Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Flash, Game development, Monetize and Reviews.

“How do I make my game better?” is the number one question Flash developers ask. Perhaps you’ve finished the game and think you’re done… but no sponsors are interested. Or perhaps you have a rough version of the game finished but have no idea how to turn it into a polished gem of a game. How do you improve your game?

First Impressions are the answer! We ask arbitrary users with wildly different gaming backgrounds to play your game for 5 minutes and give you their first impressions. They each write a paragraph of comments, along with some ratings on things like graphics quality and intuitiveness. Once you’ve gotten ten or twenty fresh opinions about your game, you’re bound to have a better idea of what to do next. And once you’ve made improvements, you can get more first impressions to see how people reacted to your changes.

First Impressions

With these words FlashGameLicense crew introduce their new service, called First Impressions (FI from now on).

If you don’t know what is FlashGameLicense (FGL from now on…), it’s a marketplace where Flash game developers and sponsor can meet. Read my review about it.

But now we are talking about the FI service. Basically, you are paying for people to play and review your game.

At this time, you may wonder why should you pay for a review when you can freely submit your game to a portal that allows people to review games and get reviews for free.

While it’s true that you could have some reviews at no cost, remember once your game is published, it’s not an unreleased game anymore… and this is important when you are looking for a sponsorship.

Also, most of the reviews people leave on portals are something like “Awesome! I enjoyed a lot! Thanx mate!” or “Boring. 2/5″… after playing your game for less than 30 seconds.

So, if you are looking to keep your game unreleased and have good quality reviews, you should consider purchasing the FI service.

Let’s make a test drive

You know I like to try and test everything… so I ordered 20 reviews for an one-week game that is about to be released.

Once you purchase your reviews, people start reviewing it very quickly… you will suffer the so-called “refresh syndrome” because you will find yourself reloading the page again and again just to see another review.

FI reviewers are paid to play and review, and this is the reason why reviews are always appropriate.

While I cannot show you all the reviews because most of them contain descriptions and spoilers about the game (that’s not already published), I want to show you a couple of screens where you will see how players reviewed the game.

I blurred off descriptions and comments

Only you can read these First Impressions and see the scores that reviewers give you. They are entirely private.

Final considerations

At $1 per review, it may seem a bit expensive, but you can fine-tune and polish a complex game with no more than 20 or 30 reviews, that will cost you less than a paid API integration or less than 100,000 plays if you will embed MochiAds ads.

So it’s definitively a good buy, expect an high return of investment from this feature.

To start ordering reviews and make your game better, just sign in to FlashGameLicense and you’re ready to make better games.