html5 Greetings from Famobi

[Famobi]

Hi everyone,

 

Famobi has been around for more than two years already, but somehow we haven’t actively  taken part in this wonderful forum during this period.

Many of you know us already and have published their wonderful games in our network. So first of all we want to say THANK YOU!

 

Thank you for the fantastic games you create, thanks for making the HTML5 games industry the next big thing and thanks for just being really great people. After all you and your games are our daily business. And we have lots of fun with them. But even more important, our clients love them. We have spread your games to many portals, companies and brands and gave them the attention they deserve.

 

Since your games have been the foundation of our company and its ongoing success, it’s only fair that we share with you our current state and upcoming projects.

 

Of course we continue and steadily improve our daily work as a distributor of your games. We place them on all the biggest and most known portals around the globe. And new portals, big and small, are registering for an account at Famobi every day.

 

Another focus right now is Facebook Instant Games. Shortly we will begin placing games in the Facebook messenger. So if you have amazing high score games with a quick and easy gameplay, let us know anytime. One can never have enough of those

 

And in general, please continue to send us your games. There are no restrictions to genre or age. However we have a few requirements based on the needs of our clients and partners, that have proven to be crucial for maximum success.

 

The games must be:

 

• Full responsive. Games must work in portrait and landscape mode.

• Without text. No texts means anyone will understand your game regardless of language.

• Small. Preferrably the file size should not exceed 3 MB.

• Smooth performance. Even on lower-end devices. We test our games from iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S4 mini upwards.

 

These are a few examples of games that fulfill these requirements and that we really love:

 

Solitaire Classic

Street Race Fury

4 in a Row Classic

Bottle Flip Challenge

Mandala Coloring Book

Backgammon Classic

Kids Color Book 2

 

 

But before our post reaches the dimensions of a novel, let’s come to an end for now.

 

For all those who didn’t know or contact us yet, you can reach us anytime under these addresses:

 

Game submission:

Please use our submit form right here: https://famobi.com/#contact

 

General questions:

[email protected]

 

Purchase of games:

[email protected]

 

Thanks so much and let’s continue to shape the industry!

Cheers from the whole team!

[MyDailyCashMachine]

I came here to this topic to find out more about Famobi as well.

[Famobi]

Hi everyone.

@MyDailyCashMachine

Feel free to write us to one of the aforementioned mail addresses (probably best to info@). We will be happy to answer your questions.

@True Valhalla

I really appreciate your opinion. Criticism and suggestions are always welcome. And I definitely understand where you as a very successful developer are coming from.

But I wanted to reply and maybe clarify the things you mentioned.

We seem to both have the same reason to be in this business: making better games.The idea behind our company is spreading good games across the planet. Now I know that you are doing perfectly fine on your own and I find it very fascinating to read your various blogposts on your website. But not every developer has the means, the capacities or the experience to do the same. 

We don't just take games from developers and distribute them like that. What we actually do is run each game through our QA department and giving valuable feedback on optimization for different devices, performance, gameplay, etc. All based on our more than a decade long experience in this industry. Our goal is to help developers optimize their games and make them available to a broader audience. We take a lot of time and effort to give feedback and together with the developer make the best out of each game we're being submitted.

We're being very fair to our developers in every way and they all know how much we appreciate their games. And furthermore we are very transparent with basically everything.

We very frequently buy exclusive games from developers directly and we give out lots of developing jobs for these kinds of games.

And of course no developer is obligated to distribute their games through us and they are free to decide when to do it. E.g. a dev can sell or license his game to partners as direct deals, before he turns to us in order to reach websites or companies that he himself wouldn't be able to or that he simply doesn't know. We have partners where Famobi is the exclusive HTML5 games provider, so a dev wouldn't be able to place his game there on his own.

As I said, I completely understand your point of view based on the success and flourishing business you're running. But that's only a part of the industry and might not apply to everyone.

Anyways, I hope I could shed some light on this issue. I really appreciate the feedback here. And if this helps to get a better insight into what we're all doing, it can only be good.

Wishing everyone a great start of the week!

 

[OscarBraindeaD]

Hi all,

Do you accept games done using gamemaker and exported to html5?

Thank you.

Regards.

[Nulligma]

Famobi are nice people. They communicate and work professionally. 

I have sold many flash games. It had 2 licences Exclusive (Publisher have rights to distribute on internet) and non exclusive (Publisher cannot distribute on internet). These were crystal clear rules. 

Now I come new to HTML5 and sold one non exclusive to Famobi. Everything went nice and I told them the game is site-locked then they paid me for non exclusive. But after few months, my game is everywhere on the internet.

You say you have 10 years of experience but still you dont even know the difference between exclusive and non exclusive? Or are you purposely doing it? You could have bought exclusive and distributed it on internet. That would be few extra bucks for you but some developers are really poor and this is their living. 

I can only ask you to stop distributing my game on internet. And tell developers to beware of everyone on internet.

P.S Thanks @TrueValhalla for helping

[Famobi]

Hi everyone,

first of all thanks for the feedback. We would love to clarify the above mentioned issues here.

@Jacob Sam

In 2016 you started to publish our games as stand-alone apps, one game per app. This is not allowed and in August 2016 we contacted you to inform you about this. Three weeks later you still had our games in the app store, so we send you a second mail and advised you to remove our games from the app store. 

You started taking them down, but re-uploaded them only a few weeks later, although we told you several times it is not allowed. Even RIGHT NOW you are still publishing our games there. And under different accounts to disguise your actions. 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/text-twister-word-birdy/id843602911?mt=8

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/basketball-shooter-street/id1190168665?mt=8

https://itunes.apple.com/gd/app/text-twister-2/id1167692290?mt=8

https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/giana-mattos/id1175565732

All of the accounts you made lead back to you. Even in this forum here.

And while you were writing us more than just a few emails about your missing payment (with not legally generated revenue) for the last couple of days, you even added someone from a completely different company (another distributor/publisher) in CC while speaking about Famobi internal things. This is a very unusual business behaviour. And not something we would want to discuss in an open forum.

I hope this clarifies this issue a little bit for the people reading this.

@Nulligma

Hi there and thanks for the feedback as well. We're sorry you are not happy, but we think this needs some clarification as well.

The issue you mention is something that you had specifically talked about with our content team. After you mentioned a sitelock, we explained to you that the game would be part of the Famobi portfolio and available for publishers to use the game on their portals. And your exact words were "This works for me". 

We prepared a contract that you signed, which again states that your game will be offered in our affiliate network portfolio. You never contacted us after that saying you were not happy with the partnership. You even offered us a new game a little time later, but you didn't mention anything about not being happy with what we agreed upon for your first game. We are very sorry if you feel treated improperly, but we think we cleared everything up with you and told you exactly what we would do with your game beforehand.

You can write us anytime. We will always be eager to help. If there is something still up for discussion, please write to us anytime. We're looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks again, everyone, for your feedback and this wonderful forum.

Wishing all of you a great weekend,
Famobi

 

[Nulligma]

Yeah I know I signed the contract. I thought you were talking about uploading games to sister sites. Thats why I said I can only ask you to stop distributing game. That was a very rookie mistake on my half

I am new to HTML5 games and I didnt knew non exclusives doesnt mean same anymore.  

I just found out that my game is open on internet and I sent you mail about it too now. But since you are replying on this forum It would be nice that we talk openly so that no one makes a mistake like I did

I just want to know how would you define "non exclusive"?  And what more rights do you want for an exclusive licence? Because clearly if you start distributing our games on the internet with non exclusive licence, we will never be able to sell and exclusive license to anyone. 

[Famobi]

@Nulligma

The difference is pretty simple:

Exclusive means that all the rights of the game are passed on to us. We pay a much higher price for exclusive licenses, because the developer is not able to sell or license that particular game to any other third party anymore.

For a non-exclusive license we pay a lower price, because all the rights remain at the developer. We will distribute the game in our network, but you still can sell and license your game to whomever you want.

Would be awesome to have a monopoly on the HTML5 games market and control it all  But in reality, there are so many ways and possible customers to sell such a game to besides the portals we distributed it to. That's the good thing for developers like you when selling non-exclusive licenses. 

We really appreciate that you can admit having made a mistake there. We surely weren't trying to lure you into anything you didn't want. It seems as though it has been a misunderstanding of the contract terms from your side, and we're sorry that this happened. 

For now, we won't be able to remove the game from our portfolio since we paid for it. But should you be looking to sell exclusive or non-exclusive licenses to us in the future, we will be happy to very clearly discuss everything in detail beforehand.

Thanks for taking the time, Nulligma.

Famobi

 

[Nulligma]

So if I sell an Exclusive licence to you, I wont be able to sell  non-exclusive  to any other publisher even with a site-lock code embedded in it? 

And buying "all rights" do you mean even credits? That will be IP rights for the game.

Since your distribution network will be growing everyday. How do you buy non exclusive? for 20 sites? 100 sites?.. Non exclusive should restrict you from distributing where-ever you like and exclusive should give you a permission to freely distribute the game. You are buying a license from developer's made property, you should have restrictions unless you buy IP rights and do whatever you want from the game on the internet. I am not a lawyer but how is that we are giving license to our own property and we are loosing rights on it? This seems so bizarre and shady. Its like a hotel owner gives license to a customer to stay for 1 year and then customer restricts the hotel owner to stay at his own hotel!

If every publisher start to follow your practice then we would be able to sell only one  non-exclusive and the game is done for. Because why would next publisher would want to buy a non-exclusive if the game is already on the internet?

[Nulligma]

BTW i just saw that you were talking about Facebook Instant Games.  Will you be going to distribute my game in Facebook Instant games with the same non exclusive license? 

[mentuat]

14 hours ago, Jacob Sam said:

Im a publisher and i dont see Famobi paying my incomes since december...they do not reply back my emails... i do not trust Famobi at all!!! They own me 500 euros - [email protected].

Do not publish or sell your games to this site...My experience is the worst ever.

You are not a publisher - you are a thief

Looking at the various aliases that 'zapbooster' uses on the app store I've found several of my games you have stolen and uploaded - along with many others I can see from other devs here

you are the problem, not Famobi - stop stealing content and uploading them to the app stores

 

[Famobi]

Hey @Nulligma

I completely understand what you mean. And as I said, we're sorry that there seemed to be a misunderstanding. I think the confusion on your side was that you thought of us as a classic publisher. Famobi is a distributor. We aggregate games from many fantastic developers around the world and distribute their games through our network. You developed a cool game and we were happy to get the chance to distribute it. As you may remember, we ourselves put a lot of work and effort in it to make it really run properly and make it fully eligible for our catalogue.
Our aim is to focus on quality games, and yours was one of those that showed a lot of promise. We happily sat down and together with you optimized your game. We only do that with those games we really would love to distribute. Had we known that you would be uncomfortable with the deal we made, we would not have started distributing your game. We always aim to be as transparent as possible for anyone involved. That includes being completely open and honest. 

And please rest assured that we won't publish your game on Facebook. Now that we know you're uncomfortable with the situation, we won't actively publish your game to new channels.
JUST TO BE CLEAR: we don't distribute non-exclusive games to other channels at all. These will only be available in our Famobi games catalogue to regular publishers such as games portals.

1 hour ago, Nulligma said:

And buying "all rights" do you mean even credits? That will be IP rights for the game.

With an exclusive license, yes. The games become an exclusive Famobi product then. But of course this means that we will pay a reasonable price to the developer. We are not forcing anyone to sell or license anything to us. But we have only made very good experiences with both non-exclusive and exclusive licenses in the past. We appreciate good content and will happily support quality games (or better: quality developers) with adequate prices any day. We know that you developers are the main pillar of the industry, thusly we would not even dream of being dishonest to anyone. 

 

@mentuat

Thanks for the honest words. This forum is a good way of grouping all the good and wholehearted players of the industry together and help identifying the other ones...

Cheers everyone,
Famobi

[Jacob Sam]

My advise, sell non-exclusive titles to these sites famobi, gamepix,etc but publish your own games on appstore and google play. This is the most guarantee process.

do not sell exclusive games to these sites, do your own profit on them or resell for disney, samsung for bigger prices.

Easy to say all this stuff and hide that famobi waited for the zapbboster owner achieves 500 euros to lock his/her account down. They should have done this early. Famobi earned 100%. The correct term is to put the terms in the main page stating what is legal or illegal and then deactivate the account as soon as a mistake or thief whatever is done. My 50 cents.

[Famobi]

@Jacob Sam

You have already been revealed to be the owner of Zapbooster, thusly being the person we're talking about here. Please remember, you yourself already stated earlier under your Jacob Sam account that you are waiting for money to be paid by us and even publicly posted your mail address "zapbooster@...". So no need to hide behind a fake account we know belongs to you anyway.

As for the subject matter:
In the very first email that we received you asked us if it is allowed to use our games as stand-alone apps. And you received an answer with THESE EXACT words:

""...it is NOT allowed to create "single-game apps" with our games."

Now please tell me how this is open for discussion or misunderstandings? 

We did not shut down your account right from the first warning, because we don't work that way. If somebody makes a mistake or uses our games without authorization, we won't ban them immediately. People make mistakes, that's just the way it is. That's why we take the time and talk to them, making them aware that something is not right and giving them time to fix it. That's exactly what we did with you.

We're sorry that right now we still have to discuss this topic here when we already made everything perfectly clear in our mails to you without exposing this subject here in the forum. But if you keep posting about it and even with the means of fake accounts to discredit us, it leaves us no choice but to set things straight. 

We would rather end this issue here and now and let it be. I think we have come to a conclusion and there is no need to stretch this any further.

Thank you,

Famobi

[Jacobs Son]

I created an account on this forum to put an alert for everyone cooperating with Famobi. I'm a small website publisher and I'm waiting for Famobi to pay me 500 Euro, which I gathered. After sending my request to Famobi, the e-mails stopped coming as if they were trying to calm down everything. I don't know if Famobi is doing it intentionally, if there are thiefs or not, but it doesn't seem to be fair. I'll wait a month or so for the payment (for my money I've fairy earned). For today I can say, it's very difficult to get the payment from Famobi. I'll let you all know if I get the money from them. If they don't pay me my money, I'll be sure to put the information on forums to warn everybody intereted.

[Famobi]

22 hours ago, Jacobs Son said:

I created an account on this forum to put an alert for everyone cooperating with Famobi. I'm a small website publisher and I'm waiting for Famobi to pay me 500 Euro, which I gathered. After sending my request to Famobi, the e-mails stopped coming as if they were trying to calm down everything. I don't know if Famobi is doing it intentionally, if there are thiefs or not, but it doesn't seem to be fair. I'll wait a month or so for the payment (for my money I've fairy earned). For today I can say, it's very difficult to get the payment from Famobi. I'll let you all know if I get the money from them. If they don't pay me my money, I'll be sure to put the information on forums to warn everybody intereted.

Dear Jacobs Son,

first of all I'm not going to address the fact that your nick name is very similar to the one three posts above yours, whose only purpose was to somehow discredit Famobi after this particular person had stolen our games and used them as stand-alone apps, although we had strictly forbidden it when we were in direct contact with him. (Talking about thieves...) If a person intentionally betrays us, I believe everyone here will agree with us that this person will not get paid. By the way, we found out that this person has also uploaded our games to Amazon, as well as AGAIN uploaded them to Google Play. We're going to shut him down RIGHT NOW, just as a side note. Gamehouse games have also been stolen by this person... I'm sure it doesn't end there.

Second of all we have always and will always pay our developers as well as our publishers. You need to write us an invoice to enable us to pay out the money that you have earned. Please get in contact with our support team to get things sorted out, if you have used our games legally. 

Can you share some info where you have published the games?

Thank you,

Famobi

[Jacobs Son]

On 12/20/2018 at 9:59 AM, Famobi said:

Dear Jacobs Son,

first of all I'm not going to address the fact that your nick name is very similar to the one three posts above yours, whose only purpose was to somehow discredit Famobi after this particular person had stolen our games and used them as stand-alone apps, although we had strictly forbidden it when we were in direct contact with him. (Talking about thieves...) If a person intentionally betrays us, I believe everyone here will agree with us that this person will not get paid. By the way, we found out that this person has also uploaded our games to Amazon, as well as AGAIN uploaded them to Google Play. We're going to shut him down RIGHT NOW, just as a side note. Gamehouse games have also been stolen by this person... I'm sure it doesn't end there.

Second of all we have always and will always pay our developers as well as our publishers. You need to write us an invoice to enable us to pay out the money that you have earned. Please get in contact with our support team to get things sorted out, if you have used our games legally. 

Can you share some info where you have published the games?

Thank you,

Famobi

Dear Famobi! My nick has nothing to do to those 3 posts above. I just wanted to refer to it a little bit, because it’s in the same topic. I'm completely different person and I put your games to my site only, 100% according to your rules. I don't try to discredit Famobi, I'm only trying to write the truth for others. And I don't claim that you didn't pay me (we'll see about that soon), I'm claiming that getting the money I've earned is very difficult. I base my claim on not replying e-mails and stay silent, after I reclaim my money. It seems very strange and not fair that someone has to even think whether he will receive money or not. Especially after reading this on your FAQ page: “Then you can send us an invoice and we will pay you the money faster than you can say "Where's my mon...". “ It’s a little bit ridiculous.

[Famobi]

Dear Jacobs Son,

thanks for clearing that up. The user "Jacob Sam" was and still is basically a thief who continuously stole our games, published (and still publishes) them where he was strictly forbidden to do so and has the audacity to demand money from us. So naturally we are a little sensitive towards this criminal person.

Regarding your topic:

It might have been due to incorrect invoices, which we are not able to pay, unfortunately. But be sure that we always pay our partners. If I'm guessing correctly, your issue is already solved and we already had contact via mail. If not, please let me know anytime.

Best,

Lars from Famobi

[totoper]

famobi is not paying !!! they didn't pay me for 7 months and not answering me via emails i send to request payment ! 

over 1000 euro and over 10 mails and nothing !!! 

 

[totoper]

why are you not paying and not answering emails ?