My take on flashgamelicense.com

[tomsamson]

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.

[Incrue]

And what if you do the way Squize told, just send the one swf that loads the levels and host the levels,images on your own site?

[tomsamson]

Its difficult with this question, whether its a good solution/suggestion or not depends on what of the things it implies are important to you.

Let´s first look at the question with focus on flashgamelicense.com stance/suggested workflow there:
I asked the guys using the site on the site´s chat, too if it is a recommended workflow to host additional assets of a game on one´s own site so the main swf one uploads to that site loads those in.
They told me one could in theory do that but it would not be recommended as again portals they work with there seem to want to just have the game in one file and there its suggested to developers to have it that way instead of telling portals why other options might make more sense to them, the developers and the players of games and therefore also regarding the amount of plays a game gets in many cases.

To answer your question not with focus on flashgamelicense.com but rather saying what i think in general is good and bad about the approach:
-convenient: you only upload one file to a service/portal
-good: in cetain specific setup you have more security/protection options if additional files are stored on your server, you could grant only certain sites access to files to some degree
-bad: when your game gets placed on many or just big sites with lots of traffic and the game loads additional assets from your server then this would lead to a MASSIVE filesize transfer heap on your server.
Imagine the traffic a high ranked game gets on sites like miniclip,shockwave or even smaller portals,combine all the traffic heap they cause for one such game and imagine your server has to deal with that.
Unless one has mirroring and other bandwidth/traffic allocation systems in place most servers would choke and crumble under such pressure and with many hosting plans offered you´d have massive server costs if you cause such traffic volumes (or they would just block further traffic when your bandwidth limit is reached, in which case your game wouldn´t work anymore on all the sites that feature the game).

[Squize]

Why is this in it's own thread now ? Tom your points were still highly relevant to the original thread it was posted in.

As to the whole external file thing, nearly everything I've written in the past 4 years or so has required external files.
The bigger portals I'm sure will be pretty cool with hosting those files ( And even if their not, the bigger portals pay for your game, which helps offset any bandwidth costs ), it's the smaller portals that just run off a standard framework which can't cope with it.

To keep in mind though is that aside from possibly tilesheets, most external files are little xml ones or map data. Neither are too big. I know ( More than most after suffering a huge bandwidth bill years ago ) that all the little sites hitting your server can add up, but when I got stung it was 4 swf's being hit millions of times, not a handful of text files a fraction of the size.

It is a problem and something us as developers have to look at, but it's a double edged sword. If your server is being cained in terms of bandwidth, it means your game has gone huge. If you've got ads in it then the ads will more than pay for any additional bandwidth costs should they occur.

Also say each map file is 100k at most, which is pretty huge, not every player will be hitting every level, a lot will only load the first level. A 100k file is a lot lot less than a meg+ swf.

I know I'm kinda digressing a little, as this is about FGL, but as it came up I thought I'm mention that it's not all doom and gloom hosting some files yourself.

Squize.

[tomsamson]

Why is this in it's own thread now ? Tom your points were still highly relevant to the original thread it was posted in.

Yeah, had a bit mixed feelings about it On one side i felt like i added something relevant as post in that other thread, on the other side that other thread wasn´t just about flashgamelicense and i felt like my novel sized post would maybe lead to that thread drifting all in focus to something i wrote in my post
Also i feel like that site and such services are maybe seeming interesting to many here so it could be good to have an own thread for it.
I linked to this thread in the other thread post though

As to the whole external file thing, nearly everything I've written in the past 4 years or so has required external files.
The bigger portals I'm sure will be pretty cool with hosting those files ( And even if their not, the bigger portals pay for your game, which helps offset any bandwidth costs ), it's the smaller portals that just run off a standard framework which can't cope with it.

Yeah, i agree on all, rgearding this site i just wonder its not communicated to portals why its better for everyone involved that they support several files per game and instead developers are forced to have single file games or maybe (maybe temporarily,too) host additional assets for games on ones´own server.

To keep in mind though is that aside from possibly tilesheets, most external files are little xml ones or map data. Neither are too big. I know ( More than most after suffering a huge bandwidth bill years ago ) that all the little sites hitting your server can add up, but when I got stung it was 4 swf's being hit millions of times, not a handful of text files a fraction of the size.

It is a problem and something us as developers have to look at, but it's a double edged sword. If your server is being cained in terms of bandwidth, it means your game has gone huge. If you've got ads in it then the ads will more than pay for any additional bandwidth costs should they occur.

Also say each map file is 100k at most, which is pretty huge, not every player will be hitting every level, a lot will only load the first level. A 100k file is a lot lot less than a meg+ swf.

I know I'm kinda digressing a little, as this is about FGL, but as it came up I thought I'm mention that it's not all doom and gloom hosting some files yourself.

Squize.

I mostly have bigger games split up into several files for 3 main reasons:
1.: Streamlined convenient workflow for me:
Easier to sort assets and to work on levels and media assets if thy are not all cobbled into one big fla/swf in which case it would then take up to several minutes to just compile an swf from the fla to test something.
For some parts of game creation, like making leves its also often convenient to use external tools like level editors to test and export maps quicker than maybe possible in flash ide.
2.: protection: as talked about before when one splits up a game into several files its more cumbersome for thieves of games to grab the game/edit it
3.: reaching a broader audience of (returning) players for the game:
People with slower connections or lower patience spans are less likely to wait long timespans for a game to load. If all assets are in one big swf and that leads to a long initial loading phase that will probably alienate a big portion of possible players.

So map files in txt or xml file form or similar small data file don´t have a huge impact on load times and therefore also a in comparison neglectable impact on server traffic heap, there one could also say ok,if portal x doesn´t want seperate files i can just integrate that external map data into the main game file, not much work and not much filesize difference in many cases.

Now what about point 3 of what i listed above? Media Assets have biggest impact on the filesize usually, graphics,sound, maybe even flvs, these are the things that usually bump up the total filesize most. And for these it then also make most sense,not just to one as game developer but also to portals and game players to have em as seperate external files.
If one hosts these on ones´own server these will also lead to biggest traffic heap though.

Now you say if your game leads to such massive traffic heap because additional assets are always loaded from your server that means your game has gone huge and then advertising and other returns could make up for that.
But what about posting the game on a site like flashgamelicense.com?
You should not add in advertising into the game there as they suggest, even neither a splash screen for your team or whatever.
So you don´t make any money with the game beeing run there until someone licenese it etc.
Still every view of the game from there would lead to traffic on your server if you host additional files for the game on your server.
Since the concept of that page is that ideally as many portal fellas as possible should see your game there that could make some impact on your server over time.
Now way worse than the traffic caused from something like flashgamelicense.com :
What about all the sites that steal your game?
We all know it happens with pretty much every game sooner or later and then if the system is that additional files are always loaded from your server, any thief site not returning you any money is causing server traffic on your server. Even if one can limit this to some degree to few more than something like a constant ping attempt (by trying to block access to the actual files), its purely wasted server bandwidth/performance.


I agree with you that if one works with portals who do constant revenue share or pay for your server costs to some degree in other ways hosting files on your server and the portal just hosting the main swf on their server may be a suitable solution, i just feel there are too high risks that in various other ways one gets lots of traffic causes on ones´server while not getting any money for it in return.

[tonypa]

1. You can host all your external files at mochi for free. I have done it in one of my games and it loads files just fine from there. You dont have to use their ads to host swf, the hosting, ads and leaderboards are all separate services and can be used all together or you can pick just one you want.

2. FGL does not require you to remove ads from your game, you instead go into your Mochi game account and put in FGL as "Filtered Domain" which means as long swf is at FGL the ads are simply skipped, but if someone takes the swf from there and hosts on other portal you still get ad revenue.

3. While you dont get any money from showing your game at FGL, there isnt just too many visitors. You can see how many times your game has been looked at and in most cases the number does not reach 100. Which is hardly anything to sell ads for.

4. If you are afraid game getting stolen, you could also use Mochi "Version Control" feature which basically encrypts your swf into bytearray. Then again, many games which do have ads, actually want to be spread around so the swf itself is being offered to everyone interested.

[Incrue]

2. FGL does not require you to remove ads from your game, you instead go into your Mochi game account and put in FGL as "Filtered Domain" which means as long swf is at FGL the ads are simply skipped, but if someone takes the swf from there and hosts on other portal you still get ad revenue.

I was thinking that you would mark that option for portals to know if it has ads or not

So right, mochi hosts things for me, but isnt like im paying for it one way or another because they take their part when the money of the ads came?

[Incrue]

You should not add in advertising into the game there as they suggest, even neither a splash screen for your team or whatever.

Now thats uber not good

[tomsamson]

1. You can host all your external files at mochi for free. I have done it in one of my games and it loads files just fine from there. You dont have to use their ads to host swf, the hosting, ads and leaderboards are all separate services and can be used all together or you can pick just one you want.

2. FGL does not require you to remove ads from your game, you instead go into your Mochi game account and put in FGL as "Filtered Domain" which means as long swf is at FGL the ads are simply skipped, but if someone takes the swf from there and hosts on other portal you still get ad revenue.

3. While you dont get any money from showing your game at FGL, there isnt just too many visitors. You can see how many times your game has been looked at and in most cases the number does not reach 100. Which is hardly anything to sell ads for.

4. If you are afraid game getting stolen, you could also use Mochi "Version Control" feature which basically encrypts your swf into bytearray. Then again, many games which do have ads, actually want to be spread around so the swf itself is being offered to everyone interested.

Interesting and good points
to 1.: Haven´t thought of using mochi hosting and i also didn´t know they offer hosting even if one does neither run mochiads nor let´s mochi publish the games. If that´s the case that´s quite generous by em, i´ll have a read there

to 2.: good suggestion, too, though yeah, i still don´t see much sense in turning off advertising for flashgamelicense, even if advertising or splash screens/whatever might be annoying to sit through, shouldn´t it be the case that portals checking out the games see it in the form you license it to them/it will show when on their page?

to 3.: good to know, i´d have guessed they have way more visitors per game.
Though dunno whether to like this or not now
More people/portals checking out each game there would be a good thing for beeing able to have more licensing offers, though yeah, could have downsides on other ends.

to 4.: yeah, sure if you run ingame advertising driven you´d probably want to have the game spreaded a lot, but it still would make sense to make money with the game with other ways,too, like licensing branded/skinned versions etc
I´m not sure about how much protection the mochi system adds, but yeah,i like the version control features they have for several other reasons, so: good call.

[tomsamson]

Now thats uber not good

I imagine you could get around that by making it very short or skippable.

To that checkbox they have there: Its not the worst thing in the world and you can leave it unchecked, but yeah,i don´t like it that its even there.

[ch00se]

Hey everyone. Some good stuff in here, let me see if I can field it all.

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.

This is absolutely the contrary. And I hope to point out why with the below responses.

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.

We did recently add this, but not for portal's sake but for DEVELOPER's sake. What was happening was that in some cases sponsors were taking advantage of developers by saying things like "I'll give you $x more, but you have to take the offer by today." This is very shady, and so by implementing a required duration of a bid we are giving you a way to blame us, and have a way out, so that you don't look bad to a sponsor, but don't get ensnared in such dubious behavior. As for making offers public, that was because many developers would take an offer right from our PM system and never make the bid public. MANY times we would have already been talking to another sponsor that was interested in the game.. sometimes for thousands of dollars more, but we never even realized that the game had already been sold! The other new "rules" are also along these lines.. protecting the developer.

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."

This is a sort of double benefit to both the sponsor and developer. We found that sponsors would go through about 10 games on the site if they had ads, then they would leave the site until a later time. But when ads were removed they would go through double or more! On top of this, many times a sponsor wants to revisit your game if they like it. This is far less attractive to them if they're waiting through 10 second ads every time. And I assure you, you will never get enough views from FGL to mean anything anyway.

Also, as Tonypa mentioned, we're not actually saying to remove ads, merely to filter them on our site. You can do this through Mochi's filtering system or even manually do it through your code if you're using another system like CPMStar. And this is not a requirement anyway. My personal suggestion is to put a skippable ad placement in the game to show sponsors where you're planning to put ads, but don't put in any ads that make you wait to play the game.

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.

I think this is a case of experience. We work with over 500 portals, many of them on a daily basis, and most of them think we should only have 2 choices. Never released or released. To almost every portal that is all that matters. Adding in granularity would only add confusion. Now, I don't dissagree with your points though, and if you have a game that has a special situation then just let us know and we'll be sure to let sponsors know. What a lot of developers don't realize is that we're primarily an agent/broker service. The second your game is on our site our staff is out there talking to portals and trying to get you the best deal.

One thing to keep in mind is what are you trying to accomplish? If you're selling non exclusive licenses then all this doesn't matter anyway. Just put your game in the game shop and set your prices for any licensing type you want! If you're trying to get a primary sponsor it's going to be very very difficult if your game is even on one site. If you want an exclusive license your game can't have ever been on any site! I have a feeling what you want is a non exclusive and so worrying about all of this is moot, you should just select what applies and move on, no licensor will ever look at it.

Next, and to this is maybe the worst thing on the game submit page:
You can choose an swf to upload to the site.

I fail to see the problem here and I've never heard this complaint before so could you elaborate? The whole argument of "not making money" is sort of surprising to me since the whole point you're putting the game on our site is to make money off of it. Even if you get a small non-exclusive deal from the site you've made something. Also, there are many legal issues we have to take into consideration, and linking out on games just opens up all sorts of cans of worms.

And you do have control of the page your game is on pretty much. We don't show much else other than your game info and you can edit that, even your game name and swf.

You can only upload a single swf per game. No xmls,no additional swfs, no nothing additional.

There's a couple things with this. First I want to say that we do plan to support multi file games, and have always planned to. However, we are only 3 guys and we have grown at a speed that was unimaginable to us in the beginning. We have a todo list about 10 pages long. So we have to prioritize accordingly. What you have heard about most portals wanting a single swf is absolutely true. In fact, it is almost necessary for a game to go "viral." And so many portals won't even look at a multi file game. Also, we don't prevent you from hard linking to any assets from in your game. So there is no reason you can't run a multi file game on our system and just link to all of the files hanging off of your main swf. We've had a number of people do this, and we just recommend you note this in your game information. We hope... actually we are banking on the hope that larger scale flash games will become more and more popular, so we will do everything we can to support this. Just realize that we only have so many resources and so much time.

And to cover some other issues:

We actually have teamed up with kindisoft to offer encryption on any game on FGL. It will automatically site lock and encrypt your game. However it is currently in an early beta stage so you should test it out first and see how it does (turning it on and off is extremely easy, and it will never damage your game if the encryption is off, even if you had already turned it on.) Until the kinks are worked out we advise you to site lock and encrypt your game by some other means while your game in on our site.

Most sites that take multi file games will REQUIRE that they host all the files. So they would take the bandwidth hit anyway.

Let me know if I missed anything or if you have any other questions!

Chris
Co-Founder Flashgamelicense.com

[tomsamson]

I see your reasoning for the 'terms of service' you´ve added recently and about which i moaned above next to other things. I understand how in some cases they could also be helpful to developers but yeah,its a very double edged sword thing there, something like "You MUST Make All Sponsorship Offers Public" or "You MUST Wait 72 Hours Before Accepting an Offered Sponsorship" sounds a bit oppressive and fishy even if it can protect both sides in some cases, i see your good intention behind it though.

Likewise i understand and appreciate your reasoning behind the other things, i think a lot of my wondering and in parts beeing put off by some things comes from the point of the site being called flashgamelicense.com but actually not dealing with exclusive or non excclusive licensing deals a lot really, actually beeing a site with focus a lot on sponsorship deals and therefore of course also focused a lot on behaviour and needs of sponsorship sites.
I have various thoughts on what could be changed/improved but yeah, since your site is with focussing on sponsorship agreements so much many don´t apply there.
As i said i like the concept of a site/service like yours and your comments gave me a more positive vibe on the implementation, looking forward to see how it evolves.
Speaking about just me its probably just not ideal for me to go the sponsorship way with what all it seems to involve.
I´ll probably still give it a try with one game and see how that goes.

[Incrue]

hey chOOse nice to see you here
Just a sugestion, as a lot of guys are paranoid with this steal games stuff, you could build an application with ZINC, not air,for portals, that will load the crypted byteArray of the games and decript it;so the portals can see and noone can steal them...at least not that easily as if they were just swfs

[EvilKris]

Give the dudes a break man, the site's only been going for a year or so.

[Schfifty Five]

hey chOOse nice to see you here
Just a sugestion, as a lot of guys are paranoid with this steal games stuff, you could build an application with ZINC, not air,for portals, that will load the crypted byteArray of the games and decript it;so the portals can see and noone can steal them...at least not that easily as if they were just swfs

That's basically what MochiAds version control does, except it's not an application, just another swf.

[Incrue]

The point of being Zinc is that everything will not be easily decompileable as a swf

[tomsamson]

Several things there:
-Zinc is not for web deploy of games
-games wrapped into a zinc exe or any other similar wrapper are not protected better much than a standard swf is, any "good" decompiler can detect swfs inside wrapper exe files/get em out/decompile em
-as long as the swf is interpreted at runtime there will always be decompilers that can get things out of it and back together again,there´s no way around this, any additional protection attempt/step is good to make it a more annoying task but yeah, not much more

[Incrue]

Its not for web deploy, its just for portals to see and decide if they want the swf
I confess that i dont have much experience with zinc, but sometime ago i've found somethink like 'safe variables' and that could be very usefull because if zinc can pass them to the inner swf, so thats all thats needed because the way i was thinking the real games will never be there, only scrambled versions of the byteArray of the game, and that safe variable being the key to uncrypt it...

as long as the swf is interpreted at runtime there will always be decompilers that can get things out of it

I know its not perfect, but could be one step more

[Squize]

Sponsors aren't over the moon with ads in the way, or overly long brand intros, they're not going to want to d/load an exe to play a game that could suck.

There's almost too much paranoia about evil sponsors grabbing files and putting them on their own sites. As far as I know it's never happened at FGL. If a site did do it they would be blacklisted by everyone in no time at all.

If you have reservations about putting your game on a site like FGL, what's the alternative, you'd still have to send a link to sponsor sites anyway.

Squize.

[Incrue]

I was thinking more like an exe that install only once and load and unscramble all of the other games, not an exe for each game.
Good it never happen but i think im a bit paranoid sometimes...