PBW Needs you!

[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.

[disabled]

When I tried to propose the idea of selling the UM2, people were dead set against me and condemned me and more.

Despite the fact the cash would go to fund SE.org's expansion and development and keep it running.

[Phoenix-D]

Hadrian, this is different; not only are they *not* requiring payment, not only are they defering contiuing operating costs instead of payment for work invested, UM2 is a *mod*, and PBW isn't. PBW doesn't have the specter of taking advantage of someone else's work that *any* mod sold will have.

Phoenix-D

[DavidG]

Originally posted by hochmeister:

Are you sure PBW would sink if a payment system is used?

IMHO Yes it would. (This opinion based on extremely little knowledge about these things ) Well perhaps not sink but I'm sure it would lose players and that can't be good. Hopefully they can get enough money to avoid having to put adds in. (My cheque is the mail )

[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

[Gandalph]

Stats show that in the Last month there were 481 Users on PBW. Multiply that times 12 months and you get 5,772 Users per year. If each of those Users paid a fee of $5.00 per year (an extremely small amount), then PBW would have an annual budget of $28,860 per year. As an IT pro (Network Admin), I can tell you that this should be a sufficient dollar figure to support this system. Obviously, the problem is that you don't see this scale of contribution. I say THAT is the sad thing. I have before, and will again, send money to PBW because it is THE WAY TO PLAY. If everyone else who played on PBW felt the same as me, this thread, and this conversation, would not be occuring.

[ September 09, 2002, 03:40: Message edited by: Gandalph ]

[geoschmo]

28K would cover it and then some.

However, your numbers there aren't quite right. 481 Users Last onth doesn't translate into 5000 Users a year, because those 481 Users will still be here next month.

We have been pretty steady at about 300 Users daily and 500 Users weekly for almost a year now.

Geoschmo

[Gandalph]

The point is still the same, if all Users contibuted a small amount, PBW would be covered.

[ September 09, 2002, 04:27: Message edited by: Gandalph ]

[dumbluck]

Originally posted by Gandalph:
The point is still the same, if all Users contibuted a small amount, PBW would be covered.

Yea, I think that was the general thrust of the "sales pitch" the topic starter was aiming for....

[Trajan]

The idea of micropayments comes to mind. I use an Online service (www.istockphoto.com) to get free-use images for my marketing/graphic projects. I basically pay them an upfront amount (say $10 U.S.) which is then applied to my account. Whenever I download a picture, $.25 U.S. is deducted from my account.

This works nicely, it is not painful, and I believe that the money is put to good use in supporting the service and creators of the images.

To brainstorm for just a moment before I go back to working --

If Joe Gameplayer establishes an account at PBW, and knows that to play one game will cost him say ten cents per turn for his first game and say 2.5 cents per turn for every game after the first, it would be a low-pain way to bring in a revenue stream. Now...would that stream be enough? I do not know. But it may help.

This model is based not on the number of players, but on the number of turns played. If the cost structure where a graduated system where the more you play the less it costs per turn, then there is an incentive to play more.

I am just thinking out loud, while I add some cash to my paypal account and see about getting it over to PBW.

Just a thought.

Cheers!
Trajan