Reformation of BigFishGames Affiliate Program

Not long ago our dear  BigFishGames affiliate program has altered its system of working. In other words February 5, 2010 is the second birth of this well-known affiliate program. Today it is hard to say how all these alternations will reflect on BigFishGames’s affiliates, but some unpleasant surprises have already occurred. For example, all these crucial points were announced the day before by email. So if you do not check out your email regularly, on which your BigFishGames account is registered, you were out of touch with this news, until affiliate program cut off.

Let us sum up the main points of the reformation by affiliate program:

1. The old affiliate program Principal Network Partner and My Game Space were abolished and were substituted for the new affiliate program named BigFishGames Affiliate Program (BFGAP).
2. New affiliate program is not multilevel any more, i.e. recruited web-master is honorary now.
3. The part of users is shared, but BigFishGames’s users are still not available. See the diagram:
   
   • All users who bought the game more than a year ago and were active during the previous year, remained to be BigFishGames’ customers.
   • All users who bought games up to February 5, 2009 and were Inactive during the previous year, will be available for other affiliates and can be a referral according to the “last refer” system.
   • The affiliates will keep the users, who made their first purchase after February 5, 2009.
4. There is a new referral system – “last to refer”. According to this system, if your referrede user did no purchase during 90 days, he can be taken away by some other affiliate. But if you are the last who recruit this buyer and he bought a game, this user will be yours during the year and you will earn commission from every purchase he makes.
5. According to the new affiliate program the affiliate earn 70% commission from every purchase. The rate is high, of course, but you should remember that it is 70% from NetRevenue, i.e. from the profit on the sale, minus 42% royalty and for BigFishGames, minus taxes and so on and so forth. All in all, affiliate earns only 40,6% of Gross revenue.
6. New statistics and facts. The earned income statistics has changed. Now you are able to see your income graph during the day. However, there is no chance to observe income history. Today you can see also the statistics of your users.
   Affiliate program plans to create downloading and purchase game statistics (Games Reports). It helps you to keep an eye on games popularity. Also there are so-called Campaign Reports, which let you track the most popular links that lead you to the purchases with the help of sub-codes.
7. There were added new fields to XML-feed, such as: 9 new game genres, links to game video and to game flash banner.
8. Today the cookie afsrc  is not used any more to set some affiliate code, but tookie is used now.
   The features of affiliate links have been changed. To be able to work with the new system feature afcode=[afcode] is replaced by afcode=[afcode]&channel=affiliates&identifier=[afcode]
9. Consequently, Terms of Service have been altered, too. We advise you to acquaint yourself with it.