Sponsorship, licensing and publishing

Like I commented on Freelance Flash Games blog, I disagree with the current definition of sponsorship. I disagree not because I’m some kind of linguistics freak (English is not even my first language) but because I feel that the discussion of the terminology, together with experience and knowledge brought from outside flash game space can bring new ideas and new formulas to both developers and portals.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship is a deal where the sponsor entity gets itself associated with a sponsored entity in return for some commercial value that it would not have if there was no association. Translated to our reality: sponsorship is a deal where a portal gets associated with a game in return for traffic generated by that game.

In other sponsorable property it is possible to have several sponsors. Think about F1 cars or TV shows. As you may know, a sponsorship in flash games is exclusive.

Licensing

A license is a permission. Licenses are issued by city halls, governments, software publishers and so on. Every time you buy a game you are being granted a license, same applies to a movie. All content on each TV channel is licensed to be aired by that channel. When you drive a car, you have a license to drive and a license issued so that the car can use the pavement in your country.

Same applies to flash games. When a developer sells a non-exclusive site-locked license he is not being sponsored. He is granting the portal a permission to use his game. What about primary licenses… well… a primary license is somewhere between the sponsorship model and a true licensing model. What separates a 100% licensing model from what we have now is the primary licenses. On the other hand this licenses are what makes traffic go up and down, so until something special happens, I think it’s a good thing for everyone that it still exists.

One interesting aspect about licensing is that it is widely accepted that site-locking a non-exclusive license is done to protect the interests of the primary license holder. As I see it, it is protecting the interest of the developer because the non-exclusive site-locked license could exist and the viral version be used for commercial and brand awareness of the developer. If every single developer worked his own brand awareness by not selling a primary license, making the viral version his own and then selling only site-locked licenses we would have a full licensing model, which we can only speculate if it would work or not.

Publishing

From AAA console games to casual download games, there are a lot of games where a publisher finances the game. This is the foundation of the publishing model: a publisher accepts a project from a developer, funds it, markets it and distributes it. The commercial catch is that the publisher controls everything except the production. For all that matters, the property of the end product belongs to the publisher.

Apart from some portals internal development, there’s no real publishing space in the flash market. I don’t think that it is doable though. Publishing usually involves financing the whole project. I’m a firm believer that most sponsorship deals don’t cover the development expenses if most developers took their time to see the costs they had. So it is possible to get the same performance by sponsoring with an amount of money that isn’t quite the same as if the same portal was publishing the same game.

Hope this helps to sort some ideas out. Stay tuned on Freelance Flash Games blog… I know he has something to say about this too.

Signing out…
Vlad