OK, whilst at Casuality 2008 in Amsterdam (more on this soon), I talked to the people at Reflexive and BFG who process game submissions to decide which games make it onto their site.

Reflexive put up about 5 games per week but are sent over 50! Terri Hardie at Reflexive told me that they get some really bad games submitted but she is always really excited to look for the gems that really shine out of the submissions. She does look at screenshots (so include links) and she appreciated nice polite emails (like mine – I’m English you see ;-)).

BFG put up a “game a day”, so 7 a week (for the mathematically challenged of you). They used to have two front line people evaluating the submissions, Jessica Sachs and Nate Webb, but now they have a 3rd person called Jeff (and probably even more) because they are getting so many submissions and find it hard to keep up.

I also spoke to some other people that worked at the portals and they said that they try to play every game which is published (even just for 10 minutes) to keep abreast of what the current games are like.

So what can we conclude from this? Basically only 10% (or less) of games sent to portals are actually put on the sites! This means that your game had really better shine out more than the others. Well actually it needs to be RELEVANT to the portal, so don’t sent “Zombie Killers 3” to BFG (although it might do OK on Reflexive). Then make sure it is polished and has enough content to compete with modern titles.

How can you find out how polish you game should be and how much content it needs? Simply play the current top 10 games on a variety of portals. It’s amazing how many people don’t follow this simple tip before embarking on programming “Killer Car Death Chase Vampire Shooter”…

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Game Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.