Read this & Bill Gates will give you money

MSN Games is inviting game developers to produce content for their game network. To compensate the developers, they're offering up to 20% of ad revenue. Hmm.

Chalk up another point towards digital content distribution. Sure, you have to work with "the man" but indie developers now have a big name option to distribute content. Yet another sign that the retail model is dead.

But wait a second. Is this worth it? Let's do a little math.

Assumptions:

• Let's say that MSN receives $5 for every 1,000 ad impressions served.
• To make $50 they have to serve 10,000 impressions.
• Now MSN only gives 20% to indies, so for an indie to make $50 (average retail price of games)... 50,000 impressions need to be served.
• They can serve 2 ads every minute.
• That's 25,000 minutes of exposure (gameplay) required
• That's 416 hours
• Or 17.36 full 24 hour days

That's a LOT of game play. With that many hours required to reach the levels of retail revenue, it really only leaves two options on the table: casual games and MMOs. Story genre games rarely are able to contain more than 60 hours of content. MMOs aren't cheap so what does that leave us?

Guess it ultimately makes sense for MSN Games. Hope they weren't looking to expand genre types.

via Joystiq