Portal Royalty Errors

[Owen Thomas]

I recently received my monthly cheque from one of the main portals. Accompanying the cheque was the usual one-line statement, basically stating how many units had been sold and my royalty total. The numbers added up, so if this had been any other month, I would have just paid in the cheque and forgotten about it.

However, there was just one problem: shortly beforehand I had been in email contact with the head guy at the portal and he had mentioned in passing a totally different royalty figure, almost $800 larger. Naturally, I emailed him back and discovered that he and his accountant had BOTH made significant errors in calculating the number of units sold. It turned out that the cheque I had been sent was actually short by about $500, so a second cheque was promptly dispatched to me.

I won't mention the name of this particular portal as I don't believe there was any dishonesty intended. However, it does make me wonder just how many other royalty errors are going totally undetected each and every month, not just at this portal but at all similar portals that provide such inadequate sales summaries.

I can understand the privacy and commercial reasons why portals don't want to share their customers' full names and contact details, but surely they could supply at least some details of individual sales to allow us to double check their figures, even if it only amounted to the date, time and country of sale. Or perhaps they prefer to keep us in the dark...

[ManuelFLara]

These things are not any funny..

Or perhaps they prefer to keep us in the dark...
Obviously they prefer that. Otherwise they would have a private developer's are a displaying all sales data (without breaking their customers' privacy) in real time (only for the developer's own games, of course). I wonder if any portal has something like that.

[Fantus]

Isn't there a way for a portal to guarantee correct sales information? Like a third eTrust kind of party that put their stamp of honesty on the system?

Thinking about it, I doubt it can ever be 100% safe.

[joe]

Just a short note: I think if a portal (whether it is big or small) will cheat a developer with the royalities it can't survive in a long term. Because the game development scene is small and a bad reputation of a portal in the developer scene will cause that no one would do any business with them.

I fully trust all partners I'm working with, but if I'll find out someone is cheating me and the problem can't be solved by talking with each other I would never operate with him again.

[ggambett]

I wonder if any portal has something like that.
Reflexive does, and I think BigFish announced that for this month.

[James Gwertzman]

All of our distribution deals include an "audit" clause that gives us the right, once a year, to review all sales data. If we suspected significant discrepencies then we would exercise this right. You definitely need to be vigilent, however - databases generally report the right numbers, but anytime there is a human in the loop there is a chance for miscalculations or transcription errors.

[Gnatinator]

I've been wondering about this a lot recently. How would you really know if this is happening or not?

I guess you could always go the cas way and send out a log whenever someone registers their key. (Comparing it to the registered list that the portal gives you) :)

[Owen Thomas]

Just a short note: I think if a portal (whether it is big or small) will cheat a developer with the royalities it can't survive in a long term. Because the game development scene is small and a bad reputation of a portal in the developer scene will cause that no one would do any business with them.

I fully trust all partners I'm working with, but if I'll find out someone is cheating me and the problem can't be solved by talking with each other I would never operate with him again.

Once again, I must stress that I do not believe that this, or any other portal, is being deliberately dishonest. I'm sure they've all got far too sweet a deal already to risk blowing it by being caught cheating. Trust is not the issue.

However, we are all human and errors will inevitably occur. The problem is that at present there is simply no way to know if errors are being made. Without anyone independently checking their figures, mistakes could continue for years without ever being even suspected.

True, we could each pay for an accountant to go into the portals' offices and perform a full audit each year, but realistically, how many of us could afford to gamble that much money without any evidence whatsoever?

All we really need is to be told, say, the order reference number for each sale. Then at least we could place an occasional test order, just to see if it shows up on our statement at the end of the month.

[sphinx]

Owen : the same situation happened to me, Actually I got a royalty check even though I had no titles listed at 'the portal' site at that time (I used to have title there)!!!!!!!!

I do know and trust that portal site and it was a title name confliction but I am with you it is vital to give us more data.

[gpetersz]

I never sold any game, I am working on my first one (as I stated sometimes here) but this thing seems strange to me!

If you sell your game through a portal you do not have a login/passw to check YOUR individual sales (at least by number/country without further data) ANYTIME you want?

Sounds ilogical...

(I am inexperienced in this but well....)

[cliffski]

there are audit clauses but basically unless you rake in $3-4k a month from a portal is it ever going to be cost efficient to audit them? and how reliable is the auditor anyway? Like it or not, you are pretty much trusting the portal not to rip you off. Are the portals all dishonest? almost certainly not, but are some of them prone to accounting errors? quite possibly.
Personally I HATE not having direct control, and its even worse with retail, this is another reason I prefer to build my own sales directly without portal involvement.

[gpetersz]

Well, in this case we have to live with it as I see...

I didn't talk about a 3rd party auditor, but you as somebody who can
check anytime the sales statistics or something. If I got it right from the topic starter post one can check only at the end of the month from some portal generated report (what might be erronous).

For example I have an art gallery at epilogue, I could log in anytime (to change what it contains) and check the viewers statistics or the rating statistics (how my art got rated). Anytime.

[GameBoy]

Reflexive does, and I think BigFish announced that for this month.
Actually, it's a little unclear what BigFish has just announced. This is from their newsletter:

"Within 2 months we will be rolling out online reporting for developers where you can go in and see downloads sales and conversion rates (for your titles only) in real time. This way when your game launches you can watch the downloads increase and see the sales roll in!"

Does this mean that authors will be getting data on individual sales, or just have real-time access to the same sale totals already given?

[James C. Smith]

Just to clarify, Reflexive gives realtime data on individual sales but private customer data is hidden. Developers or affiliates can use this system to place an order and verify that the order they just places appears on the realtime report (they can match their order number even if the customer name is hidden). Of course you can also get summary reports that show things like totals sales per day or per month or all time. But if you really want to see each individual sale you can. This kind of thing is standard for a payment processor or DRM provider like Softwrap or something like that. But not many “game portals” pass data like this to the developers. Some of the ones that do have real time stats still don’t show individual sales so it really doesn’t help the developer audit the seller.

[gpetersz]

Ok. It's clear now.
It is totally understandable that a portal don't want to give away customer information (what is its power) but couldn't be a list
generated with individual sales where the customer is represented by an id (like:#16633278), a date, and the title bought?
It is not a big deal but if one could have an excel sheet with these information then calculations can be made easily and error numbers would be decreased greatly (I think).

(I am not an expert of this, I am just thinking loudly)

[ggambett]

@GameBoy : I know, that's the "I think" part :)

@gpetersz : Reflexive even shows part of the customer email, with the domain hidden (ggambett@something.com becomes ggambett@xxxxxx). This also helps during customer support (to know if a customer is really a customer). BTW, I don't work for Reflexive or anything like that, I just like them :)

[Nexic]

So far I've had to deal with 3 seperate accounting errors from different portals. I don't think they are trying to rip us off, I just think their accountants can't count.

I now always do everything in my power to check for these kinds of 'errors'

[Applewood]

I can't believe these sites don't supply a breakdown of all sales made, complete with any and all pertinent data they take from the customer (perhaps sans cc number). I've seen too much of this 'they're my customers' crap.

God, even in indieland the developers are getting shafted by the box-shifters. Just suspend your accounts until they agree to give you want you want and see what happens...

[luggage]

I wouldn't really want the email addresses anyway. If I was to add them to my newsletter or send them mail it would be a) illegal and b) very close to being spam.

[Applewood]

Same here. They're paranoid it seems to me. I don't want to start massaging these customers as I write games for a living - I'll have the portal do this sort of thing for me. I have a hard time seeing this as anything other than a complete disrespect for the people keeping their businesses alive.

What I would want is an accurate way to see who bought what when they mail me asking for a refund or to spend time helping them with a problem etc.

[Owen Thomas]

The saga continues...

The following month, the cheque didn't arrive at all. After waiting a couple of weeks, I emailed them and was told they had forgotten to post it. Then this month, I noticed yet another miscalculation in the royalties I was being paid, albeit a smaller one than before.

I've used registration services for about 11 years now. They take only 10% commission, yet manage to provide detailed accounts and have hardly ever miscalculated my payments. You have to wonder why the portals can't manage the same, especially considering how much more they charge us. This has been my first experimentation with selling through a portal and so far I have to say I'm very unimpressed.

[ggambett]

I think it's time to tell us who that portal is...

[Gnatinator]

I would also like to know who that portal is.

[Ricardo C]

Yes indeed... Spill, Owen ;) It's not defamation or libel if it's true, and you would be doing a service to your fellow indies by warning us about this particular company.

[Jim Buck]

How did you know there was another error? It was dumb luck that you found out about the first one.

[Owen Thomas]

How did you know there was another error?
In the last case, it was evident just from the sales totals that there had been a miscalculation in my royalties. The portal was quick to acknowledge their mistake as soon as I brought it to their attention. The problem, though, is that there is no way for me to tell if there have been other mistakes made which aren't visible in the totals.

I don't want to single out this particular portal for criticism as that would be rather missing the point. From what I can gather, they are far from the only portal to provide such minimal sales summaries. The exceptions, such as Reflexive, should be applauded. It's just a shame more haven't followed their example.

[Jack Norton]

I think it's VITAL for a portal to have a real-time check system similar to Reflexive one.
I wouldn't work anymore for any portal not having such system...

[picman]

Thanks for the discretion Owen, but...it was Big Fish Games.

We have historically been very accurate but in the last 3 months we are converting 240 games from Armadillo and Regnow to Trymedia and our first venture in runnning another portals game business. To complicate matters, our deal with iVillage (we run their game site) is we had to get 240 new builds from developers with new branding (no bfg url). So if any of you have experience with doing this process with just one game, imagnie, 240. At the same time we are migrating from a manual royalty reporting system to a completely automated system. ( a few of you may be privy to our first fiasco sending our reports electronically :o )

Anyhow....the good news is within a week (or two) we will be sending out login information to developer so they can query their sales. The inputs will be a date range and the output will be downloads, sales, and conversion rate for the date range, broken out by game. This is no small feat as we have data sources coming in from 2 differnet ecommerce vendors and downloads from all over.

We also have safegaurds in place now (comparing total sales in all individual reports to gross receipts form regnow and trymedia, and spot checking most of the reports until we get comfortable with the new system.)

Again, we never tried to be "secretive" just a matter of our history of being a marketing company not a transactions company, but now hopefully we are both.

I also am sure there will be a few minor issues between now and the point when we have 100% confidence in our new system, but hey...at least we are trying to improve :)

Best Regard -

Paul (the Big Fish) Thelen

[Owen Thomas]

The inputs will be a date range and the output will be downloads, sales, and conversion rate for the date range, broken out by game. Glad to hear that Paul. Just to clarify though, will you be giving data on individual sales (including order number and sale price), or just totals for the date range?

[picman]

Owen -
For now, just aggregate for the date range. Individual sales numbers would be tough as we aggregate sales from Regnow, Trymedia, paypal, check, and phone orders all coming in in a different format adn stored in a different way.

There is no reason we cannot get to this over time, but not in the first iteration. :(

Paul

[Pyabo]

...in the last 3 months we are converting 240 games...

Gee, I think I see your problem.

[Greg Squire]

...we are converting 240 games from Armadillo and Regnow to Trymedia...

So why the change? What does Trymedia give you that Armadillo and Regnow does not? Is this something done on your end? Or are you having to get new builds from all the developers (meaning each developer would have to own some Trymedia stuff)?

[ggambett]

They asked everyone for new builds. But we don't have to "own something from Trymedia", we just provide them a full unlocked version, or a version which interacts with Trymedia's SDK. Since we already had the Trymedia SDK because Trymedia publishes Betty's Beer Bar, we didn't need anything special, but I guess the SDK is free.

[picman]

We just get full unlocked versions from developer in 95% of the cases and we create the artwork, secure them, and create installers, thus the intense work load to do 240 of them. Each game has its own challenges and very few go 'smoothly'.

We switched to trymedia fro a number of reasons, the biggest being their affiliate control and reporting capabilites. We can create a single build using trymedia and then by inserting affiliate codes in the download URL we can:
1) Create Big Fish Games branded installer, wrapper and icons
2) iVillage branded installer, wrapper and icons
3) Generic branded installer, wrapper and icons
4) Offer the BFG toolbar as a opt-in during install or not at all
5) Much much more.

Then every affilaite code can be tracked for downloads sales and conversion rates independantly.

If we have a ad buy, we just call teh download via a different affilaite code int the download URL and track our exact return on investment.

The possiblities are very intriguing. I am very impressed with this capability in particular.

The other major improvement is security control. We were finding our builds on crack sites and even ebay...with trymedia's connected unlock system, this is virtually impossible.

Paul

[Jack Norton]

The other major improvement is security control. We were finding our builds on crack sites and even ebay...with trymedia's connected unlock system, this is virtually impossible.

Wow now that's very interesting :)

[Yuriy O]

I won't mention the name of this particular portal as I don't believe there was any dishonesty intended. However, it does make me wonder just how many other royalty errors are going totally undetected each and every month, not just at this portal but at all similar portals that provide such inadequate sales summaries.

I can understand the privacy and commercial reasons why portals don't want to share their customers' full names and contact details, but surely they could supply at least some details of individual sales to allow us to double check their figures, even if it only amounted to the date, time and country of sale. Or perhaps they prefer to keep us in the dark...

I have several portals that are giving us a lump sum and just a percentage of royalty, but not a detailed report with a corresponding sales price.

What we gonna do at the end of the year is run an audit.

[Tertsi]

The other major improvement is security control. We were finding our builds on crack sites and even ebay...with trymedia's connected unlock system, this is virtually impossible.

Interesting indeed. I researched this a couple of months ago and it seemed that their piracy protection system is very hard for the crackers to crack. I am not sure if any of them have even been able to crack a recent version of Trymedia's protection. I'd sure like to know how come. :)