OK, lets start from the begging - how much % from sales you will get in different affiliates and payment types:
Big Fish Games - 25 % from all sales plus additional 15% bonus if you will prove that you work only with BFG affiliate. In result you will get 40% from whole sales. BFG affiliate supports 3 types of payments: PayPal, check and wire transfer (min payout for wire transfer is $500). The interesting thing here is that BFG doesn't take any commission from all payments.
Reflexive Arcade - One of the biggest player in Casual Games affiliates. They offer 40% from whole sales always. Types of payments: PayPal, check and wire transfer ($20 is minimum for wire transfer). BUT they have commissions for Check ($5 for check sending) and Wire Transfer ($20). Also Reflexive Arcade takes from you some deductions, Processing Fees ($0.35+2.48%) - billing charges and 0.25 for each 1Gb traffic from downloads. In result we have a little bit les then 40% from whole sale in case if we have a good traffic conversion (at least 5% from downloaded games has been sold).
Arcade Town - they pay 35% from whole sales. In real they don't have theirs own billing system and they work by bmtmicro.net. All statistic information you also will look in bmtmicro.net. I didn't spend a lot of time to understand theirs system (it is too complicated) what why it so poor information about it.
Real Arcade - it is not very interesting for us. They work through CJ (Commission Junction). The goal of theirs affiliate program is to give $12 for each registered account from you (the main problem here is that you will get your money only if user will left his Card information on his account). They have another affiliate, but you can work with them with different conditions only if you have a huge portal with huge traffic.
This was a short description for biggest affiliates in game industry. They are very close to each other in some cases but below I will describe a main benefit of working with BFG affiliate.
Friends List
Friends List is the list of all users which left theirs email on BFG portal (after game downloads, on account creating and etc.). It mean that all people who buy through your site, or come back to BFG site after they downloaded a game from you and left theirs email will go to your Friends List and will be their FOREVER. You will have always (FOR LIFE) 25% (+15% additional as I describe above) rewards when somebody from your list will buy a game. It means that the goal of BFG affiliate is not JUST selling defined games but to attract more users to join your friend list - nobody else can offer such benefit. In all other affiliates you get only reward for games that you sell through your link or through downloaded from your site game and in this case a lot of users don't come back to you, they use publisher site and you don't have any rewards from it.
Some (approximate) statistics related to friends numbers and rewards from them in a month (only sales from current friends - not from new one):
Friends - Rewards
- 100 - $20
- 500 - $140
- 1000 - $350
- 4000 - $1500
Labels: affiliate, Arcade Town, bigfishgames, difference, Real Arcade, Reflexive Arcade