We’re always looking for ways to facilitate transactions and add value for both sponsors and developers. We have a couple of great new ways to do that! First up is ProxyPay.

ProxyPay

In short, ProxyPay is a service to help sponsors and developers get money to each other across different payment systems. For instance, a sponsor can pay us via PayPal, and we can then pay the developer via MoneyBookers or wire transfer.

If you’ve ever experienced the nuances of paying internationally, or if you are an international developer that’s tired of trying to arrange a payment method that will work in your country (and tired of saying “no I can’t take PayPal in my country!”), then you probably see the benefits of ProxyPay right away.

There are modest fees associated with this service, to cover our costs. The most common arrangements (such as the above-mentioned payment via PayPal to MoneyBookers) costs $50 plus the service fees from PayPal and MoneyBookers.

The ProxyPay system has been in beta for some time, so you may already have received payments this way. However, it’s now open to anybody, so developers, feel free to ask sponsors to use ProxyPay to pay you. This page has all the details.

EasyLicense

Sponsors are increasingly needing more and more information from developers in order to license games.  Legally, in most countries, sponsors must collect tax information and have multiple contracts signed between them and the developer before they can sponsor, or even non-exclusively license, a game.  Some larger companies even require upwards of $3million in insurance coverage from the developer.  For indie developers, and even small development companies, these are large hurdles –  sometimes even roadblocks.

This is where EasyLicense comes in to make things… well.. easy!

From the developer’s perspective, EasyLicense allows you to sign one contract, and set up all of your payment information through one company, FGL.  FGL then can sub-license your game out to anyone you choose without you ever having to sign another contract, or hunt down your EIN or W8-Ben, or any number of other aggravating tasks.

From the buyer’s perspective, EasyLicense allows you to work through FGL to license potentially thousands of games without worrying about tax withholding laws and treaties in various countries.  It also allows you to pay out to a single, US, company for all games.  Companies we are currently working with have found this saves them significant amounts of money since their legal and accounting departments rarely need to get involved. This also benefits both sides in our experience as this allows payouts to flow much faster than cases where hundreds of developers are being paid individually.  All contracts also come with $1million in insurance coverage for errors and ommissions, and cyber liability by default, and more can be added if necessary.

Although this service is still in beta, we’re already seeing exciting sponsorship growth through this licensing model. If your company would benefit from this service, please drop us a line and we’ll get you the details.

In the last post, I reported that 33% of games are made with AS2 (over the past six months on this site). HansaW wondered how well the AS2 games sold versus AS3 games. Interesting question, so I dug that up:

Here’s another angle:

Yep, definitely making less money. But these are a little misleading, at least to me, since there are fewer AS2 games versus AS3 games overall. So I crunched a different stat: assuming the game sells at all, it will sell for 18% less on average if it’s in AS2 versus AS3. However, I think that disparity is more about the quality (and simplicity) of the average AS2 game, as opposed to an effort by sponsors to pay less on AS2 games per se.

In fact, anecdotally, it seems like some sponsors aren’t really paying attention to the AS2/AS3 status on the game before they bid… even if they can only use AS3 games! I just got another email about a sponsor pulling out of a bid because they didn’t notice it was AS2 before bidding. Strangely, that’s two this week. Sponsors, please note this before bidding, if that’s important to you!

FlashDevelop: How Was It Recorded?

The other big question from my last blog post was about how people using FlashDevelop are recorded in our stats: several commenters said they use Flash Pro only at the end of development, to bundle the game with a preloader, so they were incorrectly reported as Flash Pro users even though it’s not their main development environment.

I made a small effort to detect this case, actually. The “other” category includes some games that seemed like they only used Flash Pro briefly. If elements were dragged onto the stage instead of placed there via AS3 code, that was one indicator — another was whether there were a lot of non-default symbols in use, since I assume people who actually develop in Flash Pro end up creating a lot more named things (such as frames and symbols) than pure AS3 games do. But that was largely a guess: I poked at a couple games I knew were one way or the other, and made some simple heuristics based on what I saw. I don’t know how accurate they are.

So at the end of the day, it’s true: if you’re using Flash Develop or the command-line, you can assume you were incorrectly reported on that chart. I suspect a lot of the Flex users are actually not using the Flex Builder environment. I do kind of doubt there’s a huge number of incorrectly reported Flash Pro users, but I don’t really know.

Does it matter?

But on the other hand, for the most important use of that chart, it doesn’t matter!

When a sponsor asks us whether they should prioritize their development kit for Flash Pro or for Flash Builder or what, we’ll still probably tell them to prioritize for Flash Pro. Even if you don’t develop in it, the 55% number shows you at least have Flash Pro, and can make a build in it. Thus, more than half of all developers have access to, and skill with, Flash Pro.

So if someone had to choose between providing a timeline-based library or a mxml-based library, the timeline one could be integrated by more developers, it seems. (That’s a pretty terrible example… we’d never tell sponsors to make an API based on either of those approaches! But some people have multiple legacy libraries and have to choose what they will keep supporting.)

Again anecdotally, I know Adam has long been telling people that Flash Pro is underrepresented, and it seems that I interact with more Flash Pro users than FlashDevelop/etc. users.  That may be because I deal with people who have technical problems, and one could argue that that the average Flash Pro user is less technically savvy than the average FlashBuilder user, perhaps. Hard to say, really. I’ve met some amazingly skilled Flash Pro users, too.

When CS6 comes out, I’ll try to make time to create a permanent report tool that digs a little deeper on the heuristic analysis. (The chart from the last post uses several heuristics, but they are mostly unverified… in other words, they’re pure guesswork on my part.)

We’re mostly back from FGS and GDC! During the conferences I was asked for a couple of pieces of information. They’re pretty interesting, so I figured I’d share them with everybody. These stats are for games uploaded in the last six months.

AS2 versus AS3

As you can see, AS2 is still holding its ground quite well; it’s been at 33% for over a year. But nevertheless, several big sponsors told us that they are phasing out AS2 support this year. (Yes, we did plead your case: there are a lot of great AS2 games still being made!) In the end, it just costs too much for them to support two completely different code-bases, and when these sponsors try to do new and clever things with their libraries (like integrate with Facebook for scoreboards), they are running into technical limitations of AS2.

I know that AS2 die-hards don’t want to hear this (and personally, I think AS2 is a much cooler language for non-programmers to make games in), but I think the writing is on the wall. Make 2011 the year you switch to AS3!

AS3 Development Environments

If you develop in AS2, then you pretty much have to develop in Flash Professional. But there are a lot more options if you develop in AS3. Which is most popular? Well, we can’t tell that for 100% certain, but there are telltale indicators for most of the popular IDEs embedded into the SWFs they make. So by examining these markers, we are able to tell approximately how popular each development environment is:

One very interesting thing to note is that the various versions of Flash Professional are responsible for 55% of the AS3 games on our site (along with 100% of the AS2 games, of course)! This is definitely not what big companies expected to hear. Even some Adobe employees didn’t realize that Flash Pro was still so popular for game development. Most of the mega-corporations we’ve talked to assume that Flex or pure AS3 games are the vast majority, with Flash Pro used only to create assets. This just isn’t true. We’ve been educating companies about this for a while.

We don’t have enough historical data to tell if Flash Pro use is waning or waxing, but my guess is that the newest Flash Pro’s excellent mobile-device support will keep it pretty high.

So even if sponsors phase out AS2 support, they will continue to need to support both .FLA-based games and pure AS3 projects in their leaderboards, preloaders, and so on. (This is much easier than supporting both AS2 and AS3, though, so there’s not too much worry there.)

A note on these numbers: these stats are based on the final SWF uploaded to our website… so if you used Flash to do animations and then embedded them in Flex, your game counted as a Flex app. These numbers are based on the SWFs uploaded from August 2010 to today.

We’re Back In Action!

As Chris mentioned when we left, game reviews basically stopped during GDC week: the entire FGL team (all thirteen of us!) were at the FGS and stayed for some of GDC. (It seemed the smartest thing to do was to put games on hold that week, since 17 of our top 20 sponsors, and who knows how many other sponsors, were away at GDC… not buying games!)

But our game agents have now returned to work, and are digging through the backlog of games very quickly: we’re down to 91 pending games as of this writing. If you just put your game up for approval today, I would guess you have about 7 days before your game gets approved. At that point we’ll hopefully be caught back to normal in terms of the queue.

Adam, Chris, Steve, and I have a million emails to catch up on, so if you mailed us recently, we’re digging as fast as possible. If you need something urgently, please remember to put in a ticket for it from the “Contact Us” menu item, we’re addressing those items first before tackling the privately-sent emails.

This year’s FGS was the best yet, with some really incredible pieces of news (such as Unity compiling to Molehill SWFs! Holy crap!) and some really exciting new game technologies and partnerships coming up.

As we were leaving for our planes, Adam mentioned that he hasn’t been this excited about the Flash scene since the first month we opened FGL. This year is going to be really exciting for FGL, for game developers, and for players too.