Finding Sponsors For Your Flash Game

Paul, from Playhub, talks about finding sponsors for your Flash games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/cc-playhub.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Casual Connect in Seattle, and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Paul: Hi, my name is Paul and I’m from Playhub.com.

Interviewer: What’s that about?

Paul: It’s a casual flash game portal. You play three games.

Interviewer: How do you get the games on your site?

Paul: There’s games all over the Internet that you grab and put on your site. One thing that we do to specialize it is sponsor these games to have our branding in them, and those are the big ones for our site.

Interviewer: OK. So, when you talk about sponsoring, what do you exactly mean? Is that something where small game developers will develop a flash game and then you put your branding on it?

Paul: Right. I mean, they can develop a game or have one developed and try to contact us. We put our branding in it, and virally put it on the Internet and spread it around.

Interviewer: So, this is a way then for flash developers to start making money off their games then?

Paul: Right. Absolutely. Actually, they can upfront have charges or anything like that. It’s a great way for them to make money off their games.

Interviewer: Can you talk about some of the potential income or income ranges they can make off of a flash game that they make?

Paul: Well, I mean, it varies, depending on the quality, obviously, of the game and the game play. Depending on what we’re looking for, it can range anywhere from a minimum of $300 to games… We’ve seen games go for $50,000. It just depends.

Interviewer: Yes. So, this is a viable way then for developers. You just want to focus on development, to actually start making money off their games.

Paul: Right, I think so.

Interviewer: Is it better to go directly through you, or to go through some of these other exchange sites where they can get the best bidding or something else?

Paul: Again, it just depends. We do see people getting a lot of money off exchange sites, like Flash Games License, but they take a percent. And we think it would be better to come directly to us as a sponsor because, maybe, we can do a better deal than that. You get to keep all your money.

Interviewer: Where do you see this little sponsorship thing going versus virtual goods versus any other new things that are coming up? Where do you see the whole sponsorship virtual goods thing going?

Paul: Well, I don’t see them separate. I think you can mix the two. You can’t have virtual goods in games that you’re trying to get sponsored. they go hand in hand.

Interviewer: Do you feel that this sponsorship thing is going to keep growing, or is it going to level out or plateau or go down?

Paul: I only see growth with it. Some people are trying to make games and help promote their own site, but we don’t think that’s where it’s going to go. We think that people, portals like us, are going to be sponsoring games for a very long time to come.

Interviewer: And so, you’re saying that it’s really going to be about distributed channels or just getting your game out and stuff like that.

Paul: Right. Absolutely. Yeah.

Interviewer: Do you know any other last suggestions then for indie game developers who are developing flash games in terms of other maximizing the revenue that they can make and suggestions on types of games they should make, which is another thing we didn’t really discuss. What types of games do you look for?

Paul: It just varies. It can be any type of game, whether it’s sports or racing or a puzzle or anything like that. There are certain things that us as a portal or a publisher look for, certain elements, lead elements and things like that to help us profit from sponsoring the game.

Interviewer: What about multi-player? Is that something that you think is going to be stronger, or is it mainly single player games still?

Paul: You know, the MMOs are growing. It’s kind of a different realm right now. There are two different things than single player, flash games or whatnot. But, maybe, in the future they’ll be mixed. I don’t know.

Interviewer: When you say MMOs are growing, would you sponsor MMOs? Does that even make sense because MMOs are usually on their own site, or have you sponsored MMOs?

Paul: No. You can sponsor, I guess, but what they’re trying to and what I’ve seen here at the conferences is they’re looking for more revenue share. They use portals like us, use publishers like us to help send them traffic and then split the revenue some way.

Interviewer: So, flash MMO developers could contact you guys to get kind of a rep share distribution deal with your portal.

Paul: Right. I mean, they could, yes.

Interviewer: Any other suggestions, any last suggestions for an indie game developer?

Paul: Yes. Polish your games.

Interviewer: And how would you suggest doing that? Just outsourcing the art work or when you say polish – what?

Paul: I mean the graphics, the menus on them. Don’t slack on the menus. Those are the big things that we need as publishers. That’s one thing that we look at is the polishment. How polished is that game?

Interviewer: Where can people submit their own game to your site?

Paul: We have a “submit your game” down at the bottom of the page which you can probably find on a lot of sites. That’s where you do it.

Interviewer: OK. Cool. And what’s the site name again?

Paul: The site name is Playhub.com.

Interviewer: And that’s P-L-A-Y-H-U-B.com.

Paul: That’s correct.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.