Porter's World

Sponsors Love Mouse Support

A very simple concept that is often overlooked is the importance of mouse support. As far as sponsorships go, you are far more likely to get a sponsor if your game is fully mouse controlled. A great game will always sell, adding mouse support just increases that chance, as well as the money you’ll receive for your sponsorship.

There’s a few reasons mouse controlled games do so well. The first we’ll look at is why sponsors love mouse support. Having mouse support greatly increases the amount of click-throughs a sponsor receives from your game. This is the entire reason the sponsor pays to put their name in your game, so it’s essentially the most important feature aside from your game being great. Even an amazing game without mouse support will find a lot of trouble getting a sponsor because it simply doesn’t give enough click-through back to the sponsors site. I spoke with Lars,( the Games Acquisition Manager for King.com) about why mouse support was so important and he shed a lot of light on the matter. My recently sponsored game Tower of Greed was a rare exception in Lar’s pickings, he generally only sponsors games that are mouse controlled, however this is proof that a great game can still recieve sponsorship if it’s built right. Although the game is entirely keyboard friendly, we did include mouse support for menus to raise the click back for King as well as make the game more user friendly.

That leads us to the next big reason mouse support is so important, it’s user friendly. Flash game players are not your usual gamers, unlike console gamers, flash gamers aren’t used to using a controller. I personally love keyboard controls, far more than mouse controls. As strong as my liking for keyboard controls is, I grew up playing NES, SNES and so on, and I recognize that. As simplistic as arrows or WASD with one hand ,and two buttons for jump and another action with the other hand may be to many gamers, many flash game players find these controls to be very confusing.

Overall using mouse support is something you should definitely do if you can. If you’re a beginner to the industry I highly recommend you use a game that is fully controlled with the mouse. It’s rough starting out and using the mouse for your control scheme will greatly boost your chance of finding a sponsor while you lack abilities in other areas due to inexperience. In the end, using the mouse for your game’s control scheme is going to benefit you, your sponsor and your players, so be sure to consider such things when planning a new game.