A Way To Monetize Your Kivy Game

While I am building my game, I look for a way to monetize it. This will be my first game, so it is also the first to attempt earning money with an App. I am also not familiar to monetization companies.

So, I have done a search to find an appropriate ads network which can be easily integrated with kivy. The first and only company who provides a sdk for kivy is RevMob. I integrated RevMob sdk and tested it. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a good performance and FullScreen Ads crashes. Just links will work. Therefore, RevMob option is not really preferable since ads need to be visually effective.

You can also integrate android sdk of any ads network by using pyjnius. In this post, I will show how to use Adbuddiz sdk with kivy.
First, you need to create an account at AdBuddiz and associate your application with this account. You will need 'Publisher Key' in info window of the app.

As next step, download AdBuddiz sdk and place the .jar file under libs/ directory of the project.

Here is an example code of AdBuddiz integration:

from kivy.app import App
from jnius import autoclass
from kivy.utils import platform

platform = platform()

if platform=="android":
    PythonActivity=autoclass("org.renpy.android.PythonActivity")
    AdBuddiz=autoclass("com.purplebrain.adbuddiz.sdk.AdBuddiz")

class AdsNetwork():
    def __init__(self):
        if platform=="android":
            AdBuddiz.setPublisherKey("Publisher Key");      #pass publisher key of your app as string
            AdBuddiz.setTestModeActive();                   #for testing purposes, use this command
            AdBuddiz.cacheAds(PythonActivity.mActivity);    #this will cache the ads
    def show_ads(self):
        if platform == 'android':
            AdBuddiz.showAd(PythonActivity.mActivity)   #show a popup ad

class MyGame(App):
    def build(self):
        self._adv = AdsNetwork()
        return Button(text="Show ads", on_release=self._adv.show_ads())

if __name__=="__main__":
    MyGame().run()

Some small configuration is necessary to show ads. Firstly, adnetwork uses some sources whose permissions need to be listed in AndroidManifest.xml file. To achieve it, open your buildozer.spec file and make sure following lines exist:

android.permissions = INTERNET,ACCESS_WIFI_STATE,ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE

In order buildozer to add your jar to the apk, you explicitly define it in buildozer.spec too:

android.add_jars = %(source.dir)s/libs/*.jar

It is almost done. In AdBuddiz side, it needs its activity definition to exist in AndroidManifest.xml file. For this purpose, add following line into AndroidManifest.tmpl.xml file under .buildozer/ directory:

<activity android:name="com.purplebrain.adbuddiz.sdk.AdBuddizActivity" 
                 android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Translucent" />

Your code is ready to show ads now.

 P.S. The work is originated from this wiki page of kivy.