Archive for the ‘Sponsorship and Licensing’ tag

Our actions don’t affect us because we are not professionals

Rant mode on…

Saying you believe in your own potential and in the quality of what you do or create is a huge measure of your own success and value. The rest is proving it. This is true when you want to improve everyday of your professional life and it is damn difficult to prove it. Bottom line is that no one takes your word for it, you have to prove it by showing your potential and quality, therefor your success and value.

Nothing is more a reflection of this than it’s exact opposite. If you say you don’t believe your own quality and potential people around you will take that for granted! No one needs prove of the lack of value, quality or success of someone that says it! Everyone will take your word for it!

Now transpose this to a reality where money is involved, let’s say, for some reason, I’m talking about the flash game market reality. The portals want to buy content at the lowest possible cost, which is only natural. The developers want to sell that content for the highest possible margin.

Portals do their best to have a professional behavior. Portals excel at saying they are good and to prove it. Obviously if it’s proven, we all know they are or at least they do their best to be.

But I just read that developers are not professionals said by a developer and the context of this is unprofessional behavior. What I read (and it’s just my opinion) is that the developers as a whole have a low potential, low quality and that they do it for the love of games. A developer said it… no need to prove it.

Even if one developer thinks that his unprofessional behavior won’t affect him because he is not a professional, it will, hard but I’m not worried at all. What worries me is that it is extended to the whole flash developers present in that community as if it was cool not to be professional. The value of the whole community will lower if that mentality spreads, thus lowering the potential for margin. Professional developers will do their best to prove they are not part of the pack, and probably will manage to do so, but the idea that actions don’t affect hobbyist developers will at least affect all hobbyist developers, some of them amazingly talented.

Rant mode off…

Thinking about selling your source code?

Through FGL (seems all my reasoning lately is either FGL or Bold Pixel… oh well, moving on) I found a blog post from FlashNinjaClan’s webmaster, the well known Archbob. Here’s the link, come back when you finished reading it, please…

Most of the post was about finding cheap games. I’m fine with that, if a portal wants to find cheap games, by all means, go for it. I found disturbing that developers sell their games WITH source code for $150-$200 and even more disturbing that portals (or at least Archbob) buys it with the intention of using the “engine” (gotta love the easy use of the word) to create more games. Here’s why you should not sell your code for that amount of money:

Source code is not content

When you license a game, you are licensing the use of content you created. That can have a varying value depending on the well known keywords fun, replayability and so on. The source code you used to do it has nothing to do with it. The value portals see is content based, not the time and the engineering expertise you’ve put in it.

That’s what people pay for code: the time and the knowledge. Is your time and knowledge really worth $150-$200?

Source code is as valuable as it is reusable

Archbob said it with a problem: he will use the source to create other games. If other games are created with the same “engine” then the value that was paid to you, the developer, should paid as many times as games created. It’s quite simple and follows the same logic: code is not content! I registered today at flashden… see how much you’ll have to pay for reusable bits of code.

Is it really worth it?

So you did a game that got no bids. Then you got a $150 bid and you’ll sell your game, your code and that’s it. Unfortunatelly, in the long run is much more than that. What will that do to you and all other developers in the long run? What’s the impact of those $150? Maybe you can get a nice thing for yourself and I’m sure you deserve it, but where will that take you in one, two or three years? You are being paid $150 to create competition for yourself and for me for free for the next games built with your game.

So… think about it…

If you are thinking about selling your source code for that amount of money, please do not do it! You are not doing anyone a favor, quite the opposite!

Microtransactions, a triangle of trust

So all the hype is now in the flash microtransaction deals. It looks like it is the next big thing. Everyone wants to get in. Well, what will happen is one of two things: everyone will get in and it won’t work or some will get in and it will work.

I used the expression “triangle of trust” a couple of days ago while discussing microtransactions has a new possible model opposed to the current sponsorship model. That triangle is made of player, portal and developer.

The player

The player must trust the portal because to the player’s eyes, the one selling something is the portal, not the developer. A player that trusts the portal and enjoys the game will be the target of the deal.

The portal

The portal must trust the developer and the content the developer creates to allow their game to go into their service, thus generating revenue.

The developer

The developer must trust the player is loyal enough to the portal and willing enough to put money in his game.

If the trust crosses the triangle, microtransactions as a model are very doable if the provider has very strict quality control standards. Content must be of excellence, implementation of the system must be obvious, clear and trustworthy for the player. This means a lot of hard-work from everyone involved.

So we need to come forward and close this triangle of trust between the portals that work with us and the players that play games in these portals. An extra mile is needed by the developer to have something that is worth playing and worth spending money on.

I don’t believe that this is the next big thing. I do believe it’s a fantastic value added to our poll of monetization resources, one that is struggling for fresh air.

Vlad out!

The Perfect Deal

Is there an ideal flash game sponsorship? According to our friend blog Freelance Flash Games, yes there is.

A good and honest debate started sometime ago on a comment in FFG’s blog, moved later on to a FGL chat, then to a post here and the circle closed with The Ideal Flash Game Sponsorship.

I hope it does not end here, honestly. I’m a strong believer that developers, portals and services should be closer and agree that we must at least have a wider discussion about our industry.

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

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