We’ve been quietly testing a new version of our pre-review service, and it’s now in open beta: video pre-reviews!

If your game is still in development, and you’re willing to work with us to make big changes to the game (if necessary), we would be happy to pre-review it. We’ll play your game and send you a video of the experience, so you can see exactly how we played the game, where we got stuck, what we liked and didn’t like.

To request a pre-review, click on “Edit Game” for your game and look for the Prereviews box.

Note that we anticipate a turnaround time of approximately a week. Also, in order to keep the queue from getting too long, we no longer give two pre-reviews: for now, the limit is one per game.

This is an experimental service we’re offering to the community. It’s still new and it needs your feedback. Please let us know what you like and don’t like about this service!

Other Changes

We’ve been bad about remembering to blog when new features are added! Here are some recent updates (including some just added tonight):

• Co-Author Permissions: Developers can now decide whether their co-author has permission to edit the game or not. By default, co-authors can edit anything about the game, just as before. If you un-check this box, co-authors won’t have access to the Edit Game screen for your game. However, they will still be able to see bids, use First Impressions, and view feedback.
• “Bidding Notes” Changed: We are repurposing the “Bidding Notes” field so we can show it elsewhere (for instance, when your game is in the Game Shop). We moved it to the General Description tab and renamed it “Notes to Buyers”. We also converted it from HTML to plain-text. If you used fancy formatting in your bidding notes, please go check it now to see if it looks acceptable.
• Preview Players Have Levels: Preview players now earn “levels” when they give good feedback (much like developers earn levels when they sell games). If you’re a developer who receives great feedback from a preview player (or anybody else!), please take a moment to mark the feedback as “Great Feedback”. This gives a little pat on the back to the person doing this favor for you.
• Game Agents Powered Up! Thanks to new back-end tools and new team members, our game agents are now working closer than ever with sponsors. Sponsors, we know your time is precious, so we’d be happy to help you find the best games for your specific needs. If we haven’t reached out to you yet, please feel free to drop us a note directly!
• EasyLicense Payment Info: If you go to the “My Account” page, you’ll see a new option: Payment Info. We use this information to pay developers when they sell a game through EasyLicense. When you have an EasyLicense deal pending, we’ll ask you to fill this information in. (You can also fill it in early, of course! If you fill it in  now, it will save a step in the process so you get your money to you a day or two faster.)
• Forum Signatures Capped: Forum signatures are capped to 250 pixels in height. If your forum signature is longer than that, scroll-bars will appear. But even 250 px is extremely large, and should be used sparingly. Please keep your forum signature under 200 px if at all possible!

We will have 1-2 hours of downtime late tonight (technically tomorrow morning, around 1am EST 7/23). We’re doing some routine maintenance and putting up a new version of the website. Stay tuned!

We’ve made a pretty big site update today. Here are the changes, then some commentary at the end.

Big Changes:

• New Bidding Parameters: when placing a bid, you will now see quite a few additional fields to fill out. These are “private fields” — the information in them will not be visible to other bidders, just to the developer. They help solidify the agreement between you and the developer so that there aren’t unpleasant surprises down the road. The new fields cover: what branding changes the sponsor wants, what branding the developer is allowed to have, what tracking APIs, high-score APIs, microtransaction APIs, and other APIs are allowed/required, translation requirements, and specific gameplay changes needed.
• Your Last Bid Is Saved: when sponsors place a new bid, the form is auto-filled out with the information from the previous bid. Please fill out the various “Private Fields” completely — you will only need to do it once since the data will get re-entered automatically for each new bid.
• Better Automated Email: emails sent to sponsors will now be individualized. Sponsors will be asked to pick the genres they care about the next time they log in — games outside of these genres won’t go into their emails. In addition, when there’s extra space in a day’s email, we will include earlier games in these genres that the sponsor has never viewed before. (Many of the best games tend to get overlooked on busy email days, so this helps sponsors find great games that they may have overlooked.)
• One-Week Bids: if a game has been for bid for at least two weeks, sponsors can now place bids with only a 1-week duration (instead of the regular 2-week minimum).
• Buy It Now More Prominent: games with Buy It Now prices will now show those prices on every browse page. (Previously this was only visible when you viewed an individual game.) In addition, if the Buy It Now price is close to the current high bid for the game, the Buy It Now price will be colored an eye-catching green.
• “Steal of the Week”: high-quality unsold games can be eligible for this new promotion if they set a Buy It Now price below a certain threshold. (For instance, a game with an Editor’s Rating of 7.5 will be considered for “Steal of the Week” if their Buy It Now price is $2500 or less.) Each week three such games will be picked and highlighted in automated email and on sponsors’ spotlight windows. You will receive an automated email when your game could be eligible. Right now we are test-driving the promotion with a relatively small number of games (those rated 7.5 and up) but intend to increase that range in the future.
• Search Box Improvements: The search box on sponsors’ Dashboards will now search both Game Shop and Bidding games at the same time. Crazy!
• Sponsor Bid-Screen Improvements: it is now easier to tell when a bid is the highest bid, versus when the developer has marked the bid as the “Best Bid So Far”. In addition, when viewing a game’s bidding history, it’s now easy to tell which bids are yours, and which are Buy It Now offers, and so on.
• Old Browse Categories Removed, New Ones Added: The “Best First Impressions” and “Developer’s Favorites” browse categories are retired from sponsor viewing due to a lack of use. (Developers can still see “Developer’s Favorites”, though.) We are testing some new browse categories to replace them. Currently they are “Unity Games” and “Epic RPGs”. We’ll be experimenting with other new browse-category ideas in the coming months as we look for things that resonate with sponsors.
• Pre-Reviews Back, Partly: Developers who are Market-Level 3 or higher can once again request Pre-Reviews. We will reduce these requirements (eventually removing all requirements entirely) as we become confident that we can handle the increased load of reviews.
• Managed Buyers: as part of our efforts to facilitate non-traditional sponsorships, we have been providing hands-on assistance for game buyers who need to purchase in large volume or otherwise want to avoid the traditional sponsor shopping process. In some of these cases, FGL  picks games out for them based on their desired parameters, and the buyer decides which of them to buy. We now have a new type of account to make managing these buys easier. Developers may see these “Managed Buyer” accounts in the Game View history for their games. If they like your game, expect a bid or gameshop purchase-request to follow a week or so after. (The bid or buy will come from a regular sponsor account.)
• Organize Your Games: developers (and sponsors who won licenses for games) can now organize the games in their account profile. You can find the link from the My Account page, or just click here. (Remember that Game Shop sales are not listed in the profile for the game shop buyer at this time.)
• New reports are available in the FGLopedia under “FGL Site Statistics”. Check them out here. These reports will give you a better glimpse into how the FGL website is doing, plus show trends in Flash game buying and selling.
• Reviewers’ Notes can now be seen for some games. Sponsors will see a small icon in the listings — hovering their mouse over this icon will show the notes. Reviewers use these notes to point out aspects of the game that you might not immediately notice.
• Preview On Upload: when you upload a new version of your SWF or UNITY3D file, you can preview it before saving changes.
• See Your Market Level History: you can now see where all of your Market Points come from. This is available from the “My Account” menu item, or just click here. (Preview players don’t receive market points so they won’t see anything there.)
• Track Threads: you can now “track” forum threads. (By default, a thread becomes “tracked” when you post a reply to it; you can also turn it on/off manually.) Your dashboard page will show any new posts in threads you’re tracking.

This is a big update with a lot of cool stuff, and we’re pretty excited about it! Please let us know here if you spot any problems.

Two things that we expected to be in this update aren’t live yet. First, we had previously mentioned that the site is being reskinned; that is still ongoing, but has become a somewhat larger-scale change than we first imagined, so it’s still a few months off (as we work out all the kinks). Second, we are still working toward our new “Agent Model” where game reviewers act more like game agents, helping you sell your game every step of the way instead of just reviewing them once. This update added a lot of the infrastructure for this idea, but we are still changing our internal policies (and getting our manpower in place) for this new idea. In retrospect, changing the entire working model of our site in two months turned out to be a tad bit overly-optimistic, but we are getting closer to this plan every day. Stay tuned for more improvements coming soon!

This update also includes many new back-end features that help us sell your games more efficiently, and helps us facilitate new kinds of sponsors we have waiting in the wings. So this is a big update which touched a lot of website features… which may well mean there are some kinks to iron out. Just let us know if you spot problems and they’ll get addressed ASAP.

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.

The website has been updated with many new features! If you notice anything weird or odd, please let us know.

Major New Features:

• Unity Support: you can now upload games made with Unity3D! (note: First Impressions do not yet work with Unity games.)
• Game Editing Overhaul: you can now edit all aspects of your game from one place, and the game-creation process has been dramatically improved. Many small bugs and annoyances have been removed. (And, presumably, replaced by new bugs and annoyances… please let us know how this can be further improved!)
• Fan Accounts: want to invite friends or family to playtest your game? Try the new Fan Account option! Developers can create these accounts and send them off to anybody they want. No muss, no special “codes” (like we had in the Previewer beta). Note that Fan accounts will only be able to see your games, and only the games that you mark as being “Visible to my fans”.
• Pre-Reviews: before you place your game up for bid, you will now be asked if you want us to “pre-review” it. One of our review team will do a dry-run review and send you the scores and comments, so that you can make changes before you put the game up. The reviewers will be available for further conversation, so you can ask questions and get specific feedback. When your game is finished, it will be “really” reviewed by one or more other reviewers.
  • We are working towards having a “dedicated agent” experience, where each game will be assigned to a sales agent who is your point of contact. We aren’t there yet, but the pre-review system is the first step in this direction.
• “Followers” System: we’ve replaced the “Friend” system with a “Follower” system. It works much the same, and your friends are automatically imported. Your feedback on this system is requested! The major changes are:
  • You can post messages that all your followers can see in their “Followers” page
  • You can see who is following you and reciprocate if desired
  • Your messages are stored sequentially so that users can see multiple messages from you. (The old “friend” system only had one “status message” per person.)
• Sponsor Suggestions: When viewing games, Sponsors will see lists of “Similar Games” that they might also be interested in.
  • We understand that some developers are concerned about this causing developers to leave their game earlier than they otherwise would, but the potential benefits are very large. This system is an experiment in order to gather metrics and see what real results we get.

Other Improvements:

• Previewer Program Now Open: Anyone can now sign up for the Previewer program from the main FGL website. They must still sign an NDA, however.
• Badge System: we will use this to give badges to winners of contests, such as our Programming Contests or the 2010 FGL User Awards.
• Age Rating: you can now specify an Age Rating for your game, to help sponsors find games that better match their demographic.
• Update Notes: when you upload a new version of your game, you can choose whether this is a “minor update” or a “major update”. If it is a major update, you can provide update-notes that will be sent to everyone watching your game, and everyone who has bid on it. Note that you can only have a few Major Updates per month; it is expected that most updates are “minor updates”.
• Forum Signatures Can Now Just Be Images: You no longer need to include text in your forum sig. However, note that there are now guidelines for maximum signature height (approx. 250 pixels).
• Mobile Games Category: is now visible to developers and previewers. In addition, you can see games by high-market-level developers in the “Reliable Developers” section.
• Bid Listing Improved: developer’s bid-listing now includes a bit more info. This screen will be getting more features soon!
• Alerts when Leaving Pages: if you enter text into a form (such as when providing feedback or posting a message in the forums) and navigate away from the page without submitting the form, you will be prompted to make sure you aren’t making a mistake. In addition, you will be asked to make sure you really want to leave the Chat room and the Edit Game page without saving.
• Email Followups Improved: when you request email follow-ups to a forum thread, the emails you receive now have a link right to the newest post.
• Watch-count split up: Developers can now see how many sponsors and how many developers are watching their game. (Previously, these numbers were grouped together.) However, in order to protect sponsors’ privacy, the “number of sponsors watching” count is delayed by a random number of days and views, so that you cannot easily figure out which sponsor might be watching your game based on who has viewed the game.
• “Follow This Developer”: sponsors are now prompted to follow developers when they view games, so that they can quickly be informed of status updates and news by that developer.
• Gravatar Support: if you do not have an FGL forum icon, but do have a Gravatar icon, that will be used on the forums now.
• Chat Room – Mobile Phone Support: the chat room now supports most smartphones.
• Approval Queue Bugfix: if you edit your game while it is pending approval, it no longer resets your place in the approval queue. (Unless you indicate that it is a “major update”… minor updates don’t upset your queue position.)
• Icon Voter Improvements: along with minor bugfixes, you can now play the games you are voting on, if they strike your fancy.
• Team Profile Updated: the new guys are there now on the FGLopedia “About Us” page.
• Forum Categories: a modest attempt at organizing the forums.
• Buttons Revised: the candy-coated buttons are mostly now gone. If you are using them in your forum signature, please stop, as they’ll be removed soon!
• Youtube Video Revision: you can now easily set and change your Youtube video from the Edit Game page, along with everything else about your game. Changes are instantaneous. (Previously they required admin approval.)
• Co-authors Can Do More: Co-authors can now change anything about a game or its viewing permissions. Theoretically, the only thing they can’t do now is actually accept bids.
• Dozens of other bugs fixed: from strange phrasings to non-optimal sales recommendations, we’ve made many small changes. Of course, we’ve probably introduced new problems… so please let us know if you see any!

If you spot any problems, please post them! Thanks!

If you’ve visited the chat room recently you may have noticed a new icon-voting widget. Icon voting is back! If you have time, visit the chat room and vote on some icons! (Or, if you prefer, vote directly from the full-size voting page).

How does an icon get into the voting pool? Automagically. Any unsold game that has been uploaded within a month and is visible to developers or sponsors will automatically have its icon entered into the voting pool. Once an icon has at least 10 votes, the game’s authors can find the “icon hotness” on the game-view page underneath the description.

Remember that better icons mean more clicks from sponsors. And after your game launches, better icons mean more clicks from gamers, too! So please take care to make the best icon you can.

Speaking of icons after the game launches… we realized that we’ve been leaving sponsors out of the equation. Sponsors often need to pick the best icons, too! Many will use a game’s FGL icon, but sometimes that icon doesn’t strike their fancy (or their target demographic’s fancy) and they need to make custom icons. Now they can get their custom icons rated, too. The multi-icon upload page lets you add extra icons to the voting pool to get rated. The number of icons you can upload is determined by your Market Level. (And this feature is available to developers too, in case you have several icons and can’t decide which to use.)

PS – We’re still early in the voting (and we’re still tweaking the methodology) but you can already see some clear trends in the Top 100 Icons list and the Bottom 100 Icons list. And there’s a Middle 100 Icons list, too… the most average icons!

Check Out Our New, More Comprehensive Review Reports

If you’ve had a game approved for sponsor viewing in the past few months, you probably received a note from us that listed some extra information about your review score. This is our new Review Report, and it’s a courtesy feature we’re experimenting with. It includes a little chart with some numbers, like this:

In addition to these numbers, you will also see any notes the reviewers made.

Note that the “Overall” rating is not a straight average — different factors are weighted differently. For instance, Graphics are more important than Sound for most genres of game.

What Do The Numbers Mean?

We’ve recently made some effort to make our ratings more uniform. This has also caused them to drop a bit on average, as we had slowly been inflating our game scores over time. (The change is pretty modest, though.) Here’s what the numbers mean, in English:

My Game Was Got Rejected! Should I Be Angry?

No! If we reject your game (instead of approving it for bidding), the rejection is only temporary: we’re giving you an opportunity to improve your game before it’s seen by sponsors. Remember: you only get one chance to make a first impression with sponsors. So if we reject your game, it’s because we believe your game has potential — and just needs some extra attention before it can reach that potential.

If you don’t agree with our advice when we reject your game, you are always free to re-submit the exact same game again; if you do, it will be approved without further rejection, using the scores we previously indicated.

But we consider rejection to be a favor we give you, not an insult. We don’t reject every game just because we have ideas about how it can be improved. If we reject your game, it’s because we think your game in particular has potential, and we think our feedback will be especially valuable in reaching that potential.

Rejecting your game is never about punishing you — it’s about maximizing the sales potential of your game!

I Don’t Like My Review Scores! Can I Get a Re-Review?

In the past we’ve tried not to put too much emphasis on the admin review scores. They cause a lot of anxiety and they aren’t the most important thing to selling your game: a great game will sell regardless of what number we stick on it. But many developers have asked us for extra feedback about their game, and while we’ve offered lots of feedback over the years, we’ve never had a uniform method of organizing it until now. We know that sometimes, an objective critique of your game is incredibly valuable, not just for your current game, but for your future games as well. We’re happy to be able to provide some of that for the Flash community.

But at the same time, we also wanted to reiterate: please don’t read too much into the precise scores you get. They just don’t make that big a difference. We often have developers request a re-review because they believe they should have gotten a half-point higher than we gave them — a half-point difference is just not important in determining how well your game sells!

But we do make misjudgments, and developers sometimes make big improvements that we should know about. Ideally, we’d love to keep re-reviewing all games as often as needed, but that just isn’t possible: due to the volume of games we receive, we simply can’t re-review every game that requests it. So we have to limit it. If your game has been for sale for over 30 days and you have made significant improvements to it (such as all new graphics or very dramatic gameplay improvements), you can use the Feedback menu item to request a re-review. You can only request one re-review for your game ever, and be aware that a re-review might actually cause your score to go down! (It’s rare, but it has happened before, since the re-review may be done by different reviewers.) When you request this re-review, you will be added to a queue, prioritized by your Market Level. The re-review may take several weeks, depending on how busy we are. When you request the re-review, please make sure to include details of what you’ve changed. We want to see large and important changes before re-reviewing!

However, the best advice is, as always, to make sure the game is the best possible before you submit it for approval. Use FGL’s great community and our other feedback methods to hone your game — don’t rely on the admin review for feedback. You only get one chance to make a first impression with sponsors! Once your game goes live, there’s nothing anyone can do to take that first impression back. Make it count!

We released a major update to the website today. Here are the changes!

• Major speed improvements! The website has been slowing down during peak operating times, so we’ve taken many steps to optimize it. We expect a dramatic performance improvement during peak hours.
• Security improvements! This update incorporates several significant security improvements. We don’t normally mention security upgrades, but in this case, we want to let you know about it so that if there are bugs, you’ll know what’s happening. If your game is replaced with FGL_Eric’s face, that means the security system has activated. If you see this, please send us Feedback to tell us where and how you got it!
• Game Cleanup: To help sponsors find fresh games, we’ve added new systems that unclutter our game catalog. We realized that over the past month, nearly 1/3rd of sponsor views were on games that were already sold, already self-published, or potentially abandoned by their developer. Developers often forget to remove their games from FGL in these cases, which makes it harder for sponsors to find fresh games. We’ve added features to rectify this:
  • If you don’t log into FGL for 30 days, we’ll assume that you’ve wandered off and are no longer interested in getting your game sponsored. Your games will become hidden from sponsors until you log back into the website. (We will, of course, send you an email to let you know this has happened.) We apologize for the inconvenience, but we believe it will help keep our game inventory much cleaner.
  • In addition, we now automatically search for your game on the internet. If your game is detected “in the wild”, it will be removed from the sponsorship catalog. This process is not infallible, however — sometimes a Flash game is released with the same name as an old Flash game. We have heuristics that should keep this from being a problem, but if your game becomes hidden inappropriately, just let us know and we will fix it.
• Changes to Last Call: We’ve made two major changes to Last Call to make it more effective for developers, more predictable for sponsors, and nicer to our game catalog.
  • When your game is placed into Last Call, we will now email it out to sponsors to let them know. (Previously, “Last Call” was only visible from the website, not the daily automated email.)
  • The day after you have completed Last Call, your game will become hidden in sponsor browses and searches. Direct links to your game will still work, and sponsors who have ALREADY bid on your game will still be able to find it easily, but the website will stop promoting your game to new sponsors. We did this because once Last Call ends, you are supposed to accept a bid and end bidding. We hope this change will help promote the behavior we want.
• Changes to Buy It Now: now when you get a Buy It Now bid, your game will immediately become hidden from sponsor searches.
  • Many developers have opted not to honor their Buy It Now offers, which was understandably very annoying to the sponsors who made the offer, so this is an effort to rectify the problem. Developers, please only set a Buy It Now price if you intend to honor it!
  • We know that sometimes a Buy It Now bid will need to be rejected because the deal fell through or the sponsor included unreasonable demands. In this case, please contact the admins and we will return your game to the sponsor viewing area.
• View Locations: Developers, track your game views more accurately than ever! Now you can see WHERE your game views are coming from — whether they are from automated emails, areas of the FGL website, your personal promotion efforts, or the efforts of the FGL admin staff.
  • We have attempted to back-fill view information for the past month or so. However, you will notice numerous entries labeled “miscellaneous”. In these cases, we had to guess where the view came from. In the future there should be significantly fewer guessed entries (though there will still be some “miscellaneous” links).
  • Developers, by adding &from=dev to the end of your game’s URL, we will record views from that URL as a developer self-promotion. When you include your game’s URL in an email, you should include this. (We automatically add it to the end of the game’s URL when you view your own game, so normally you don’t need to remember to do this.)
• New Browse Modes: Sponsors have three new ways to browse for games. As always, we are constantly trying new ways to organize games; these ideas may or may not be permanent depending on how useful they end up being.
  • Highest Bids: the games that have the highest bids in the system right now
  • Reliable Developers: games from developers who have very high Market Levels
  • Mobile-Ready: games that are optimized for Flash on mobile phones
• User-interface improvements: as usual, we have also made various miscellanous improvements, such as more usable pagination controls and a cleaner presentation on various parts of the site.

Please report any issues you find in this thread! Thanks.

I have quoted Eric and decided to post the major site update which was live on the 18th of May 2010, for those of you who prefer reading the blog

• We have big plans for the Game Shop! This is just the first step in redesigning how it works. There are now a lot fewer choices, and the choices are much more explicitly defined. Make sure to check your games to see that you’re happy with the prices!
• If your game is in the Game Shop, you can now opt in to making the game visible outside the site. This new feature lets site visitors see your games and make offers on them! This is an experimental feature that we will be expanding upon in the future, if it is successful.
• We’re officially rolling out the YouTube video browsing features! (We’ve actually been using your YouTube videos for many months, with great success, to help sponsors find games we think they will like. This update is just the formal roll-out, making the browse-page visible to everyone.)
• We’ve changed our terms of service. Paying a commission is no longer just “morally obligatory”, it is now legally obligatory, too. To place your future games into bidding, you will need to digitally sign our web form saying that you agree to our terms. (Previously added games are not affected.)
• We’ve split the Sponsor account type into “Buyers” and “Sponsors”. The former type has access to the Game Shop, while the latter has access to both the Game Shop and the bidding area. (This is just a terminology change; previously these were “Sponsors” and “Premier Sponsors”.)
• The “Last Call” button is not such a mystery anymore. Developers can click this button at any time to see if their game is eligible for Last Call, and if not, they can see a reason why.
• The forum’s Search feature has been completely rewritten.

Those are the major highlights… here are additional changes:

• We’ve adjusted the layout of many pages to provide redundant buttons and links.
• First Impressions reviewers will now be able to play games in Full Screen mode if the game supports it.
• The code-highlighting features have been significantly improved so that they work better. To embed code in your forum post, wrap it in tags [as2] … [/as2] or [as3] … [/as3]. The code between these tags will be syntax-highlighted automatically.
• There are also similar syntax-highlighting tags for [php], [java], and [c#]
• While any developer can still rate the feedback they receive, only high-level developers can make feedback have a value higher than “Great”. This was being abused too much by new users who didn’t understand (or care about) how the system worked.
• We’ve added stricter wording in many parts of the site to help educate users about proper FGL etiquette. This includes warnings about overusing the Cancel Bid feature, sending unsolicited private messages, accepting a bid that is less than 72 hours old, and more.
• We’ve reorganized the forums a bit.
• We’ve touched up how Player accounts see games. We’ve also added some behind-the-scenes features to help us grow the Player system more quickly.