Acceptance Guidelines

First, there are things that are absolutely going to hamper your acceptance. These are:

1. Requiring a connection to a third party site - Whether it is to register for multiplayer or to submit a high score, a requirement to connect to your website (and therefore leading people away from ours) is a major strike against accepting your game. If we like the game we may ask those features be removed in our version, but then it becomes a pain for you to rework your game, and more trouble for us to keep track of the fact the versions are different. My advice: Keep it in the game guys!
2. Gore, Excessive Violence, Language, Sex - Sex may sell on a porn site, but we run a family-friendly portal. Guns are ok, shooting things may be ok, limbs being torn off in a fountain of blood is not ok. Basically focus on keeping your game T for Teen or E for Everyone in rating.
3. Download Size - Download size is less of an issue than it used to be. There was a time when any game over 5 megs had serious sales problems. Currently we try to keep things under 40 megs for the demo, but we do occasionally distribute larger games. Still, the more you get over that 40mb mark the harder it will be to get a deal with portals. And don’t forget, even with people at home having broadband, the smaller the game the more likely it is to be downloaded, and therefore played and purchased.
4. In game branding - Sometimes developers get the great idea that they are going to place their own branding inside the game. To a limited degree this is ok, but all of that has to be hashed out. If you submit a final build and a portal sees that you are still branding your game heavily, we’re going to ask you to go back and remove it. It’s needless hassle for everyone and could create some animosity, which may impact your future dealings. Branding is really anything beyond your company logo. Some developers commonly place a splash screen with their company logo, but placing your website’s URL inside the game isn’t going to fly. Other portals are far more strict about this, so be up front with the portal and ask how much branding you’re allowed with specific examples of what you’d like to do. Communicate, it’s worth it.

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