So, I’ve been looking at people’s sponsorship adventures over at talk-arcades and other publisher places and a lot of people have been sponsoring — and not with much luck. Usually the budget is pretty low, less than $500. Lots of people say that is the minimum to sponsoring a half-decent game. Whoever said that either does not know what they are talking about or are just trying to get sponsors to spend more money.

$500 is not the minimum. It could be if you only look at games that have bids and ignore whatever else is there. There are lots of decently good games at FGL that just sit there without any bids for months. Its your wanting to find a bargain, those are the places to go. Look for games with good Graphics and presentation that hasn’t gotten a bid for a month or two and go after those. The usual bid I place is around $100-$125 for these games. I’ve been able to get exclusive source for such games for around $150-$200. Its not a killer deal, but its much better than a lot of the deals I see go down. Once you have exclusive source, you can easily build another game on the engine.

Also, once you see a counter-bid, do not bid up the game. I found that a lot of the time, the developer will accept my bid over the higher bid for some odd reason. Some of the time its because they have trouble with the other sponsor. A lot of the time I’m guessing is that they got a friend of used a sponsor account themselves to bid the game up and the bid isn’t real. This has happened many times just before my bid expires. Yes, you will lose some games this way, but you will still get quite a few of them.

Sometimes you have to bargain a bit, but usually its best to stick to your original price. Make sure the game you are bidding on is worth it. A good measure is if you can make the amount you put in back in 6 months or so. You need a short payback period so you can keep a steady flow of games coming from your site. Follow a strict set of disciplined rules when bidding on games and stick with that system. Do not waver or it won’t work for you.

Finally do not sponsor any games that have Mochi-Coins in them unless you are getting a cut on the coin-sale. They are just a bad deal. Its not worth spending money just to send people to register at Mochigames.com.

The last tip is try to pick up Niche games if you can. Car games, tower defense games, shooting games, and some puzzle games will get many more views than other games of similar quality. Sometimes its worth it to bid slightly more on those. Hopefully after reading this, people won’t bid several hundred or up to $1000 on a game that eventually gets less than a 3 on Newgrounds. Those games are essentially worthless. I made the mistake of purchasing a few such games early on and lost a decent deal of money that way.

Happy sponsoring.

Tags: buy, sponsor

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 1st, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.