There have been a lot of these contests popping up lately. Contests are a lot of fun and many have extremely tantalizing awards for the winners. If you have just made a great game (or plan on making one) you might be tempted to enter your game into a contest.

However, if one of your goals is to get a fair monetary value for your game, we would caution you to carefully look at the terms before entering.

Some contests have little or no ‘cost’ to enter. For example, entering your game into the weekly and monthly Kongregate competitions doesn’t limit you in any way. You don’t need to add any branding to your game. In fact, the only requirement is that you integrate their scoring API into your game, and upload your game to their site.

But then there are other contests that are not as lenient as Kongregate’s. These contests require you to give up your ’sponsorship’ in exchange for entering. They ask for exclusive branding and distribution of your game just for the ‘chance’ that you might win something. Personally we think this form of contest is a TERRIBLE idea from the viewpoint of the developer.

The reality of it being a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ idea is determined purely by the numbers.

If a contest is paying out $20,000 and 10 games enter… then it might not be so bad with the average price per game at $2000. And the odds of winning the contest are not too bad. Take that same contest and have 100 games enter… now the average price per game is $200. And even with a great game, the odds of winning are now greatly against you. Sure, there will be a few big winners but there will be a ton of great games that could have gotten a great sponsorship offer that then end up with NOTHING. We cringe when we read through the contest results and see a game that we know could have gotten $1000s in a sponsorship earn an incredible $0. And oftentimes the developer has completely lost all chances to make money off of the game since the contest also restricts the ability to sell non-exclusive licenses or use in-game advertising.