Merlin’s Dev Blog A Wizard’s Flash Blog

Choosing sponsors wisely

Game traffic

So you've finished your latest game, and you're looking for a buyer. The first thing you have to think about is how you're going to sell it. Pre-2006, sponsorships used to be purely exclusive licenses. Basically, you sold your game, and all the rights to it (even the code)  to one buyer. He/She then did whatever they wanted to it, and distributed it how they wanted. Games rarely included ads that would benefit the developer too. However, we are in 2009 now, things have changed. Developers are now selling Primary and Non-Exclusive licenses, and sometimes include ads in their games too.

A developer who uses several revenue streams for their game, like a primary and non-exclusive license, as well as ads will generally make a lot more money than a developer who confines himself to a single exclusive license. When i was first introduced to making flash games, a friend was telling me about how he was selling his flash games for a lump sum of $800. It obviously interested me so i did a little research, and found out about the licenses I mentioned above. My game has made a total of $1350, and that figure still grows by about $60 a month. The game hasn't earned more because it's a better game, but because of the sponsors and the deals that were struck with them. (If you're confused as to what a primary, non-exclusive, and exclusive license is, have a look at this page).

Exclusive licenses are a thing of the past!

You may be tempted by the large sum of money that a sponsor is offering you for an exclusive sponsorship of the game, but don't be fooled. You should be weary of any deal that restricts your potential income. Recently, non-exclusive licenses have become more and more popular with sponsors. There are two main reasons for this: They're cheap and they keep their traffic on their site. When you accept an exclusive license, your potentially writing-off two or three non-exclusive licenses. If each non-exclusive is around $500, you've just lost yourself quite alot of money.

Sponsors make millions from ads, why shouldn't I?

You may not think that adding ads to your game makes much of a difference to your revenue, but believe me, it does. Every dollar that you earn through ads is extra revenue that goes straight into your pocket on top of any license that a sponsor has paid you for. The best part about ads is that you're getting paid every month for the ad impressions and you don't even have to do any work for it. It takes about 5-10 minutes to set up in your game, and it can provide you with hundreds of dollars, (or thousands, if you've made a particularly good game).

Total Revenue for HE1

What you see above is what i've earned on my first game, HE1. That's almost a third of what i got for the primary license in 3 months. Even when the game's saturated the market, it's still earning me about $60 a month. If it continues like it is now, I will have earned an extra $720 extra off the game. Keep in mind that that's the revenue for one game. Once you start making a few games, you'll be earning more and more, (especially if your games are improving, which they should!).

So what should i look for in a sponsor?

So now we come to the most important part of the article. From what i've said above, it obvious that you need to be looking for sponsorships that doesn't limit your revenue. The best possible main sponsorship you could get is a Primary License that allows you to put ads in your game. That way you will be getting money from your primary deal, your potential non-exclusive deals, and from the ad revenue your game will generate too. If the sponsor doesn't allow ads, you should expect more money for the deal to compensate. Calculate a few rough numbers of how much extra you'd earn from advertising and see if the deal compensates enough.

Another important factor that you have to do before you decide, that may not be as obvious as the others, is who you're actually selling it to. Do a little research, put the sponsor's site in Alexa.com and have a look at the kind of traffic the site generates. There's no point adding ads to the game if you're only going to get a few thousand views a day. Hotel Escape 1 sold to minijuegos.com, a site that's ranked 487th on Alexa. On the day it was released, the game got about 100k views, and made $50 in a day. Hotel Escape 2, however, which sold to freegamesnews.com, ranked 19000th, only got 20k views, and made $8. Hotel Escape 2, which is still only a few weeks old is doing worse than Hotel Escape is doing now, which is now 3 months old. If you're reliant on the ads as a major revenue stream, you need to make sure that the sponsor you sell it to has a popular site that will get you plenty of ad impressions.

The game's sold, do I need to do anything else?

Of course you do! You're in charge of making sure that millions of people hear about your game and play it. The more people play it, the more money you will get. Watch out for an article on distributing your game which I will post within the next few days!