Flippfly

When Aaron San Filippo talks games, he’s bound to start with a couple childhood memories: he and his brother in small-town America, flipping through the pages of a bygone era’s gaming bible, Nintendo Power, and who could forget those weekend Super Nintendo rentals from the local video store (another artifact of that era).

"We were just these country boys," he chuckles. "I didn't even have much TV access back then, so I basically learned about games from the outside for a while."

And being on the “outside” only made the tug of video games that much stronger.

It eventually pulled him to work on a few blockbuster franchises in gaming, opportunities with big teams, big budgets, and household names. But then he realized he wanted more than just a single mention in the credits.

So, by 2012, he made the leap, working on his very own independent studio. That’s when he and his brother founded Flippfly in Madison, Wisconsin, with a north star: make things that are "creative, new, fun."

What’s behind his studio’s name? A family reference: “it was a play on our last name, San Filippo," Aaron says. And it stuck.

Their first release, Race The Sun, set the tone: high-speed, endless-runner-type of fun. It’s still the one people know them for. “It was our first game and it’s done better than anything we could’ve hoped for,” Aaron says, still proud.

"As a whole, ad revenue is likely half of our business," Aaron continues to explain. "If I’m looking at just Race The Sun, it’s the bulk of that title. Seriously, it’s earned more money as a free-to-play title with ad revenue than it ever did as a premium title," he says, proof that the model does indeed work.

It does the same for reach too. Just take Race The Sun: Challenge Edition. It now has hundreds of thousands of active players in an average month, and all-time downloads are in the eight-figure count.

The day-to-day for Flippfly is also designed to be lean. Aaron builds, then measures, and checks in to Discord to get a sense of what the fans are thinking. “I enjoy talking with fans in our Discord,” he says. Plus, the loop closes in real-time: point of friction today, fix tomorrow.

All the while, the philosophy of keeping play free (with the help of ads), remains the same: every player, whether they can pay or not, still gets a seat at the table. And the studio still makes some money out of the deal.

As for what’s next, some days, Aaron is heads down working on Race the Sun updates; on other days, he’s prototyping and exploring bigger bets, even a platform where players can create and connect on their own. Either way, ads allow him to pick a lane without risking the entire studio on a single die roll.

“Ads brought in new revenue streams that weren’t available before,” he says of ad support, a common indie playbook. That’s important for studios like Aaron’s, where there’s always a little more polish to add, another feature to attempt, another player remark in Discord to respond to.