Selling non-exclusives

It has been the reason for many personal messages in forum and emails. It has been the “so sorry to bother you” private chat topic: non-exclusive licenses. Many developers want to sell it, others have portals interested in it, but have no idea of the price tag to put up or the money offered is acceptable.

Non-Exclusives 101

To accept non-exclusive licenses you cannot sell an exclusive one. So no sponsorship deals if you want license based deals going. You can have (and you should have) a primary license for maximum revenue.

Non-exclusive licenses must be site-locked to protect the primary licensee investment. The money you get for a primary license can be a good starting point for deciding prize tags for FGL Shop, but should not be used as a rule of thumb for every single deal.

Factors that influence the cost of a non-exclusive

Traffic… the hidden beast

A portal will buy the developer a non-exclusive license for several reasons but the first impact of having a non-exclusive site-locked game is that it won’t drive traffic to the portal’s competition that has the primary license. It’s not difficult to imagine that this means money.

In a way, a non-exclusive license makes the game exclusive to an already loyal portal user. This also explains why there’s a no link obligation in many requests for non-exclusive licenses. No links means no distractions. Traffic is the core product of most flash game portals and we must understand that.

Price wise, it’s pretty easy: the bigger the portal, the bigger the traffic, the bigger the need to make that traffic stick, therefor the higher the price and unlike what many developers say, portals are aware of that and are willing to put up a fair price.

Game Quality and Visibility

This should be pretty obvious. A better, deeper, more entertaining game will produce more hits to the portal that is licensing the game, therefor this should be reflected on the price. Sometimes this happens simply because the primary license offer reflects it.

This is even more obvious with well known IPs. If a game does well, players will recognize it later on and you’ll notice a snowball effect on some portals, made by players that have appreciated your work before.

Requests

APIs, logos, no links and so on. A lot can be asked for a non-exclusive license and these things take time. Not really a big issue, but you have to be prepared for it to make it worth.

Create your own custom buttons for your site for instance. These should have code that would read some “global” boolean if links are allowed or not. You can create your own API manager, preloader stuff and so on, anything that can make your code easy to adapt.

But there’s another side to it… each of these things add value to the portal and some even remove value from you. No links policy is a good example: traffic sticks to the portal and you don’t get a visit from your beloved players, thus not raising your own brand awareness.

So lowering your cost to answer these requests is by default best way to get a little something more from it.

How to calculate it?

Don’t… it’s my honest advice. Like I said above, the price of the primary can give you a basic idea to work with, but that needs to be adjusted to each portal’s size and requests.

On the other hand, or you have a known daily cost and daily goal and it’s matter of pure math to know if it’s a good deal for your or not, or you’ll be thinking time and time again if you are selling to low or not.

Don’t be radical

I guess the most difficult part of this is to learn to evaluate the game and the market porperly. On one hand, if you sell licenses to low, you’ll be damaging every developer’s business. On the other hand if you think too high of your game you’ll be damaging your own business.

While common sense says that you should bring the price as high as possible, sometimes it’s better to accept a low offer to increase your business in the long run or negotiate a high offer to position you, your brand or IPs or simply your business standing… just don’t be radical.

Vlad, logging out…