I need to contact someone at Oberon about a problem with one of our games that is currently distributed by them. * My contact doesn't seem to work at Oberon any longer. * I have filled out the contact form on the Oberon biz-dev website and received no reply. * An email to developers@oberon-media.com came back with an error message. Does anyone know how to contact them? If anyone from Oberon is reading this, please send me a message. Thanks!
Lol, my contact has left as well. I remember contacting them via email and telling them their web site was severally damaged and it took them a week to respond. A week of no sales?
It's amazingly hard to get reply from Oberon this days. Even if you get reply it doesn't mean they will do anything about it. Somehow they miscalculated my tax withholding rate (30% instead of 10%) and they are not able to fix it for 2 months or more. Their sales are not that great too, soooo I'm starting to wonder if it's worth to bother with them at all for future games.
I usually don't like to talk about this publicly but I still haven't swallow this... Oberon are not very nice to work with (to say the least). I consider them to be the worst partner ever. Their offer was already the worst from the planet and then they introduced this new condition where after 6 months you could kiss goodbye your royalties. Like from 25% they felt to 15% or something. Like WTF. I rather not do any bussiness with them that this kind of business. Let them die in peace, they deserve it. JC
It's not the only portal that tries that trick. I wonder why they don't learn from BFG? BFG gives highest royalties at the moment and seems to be the one that attracts most developers... and generates highest revenues. I'm sure that's not coincidence.
Such threads should be sticky, so new developers don't do the same mistakes I won't add anything since there's no need but even my limited experience with them through ZeroG wasn't really great (euphemism).
Not guaranteed to still work: Publishing: David Nixon, Director of Publishing: davidn at oberon-media dot com Distribution: Brian Peel, Producer, brainp at oberon-media dot com You could shoot an email to Jeremy Barwick and see if he has a better contact: Jeremy Barwick : jeremybarwick at yahoo dot com
My theory is that if a company does not avail itself to be contacted or have the common decency to reply, then they're probably not worth the effort anyway.
Oberon used to be OK. Not a great %, but lots of volume and also people who got back to you. Now no one gets back to me. A few months back Oz sales dropped by a factor of 100 due to hugely reduced downloads and I've asked 3 times why (politely). The replied once and said they were looking into it, but still no proper reply and it's been months. Disappointing.
Ha, worth knowing I guess. My general principal is to stay polite as it normally gets better results.
My game went up on Oberon 5 months ago. Every payment cycle I receive a royalty report. A nice BLANK royalty report, made up of an excel sheet with nothing on it. Every month I ask them about it and there is a new excuse ("This happens with new developers and it will fix itself in a few cycles","We entered in two IDs for your game, which messed things up","The person handling that doesn't work here anymore", etc). I managed to reach someone high up the chain and he told me that I'd finally get a proper report on the next payment cycle. I'm not holding my breath.
Berserker is right: Casual downloadable games = Big Fish Games About being dead... well I'd like to have a top10 game on BFG still
Well, I heard that for some genres the biggest source of income is Zylom (and not for niche game, but very popular one even on BFG). Also, iwin made probably 1/3rd of the money that made BFG for Soccer Cup Solitaire (though keep in mind it wasn't top seller, so numbers could be screwed). Can't say much about GH yet.
They wanted to get Totem Tribe Gold on their site but I rejected their offer since last time they screwed us big time. I will be more happy with smaller but steady incomde stream from our site selling it for $19.95, instead of throwing it out for peanuts on portals. Yeah, I might earn less, but screw big fish, that was a poor way of doing business and I don't want to be pushed again. For me it's not all about money. I want partners to treat me in a honest way.