So how did this end?
It ended with a sponsorship deal with box10.com!
Sadly for my neat little chart, they've insisted that I keep the actual amount to myself.
I learnt a whole lot from the experience which is nice. My main advice to anyone using FGL is to only put up your game at least a day
after you're sure it's totally finished. For the first couple of hours I had a bugged version uploaded, which a couple of sponsors played. Dragging them back with promises of "it's better now, honest" unsurprisingly didn't work.
Once you have sponsors interested, my advice becomes to know what you're looking for in a deal and to know exactly what deal the sponsors are offering. I fell into the trap of thinking that small details didn't really matter, and could be sorted out after the bidding. They were sorted out after the bidding just fine, but by then I was in a poor negotiating position - the other interested bidders had seen the game sold and moved on to other things, so I was pretty much stuck with my top bidder. Of course I wasn't contractually obligated to do anything until those small details were sorted out, but going through the hassle of changing sponsor didn't seem worth it for what were after all such small details.
It didn't turn out to be much of a problem in my case, the only change they wanted which I wasn't totally happy with was the removal of code to track where it's spread to. Financially this is no problem as it was distributed without ads (which I was happy with) but it would have been nice to watch it spread and have some idea of how many people are actually playing my game. Instead my only way to monitor it is googling and hoping for pages that list number of hits, or checking the online score system for one section of the game.
I'd also have loved to include some tracking of how players moved through the options of the game. The game has two play modes but I'm fairly sure the second mode is ignored by the vast majority. Some numbers for that would be very interesting. Similarly, knowing some detail of when and where players click links to sponsor's pages. I added links not only to just the homepage, but to a "tips and tricks" page specifically for this game which I would be very interested in knowing the popularity of.
Keep in mind that small details can mean a reasonable difference in your total income from a game. Losing out on $100 of ad revenue isn't a huge deal, but it's quite likely that your top bidder was only offering $100 more than the next who might have handed the ad revenue straight to you.
That was a lot for a five word question!
Developer
