Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Getting a game sponsored
Right now, there are two basic ways to try to get your game licensed or sponsored. The first is to
find a portal that you are interested in and send that site a personalized message about your
game. This technique is much easier if you already have some contact with portal owners or a
history of making good games, but there are stories of first timers contacting portals directly and
gaining good sponsorships or licenses. However, first impressions count. If you are going to
contact these very busy portal owners, make sure you have the goods to show them—that means
a good, unique game that plays well.
Using FlashGameLicense.com
The second most common way to gain a sponsorship or license is to use
FlashGameLicense.com
,
which offers supplementary services to Mochi Media for Flash game developers. The site started
in 2007 as a place for developers to post games before they were public, so sponsors and portal
owners could view and bid on them. It quickly added forums for developers, a way to get
feedback on games, and a game shop to sell games instead of getting them sponsored. More
recently, the site added FlashGameDistribution.com (
http://flashgamedistribution.com/
) as a
way to get your games seen by many different portals and sponsors, and GamerSafe.com
(
https://www.gamersafe.com/
) is a service for developers to allow for a game to be saved and
replayed from any web site that hosts it and for microtransactions.
Adding a game to
www.flashgamelicense.com
is very simple: create a developer account; upload
your game, and you are done. The difference between FlashGameLicense.com and Mochi Media
is that FlashGameLicense.com is a private site. All the games posted there for license are site
locked to
www.flashgamelicense.com
and encrypted. This creates a welcome place for
developers to show their games and for sponsors to see them, with little chance that games will
leak out before their time. As a developer, you can choose the types of licenses you will accept
and what prices you'd like to see for your games. FlashGameLicense.com requests a 10 percent
fee for its service, but if you get a good sponsorship, it is well worth the price.
Using FlashGameDistribution and GamerSafe
In the event that your game does not get a license or sponsorship, FlashGameLicense.com has
created FlashGameDistribution.com, a way to instantly send out your FlashGameLicense.com
games to their viral partners. While this is nice addition to their suite of services, they have
another offering that is even more interesting—GamerSafe.com.
GamerSafe.com offers three very useful services for Flash game developers. First, it offers a
distributed Save Game feature. This allows users to play your game on any portal and save their
state, so they can return any place and restart the game. For games that require play beyond a
single session, this tool is invaluable. For years, Flash shared objects have been available to
save game data locally, but storing the state has only been useful for games that are played on
the same computer by a player. GamerSafe.com's implementation (and an implementation now
available from Mochi Media through its services) opens up your game development to genres that
so far have not been playable virally in any real way: RPGs, long-term adventure games, in-depth
war games, and so on. GamerSafe.com also offers an in-game awards API, and like Mochi
Media, a system for in-game microtransactions. It should be noted that MochiMedia has started to
add "save game" features to match those of GamerSafe, and another service named HeyZap
(heyzap.com) is quickly following suit too. HeyZap just added in-game advertisement functionality
as this topic went to press. As you might have surmised, this is an ever changing and competitive
field, so it's a good idea to stay current on these services, and read-up on as much latest news
and trends as possible.
