I agree with Jared about the medioche games and I would add that its better to sell you medioche game for more than its worth to a portal who you have had success with before and will sponsor to keep you on side, rather than to give it to a smaller portal who thinks theyve got lucky winning one of you games only for it to fail. But at the same time I agree its better not to be any portals lapdog and to build relationships with lots of them.

About selling games outright, i believe it/when its possible it will happen more and I would expect GamerSafe and mochi to then get in on it and make their own shops. For now though, its only a very few games that will be able to pull it off, and its easier to sell someone a game when they are already hooked on it, otherwise players will go to the many free alternatives. If Chris Hennebery has evidence to the contrary though, I would be keen to here it.

One thing I thought was that sponsors and microtransaction providers had very different messages about what you should do with youir game, so I would be keen to see a panel with both on and maybe a dev also

1) “I’d rather go into personal debt after turning out a stinker, than to be some portal’s pet.” – We differ here. I would rather not. I run a company and am responsible for other people’s lives via payroll, etc… Although I’d rather be as idealistic, at the end of the day Hero Interactive is a company and the dollar is the bottom line.

2) Do we DESERVE that money from the sponsor for making a stinker? I’d argue heavily that yes, we do. Our sponsor didn’t just stumble upon us and throw money at us, we had to bust our ass to get to this point. We worked hard on the business side of the company in addition to the development side, and it’s that work that pays the bills when times are tough and allows us to keep doing what we love.

Greg is primarily interested in minimizing risk. For Hero Interactive, we do all kinds of games: great games and also… well… not great games. Building up a very strong relationship with a sponsor has allowed us to weather all kinds of storms. Sure, we may make a little less when we do a huge sequel, but I can guarantee that we MORE than make up for it by getting far more money than we deserve when we make a flop. Greg’s argument is that anyone will pay top dollar for a sequel, but my counter is not everyone will pay top developer for a mediocre game. The people who will… those people really want YOU and that’s when your relationship starts paying for itself.

Everyone will be your friend when times are good, make sure you have someone to stick around when they are bad.

Cheers
Chris H

By some reason, all the links to the videos are posted on Mochi – not on the FGS site. That just seems wrong, and proves your point that FGS are just playing by the big guys rules. Also take a look at the Kreds Award, what the hell? Give an award to the games with best use of the sponsor-of-the-award-shows microtransation system. I don’t really feel this only is really fair.

Anyway, here is the link to it: http://mochiland.com/articles/session-recordings-from-flash-gaming-summit
(I somehow feared the recording would fail, so I spend a lot of time watching those things yesterday, when I really should have been sleeping).