What is a Sponsorship?
A "sponsorship" can be any sort of licensing deal in which a Flash game developer is paid money to leverage the game for the benefit of the "sponsor". The sponsor may be a game publisher with a portal website, or a distributor of Flash games, or both.
The term 'sponsorship' may have fit a little better in the past when most deals involved an exclusive branding license, but we continue to use the term today because it is handy to have one term to cover all the various different types of deals that are possible.
Why would someone want to sponsor a game?
Money, of course. The traffic that a sponsored game brings to the sponsor's site makes them a lot of money. If a sponsor offers the developer X dollars for a game, then they believe that the game will eventually make them more than that amount in return.
To be fair, the sponsor has invested a lot of time and effort in creating their portal site and/or distribution channels. They are often in a much better position to capitalize on a game than the developer would be. That's why a sponsorship can be very beneficial to both to both the game developer and the sponsor.
How much money?
The amount of money involved in a sponsorship varies a lot, depending on the details of the license, the amount of work needed on the part of the developer, the level of exclusivity for the sponsor - and of course the quality of the game.
There is a general belief that a traditional exclusive license may range between $100 and $500, perhaps even hitting $1000 for the right game. These numbers aren't wrong, but they might be low: a great game can easily bring $5000 to $7000 for an exclusive license.
Moreover, primary license sponsorships that we here at FGL pioneered can substantially increase the developer's revenue from a single game. We have already brokered games with collective offers of over $20K, plus in-game ad revenue and the ability to sell future non-exclusive licenses.
What are the main types of sponsorships?
Although a sponsorship could refer to any kind of licensing deal, we tend to talk about two main types of sponsorships: exclusive and primary.
Exclusive sponsorships are the traditional licenses that were most common in the Flash game world until just recently. Details vary, but the most important thing about exclusive sponsorships is that they are exclusive – a sponsor is paying a developer to brand ALL versions of the game that appear anywhere on the Internet for the rest of time.
A primary sponsorship, on the other hand, is non-exclusive in a very particular way. With a primary sponsorship, the sponsor pays the developer to brand the version of the game that is distributed to the Internet in a general world-wide release. However, the developer retains the right to sell site licenses – that is, versions of the game that are locked only to a particular site and may have very different branding.
You can learn more about each of these sponsorships on the following pages.
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