[geoschmo]

Originally posted by hochmeister:
I'm not a capitalist but why not a pricing system? I think you may charge a MINIMUM price for game to hold the whole thing. I repeat, MINIMUM. The question is hold on with PBW and NOT to enrich geoschmo .

Are you sure PBW would sink if a payment system is used? I think it's more a question what would that money be for.

Just a capitalist opinion.

Well, I have been up front with everybody where the money goes. I am not making up those numbers. And I haven't even tried to quantify the number of man hours that myself and all the other admins have put into it. All we are asking is that we not have to pay to run the server out if our pockets on top of putting all the hours into it that we do. I don't think that's an unreasonable request.

And it's a rock solid guarantee that payment system would not work. The fact is SEIV is a niche game. It's easy to forget sometimes because it is so addicting to those of us that play it that we can't imagine why anyone would want to play anything else. And the group of people that play Online against other humans is an even smaller sub niche of that.

If we were to take the number of regular Users and divide that by the cost to run it and start charging that amount a month as a subscription fee, yes many people would pay. But "many" is not enough. We'd have to have 100% participation. Anything less than 100% and we wouldn't make budget. And the next months costs would be the same, but the user base would be smaller, so we'd have to charge everybody more, and they would get less for it because of fewer people to play against. So naturally more people would drop out the next month, and the cycle would spiral down. In a very few months we would be gone.

Pay for play is simply not a realistic business model for a game with a user base this small.

Geoschmo