Hey.
Everybody who has ever tried getting a game(or maybe an animation) sponsored knows of the problems there can be to find a sponsor you can trust, and since I am one of them I came up with the idea of this thread. You can often find information about the sponsor if you look for it, but you wont find too much on the ones that are good which might make you doubt them. Here we will hopefully get both good and bad opinions on sponsors.
The idea is simply this, if you had a flash sponsored you can tell us here of your experience with that sponsor. I have been thinking of a grading system(if you have any suggestions on how to improve it please say), it's pretty much the same principle as reviewing a flash here on NG:
-Give us the name of the sponsor and a overall rating of him on a scale from one to five 'plusses'(+)
-Tell us the story of how things worked out with the sponsor(doesn't have to be long, just give us the important details)
-Also give him a rating, on the same scale as the overall one, on: Seriousness(simply how serious he seems), Money(how was his offers, you don't have to tell us the exact amount), Efficiency(could you reach him easily, did you have to wait long for replies etc.), Social(well, we all rather speak to a nice and understanding person than a demanding one)
-Please motivate your opinions
I will start with reviewing my first sponsor, Maxgames.com:
Maxgames.com +++
The game sponsored was PacMan Platform 2.
I contacted a few sponsors, one of them was Jason at flashportal. He was interested in sponsoring my game and thanks to help from the people here at the flash forum I got a offer I was very pleased with. He didn't want to sponsor me through flashportal though, but from a new site he was making. He wasn't finished with the site at that time though, and if I took his offer I would have to wait for about two weeks before I could submit my game anywhere. My game had quite a lot copyrighted stuff in it, so I couldn't find any other sponsor willing to sponsor me and I had to go with maxgames.
I had a hard time giving Maxgames a overall rating, but the fact that he wanted his logos pretty much all over the game makes him end up with a 3 instead of 4.
Seriousness ++++
Jason seemed very professional and I got to sign a distribution agreement, which made me feel very secure.
Money ++++
He gave me a good offer, if the game would not have contained any copyrighted stuff I would probably have been able to pressure him with offers from other sponsors though.
Efficiency ++
I had to wait a long time between each reply, often about a day but sometimes even more. To his defense I should add that it was around the holidays. I had to wait for some time after the deal was sealed too, but since the site is up now I wont consider that.
Social +++
He was pretty strict, but that might have to do with his 'professional' image.
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I hope that people will help on giving opinions so that flash artists have a place to go when they are uncertain about a sponsor. I and Crushy are currently speaking to Hallpass.com about a sponsorship, and we are very near closure (pretty much just the payment left) and when I know how that worked out I will make a review on them. If this thread survives I will make updates every now and then on the overall of the overall scores( XD ) for the sponsors, and in the future we might end up with a neat list on the sponsors on the web :)
Ps. Remember that you can give reviews for sponsors that didn't end up sponsoring you, as long as you have enough info about them to have a opinion.
(Hope I didn't screw up this post too much, I have been writing for about an hour so I don't have the energy to really think it all through :P)
