Flash game sponsorship has been going around for a few years now, and it has grown from portal to portal. There are hundreds of websites out there that are willing to sponsor games. So what is sponsorship? The most basic type of sponsorship is when a website pays a developer an agreed amount so the developer will put the website’s logo and link on the games, before it is released. It’s kind of like when before TV shows they say ‘This program is brought to you by Kraft’. Even though Kraft didn’t make the TV show, they would have payed to put the message on. Likewise, the websites pay you to say ‘presented by …’ or you can make other agreements such as to have links to the website.

Websites want to do this because they know (or assume) they can earn more money from your game than they paid for the sponsorship. When people click on their link in your game, they get more traffic and more people click on their ads, earning them money. This is like Kraft hoping the viewers of that TV show will buy their product. The amount they pay you depends on how good your game is, and the agreement you make with them. This can be anywhere from $200 to $2000, even higher in some cases.

What you should never do is sell ownership of your game. Most portals respect your right to be the owner and creator of your Flash game, and they can’t force you to say something like ‘Game created by (sponsor)’. There are different types of sponsorship, too. Exclusive sponsorship is when you have to domain lock your game (so it can’t be shown on other sites) to the sponsor’s site either for a given period of time or forever. In this case, the payment will be more but you won’t have as much exposure of your game, and you can’t have it on your own site either.

Some common sponsors (and one’s that I’ve dealt with) include Armorgames, Hallpass, and Maxgames. FlashGameSponsorship is a site that is all about this developed by Adam Schroeder, It’s worth a look. It has details on sponsorship, a list of sponsors and other information.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 4:56 am and is filed under Sponsorship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.