homepage. The games itself are so simple that the process of starting a game should be simple, and you've done that here. Job well done!
Funny thing is that I never play them myself after I've finished them. The interesting part for me is creating the computer player, and seeing if I can make him win more than the human players, I have some stats in Google Analytics that can show me that. Since the computer plays like I would play it's kind of like I'm playing against all the players :)
When I'm testing I usually let the computer just play against itself, add ?autoplay to any of the game urls and when you press Deal you'll see four computer players playing against each other...
Why do you have different second-level domains for each game? Why not use one domain with a bunch of subdomains for each game? That way you'd build brand recognition at the same time, and avoid people running out and registering things like "cribbage-cardgame.com"...
Started by accident. First game I made was Idiot, and got the domain idiot-cardgame.com for it, since I had no plans to create more at that time. When I made Crazy Eights I couldn't really use idiot-cardgame.com for it, so I gave that its own domain. After that it was just a kind of pattern I guess. I also had some vague ideas that maybe I'd get more google juice out of having links from different domains to each other.
I have thought about changing it all to one domain, and setting up some 301 redirects, but I'm just afraid to mess up my google rankings. For the solitaire game I re-use a domain, e.g I have http://www.solitaire-cardgame.com for Klondike solitaire (or classic solitaire), and then I have http://www.solitaire-cardgame.com/freecell for Free Cell solitaire.
Thanks. I used to pretty paranoid about the source, running it through my own obfuscator that changed pretty much every identifier to a $nr, but that kept giving me problems, and in the end I figured there aren't really any secrets in the source, so no it's just minified with the disclaimer that you can't republish it as is, although you're free to use it for inspiration.
As am aside, I think your freecell rules are wrong. As I recall, you should only be able to move a stack (pile?) of cards if there's enough free space to place them all. Another way to stay it is that you can only actually move one card at a time, but the game will assist you if there's enough free cells.
Yes, pretty much. If I look at analytics for Spades there are around 77% returning visitors, but I'm pretty sure they originally came through Google, since the sites aren't really advertised anywhere. They're linked from my own site, and I got one site that has card games rules to link to some of them, but that's it. They're not linked from any gaming sites or anything.
