Porter's World

You're Not Done

There’s always a lot of talk about how to make great games. From my experience however, there isn’t too much talk about what to do after your game is completed. Believe it or, there’s a lot of work to be done after your game is completed, and it’s quite possibly just as important as the work done beforehand.

Let’s take a look at the obvious work that must be done after completing your game, as said above, finding a sponsor. It may sound straight forward, but the sponsor you pick goes far beyond the current project you just completed. Picking the right sponsor could be your doorway to a stable relationship with that sponsor and help increase speed as well as revenue earned from future projects. If you own your own portal, you’ll want a splash intro screen that leads back to your site. It’s not he main branding of the game, but if the game does well enough this will get you a considerable amount of traffic. With this in mind, it’s very important to pick a sponsor that has a great distribution program. Some of the bigger sponsors will push your game much further than any of the smaller sponsors could wish to. Spreading your game to as many players as possible helps build you a name, and that name can prove incredibly powerful down the road when you have a few games under your belt.

Moving on from the more known knowledge and diving into the lesser known works of post-completion. Once your game is sponsored and released, there’s a lot to be done. Submitting your game to all the right portals is a must do. Such sites include, Kongregate, Newgrounds, Armor Games, MiniJuegos, AllGamesAllFree and FlashGameDistribution. It’s important that you the developer upload to these sites, because in most cases your sponsor can’t submit them. If possible you should add in medals to your Newgrounds games, and include the API on Kongregate in case Greg picks your game for badges, which is a huge plus.

There is also extra money to be made beyond getting your upfront sponsor payment. Sites such as, Newgrounds, Kongregate and Fizzy all offer revenue share plans to developers, and if you’re game gets enough views this could mean some very nice additional money in your pocket. Another huge plus to spreading your game around the net and getting exposure is the wonderful concept of non-exclusive licenses, or NE’s for short. Sites will contact you to buy a license for a site locked copy of your game on their site, given your game is successful enough. These copies generally sell between $100-$400, and up to $1000 in special cases. These sponsors pay for you to remove all outgoing links and original branding, which in most sponsorship cases is allowed according to your agreement, but always double check before signing a contract. In addition to the above, if you have in game advertisements in your game you can also see an extra chunk of change if your game does well. With all of the above you can be seeing a very nice amount of extra money, one that can sometimes exceed your original payment. I think it’s safe to say that under no circumstances should the above events be skipped before you jump into your next game.

Another hugely overlooked aspect of post-completion is relationship building. Making your sponsor proud to have selected your game is very important and builds a foundation for future sponsorships. Having this kind of a relationship scores you more money in the future, and also saves you time looking for a sponsor since you can directly contact your previous sponsor to pitch ideas or show them a finished product before anyone else sees it. This is exceptionally important seeing as one of the major loses many people suffer is a load of down time between games due to looking for a sponsor.

By now it’s no mystery that the work doesn’t end upon getting a sponsor. There’s reputation to be had, money to be earned and relationships to be created or fortified. The bonuses of having a good reputation help future games enormously, and a bit of reputation never hurt anyone’s ego. The extra money is great, and in cases such as mine can even pay rent between games. Overall there’s a lot of extra work to be done once your game is complete, but it’s certainly not without reward.