I´ve mostly earned money with games in other ways than sponsorships up to now.
I like the concept of something like flashgamelicense.com/ , i mean that there´s something that helps developers to reduce the overhead of having to contact all portals each time they have a new game.
On the other side i thought of giving the page/it´s services a try the other day and disliked several things in how its done, i have the feeling various things are done vary much with focus on portals´ needs way more than on developers´needs, in some cases also more than on gamers´ needs.
As long as it is like that i personally would not use it and would not recommend using it, i wrote em a mail to ask to clarify and ideally change some things there.



So here´s my take on that service for now:

To give some examples on what i mean:
I already wondered slightly when i read about their "Terms of Service For Biddable Games" which includes clauses like "You MUST Make All Sponsorship Offers Public" and "You MUST Wait 72 Hours Before Accepting an Offered Sponsorship". Such clauses seem to have been added recently and they argue for em saying they are introduced to not make portals disappointed/annoyed.
A bit strange but Ok i thought.

Then it got a bit worse though when i got to the page where one can add a game, i disliked several things there:

For example there´s a checkbox saying
"My game does not have fixed-duration ads or lengthy unskippable screens while listed on FlashGameLicense.com"
and below it an explanation for it
"Note: we recommend disabling fixed-duration ads and splash screens during bidding, as they can annoy sponsors."

While i understand their reasoning and also that it is a bit inconvenient for portals to have to watch a short advertising before they can try a game, there´s a problem with this:
You´re posting a game with which you want to earn money and probably have not earned money with yet online on a site where you don´t have advertising on the site and neither add advertising into the game. Now if anyone sees the game there and just grabs it from his cache he can put it on any random site very easily and you don´t earn a dime for/with your game.
Sure, if your game had mochiads or gamejacket stuff in it anyone wanting to remove that could probably do so,but it is at least one more step of work than just grabbing the game from the cache.

The next thing i noticed on the game sumit page was way worse in my eyes though:


There´s a select list there where one can declare the rate of exposure a game already had. Now this is fine and needed by itself, as many portals don´t believe a lot in longlevity of games or that they get lots of traffic on their site if they are already on many other sites and therefore set prices a lot based on how much a game has already been spreaded around, the options one can select in that list are highly off though in my eyes and will probably lead to way less or way less money bringing deals for many games:
There are 3 options to choose from in the list:
There´s "Never Published","Limited Exposure" and "Widely Available".

There should be more options available between "Limited Exposure" and "Widely Available". Like in many cases there are deals for a limited time exclusivity for a single site with url lock and other protections in place, so i´d count that something else than widely available, probably something like "Medium Exposure", available on 1 bigger site or for a short timespan.

Also the descriptors for "Limited Exposure" and "Widely Available" are massively off, Widely Available would be a fitting descriptor for something that is on many big portals and has had more than several million views, not just more than 10k views as they state.
Anyone who has had a really succesful game spreaded and played a lot on many sites will know that that starts at way different regions than 10k views.
Sorry for beeing so picky about that but having to select "Widely available" for a game that is only hosted on one bigger site for a while (url locked there) seems selling it way worse than it is. It probably also leads to dumping prices for games way more than they deserve by giving portals the wrong impression that games that are actually not spreaded around much are spreaded around a lot already.

Next, and to this is maybe the worst thing on the game submit page:
You can choose an swf to upload to the site.
Now to some developers and/or portals it may be more convenient to upload all games to one site and check em all out hosted on one site.
To me it means having to upload the game to another site than my own while its not placed on a page with advertising i earn money from and neither should (as suggested by them) feature advertising in the game, so as long as its hosted there and not sponsored/licensed around it doesn´t bring me any money.
Also since i have no control over the page it sits in i can´t add anymore related info on the game myself which i maybe would like to add and could be interesting to portals checking out the game.
Also there´s another problem with this: You can only upload a single swf per game. No xmls,no additional swfs, no nothing additional.
I wondered a lot about this so next to writing a mail to the guys i also joined their chat to ask what´s up there.
I was told by several users of the site that portals working with them there like games contained in one file and therefore one can only upload one file.
Dude!
While for small games it might make sense to have em in one file and i have understanding for the point in that case that it is slightly more convenient for someone posting/spreading a game to deal with one swf instead of one folder of files for a game (while the embed in a website still actually only features embedding one main swf), this totally makes no sense at all for bigger games.
Its obvious that any game player would rather have a sensmaking asset splitting and setup for a game where only mandatory stuff is loaded initially and then the player can already play the game some while later levels stream in later etc.
I felt like it was quite off that rather than communicating to portals not knowing it that it would make sense to split bigger games up into several files where it makes sense and that this would probably lead to more and more returning players for a game, they only have the option to submit one swf per game and it seems the suggested workflow is that if one has a game that is already splitted up nicely one should combine that into one single swf as several people on their chat told me.
I wondered a lot about this.

So yeah, all in all right now while nice in concept in theory i feel like various things are off there some, as i said i wrote em to see their stance and if maybe some things can be changed some there.