Forums » Everything else » A monetizing model

I've never created a game before. I've been doing web programming for years, and have skills with 3d graphics, motion graphics, print and web graphics, story writing, music songwriting/playing, and....imagination. I have wanted to build an old-school single player turn-based RPG using all these skills for as long as I can remember.

I have finally started down the path to make my game with impact, and things are going very well. I tend to talk about "my game" with friends, and I am often asked how I plan to make money on my game. My answer is "I don't know, I'm not worried about it".

Here's the thing: I plan on spending some years on this game. It's going to be as fun and amazing as I can possibly make it. My goal is for 200 hours of playing time (minimum speed run), and I hope it can be as addicting as other RPGs I've played in the past. So if I'm dedicating thousands of hours to this project, why not try to make some money to at least pay for my hosting costs? I've been thinking about this lately, and came up with a model I wanted to run by everyone.

Some factors:

- I don't want to charge people to play, because I would not try an online game if they wanted money up front.
- I hate advertisements (especially within game screens - they hinder a person's immersion level into a game and tend to make a game feel "cheap")
- I don't want to "beg" for donations
- I greatly dislike game models that monetize from selling in-game items or skills which provide an advantage to players (this feels like a cheat to me).
- I'm doing this because it interests me profoundly - I would like to make money, but I don't really care as long as I'm not losing money.

So, my thought was to make the game 100% free - you may play it for as long as you like, you don't need to enter ANY information in order to start a game. However, if you want to save your game, that requires a quick $2.99 or $3.99 expenditure. My plan was to put a "save" button in the HUD UI, but if clicked and a person hadn't paid for the game, they could quickly put in their billing/cc information, and in the process create an account which would allow them to access their last save point from any computer.

Of course it depends on the final quality of the game I produce, but does anyone have any thoughts as to whether this could be an effective model for monetizing a game?

thanks,
aaron

I think it's certainly an interesting model to experiment with. Ultimately, web games have only three payment models:

1. Ads
2. Charging for content of some kind (be it actual content or specific items perhaps with game-breaking consequences)
3. Charging for some service that the user does not have to use but that would potentially make their life easier if they did.

You're looking at the last one, and I think it can work, but I think you need to be very careful about the price, and more importantly to have enough content to encourage people to actually need to be able to save their position.

I'm not sure you'll make vast amounts of money out of it (I hope you do, though) but I'm sure you'll be able to cover your hosting costs if you implement it well.

Arantor,

I would certainly want to be within the third option in your payment model list. Monetizing a game is 100% new territory for me (hell, making a game is).

My entire goal is to make this game as fun and immersive as possible.... I want to make it so fun that people lose jobs, flunk out of college, and get divorced because of it ;) I also have no idea who my target audience would be for this type of game. It's pretty much targeted towards me, and I'm pretty weird (anyone remember Dragon Warrior? Anyone????).

I agree that price would be a major factor, and I also think that "trust" is a big factor anytime you accept payments online - or at least I tend to only share my money with websites that seem reputable. To both of those ends, I planned on having a forum which (I think) would show that other people were playing the game, enjoyed it, and had no problems with a quick, inexpensive one-time credit card payment.


thanks,
aaron

@monkeyArms
Such a simple idea and dammit I hadn't thought of that. A one-time charge for saves. So simple it shines.

In the past I've done a game for free an essentially "begged for donations". It did work fairly well because of the great community that the game created but it wasn't ideal for actually making any kind of real money. For the next go around I plan to monetize with an in-game item store which would sell customization options and other conveniences. Nothing would actually effect game play.

Along the lines of your "charging to save" idea my thought was to offer multiple characters as a pay-for upgrade. Like any other big MMO you are allow to have multiple characters. Free version would only let you maintain one per account but an upgrade could let you have more.

"Freemium" games is a crazy popular format these days... although annoying its a model that works very well ( http://blog.flurry.com/bid/67748/Consumers-Spend-Average-of-14-per-Transaction-in-iOS-and-Android-Freemium-Games. This all depends on the type of game you are making because it doesn't fit for everything.

Quote from Graphikos
In the past I've done a game for free an essentially "begged for donations". It did work fairly well because of the great community that the game created but it was ideal for actually making any kind of real money.

Sounds interesting - is the game still online?

Quote from Graphikos
"Freemium" games is a crazy popular format these days... although annoying its a model that works very well ( http://blog.flurry.com/bid/67748/Consumers-Spend-Average-of-14-per-Transaction-in-iOS-and-Android-Freemium-Games. This all depends on the type of game you are making because it doesn't fit for everything.

I guess my idea could perhaps fall within the "Freemium" model - it's basically feature limiting.

The game isn't online anymore however I've been redoing it in Impact. Hope to relaunch in a couple months or so.

Charging for letting players save game state is a brilliant idea. As @alexandre said, why hasn't anyone thought of that before?

If you want to charge for saving or for in-game items with minimal interruption to game flow and minimal development effort, take a look at Google's in-app payments:

http://code.google.com/apis/inapppayments/

(Disclosure: I work at Google, but not with this product. I intend to use in-app payments for the game I'm developing in my spare time, but I haven't used it yet.)

Martin

As @alexandre said, why hasn't anyone thought of that before?

I hadn't thought of that but I wouldn't want to generalize and infer that others hadn't either.

By the way, does the Google in-app payments service include RESTful validation of a running app for payment made at some time in the past?

For example:
- day 1: user decides to opt for game state saving for a one-time fee of 0.50$
- day 2, 3, ...: whenever app is run and saving of state required, app contacts google servers for validation of past payment made. Server replies yes. State is saved.

I should rephrase and simplify.

How does a running app validate with google that payment has already been made?

Quote from alexandre
I should rephrase and simplify.

How does a running app validate with google that payment has already been made?

Assuming you're referring to 'how do I establish that a user has previously paid for x benefit', you don't. Doing such a thing is an unnecessary burden on Google's (or any other payment processor's) part.

Instead once you get validation that the payment has been made, you store that yourself somewhere, either in the app's own storage areas or on a server under your control and you check that.

That makes sense. Thanks.

Sorry, I was away from the forums for a couple of days. Arantor is right (as usual).

I had the same idea actually, but now that I think about it I'm not sure if the user is in the right state of mind to pay for anything when the user wants to save.

Think about this scenario:
The player has played your game for 10-15 minutes, but he has decided to exit the game for some reason. When he presses thet "Save" button and is prompted to supply his credit card info, you just might have lost a customer. He is inconvenienced when all he wants to do is to leave the game.

I think you'd do better to try to sell the player the rest of your game just as he meets the first boss of the game, or he learns a cool new ability he can't wait to try out.

I'm not saying that paying for saving can't work, just that you have to be careful how you present it to the player/customer. Maybe it would be easier to do if you for example have "Save points" around the world. Players are accustomed to them and tend to use them just because they are few and far between, not necessarily because he wants to quit, and then you hit him with the sales pitch. Throw in a free "heal to maximum health and mana" too, and the player will even get some additional value out of it.

i think charging for saving ( or saving points ) is difficult. people are more accustomed to getting something more tangible in return ( like coins which you can use to buy more weapons, or unlocked levels ). however, do try it out and report back, we're interested!

Depending on the type of game, how about a one-time fee to enable spawn points?

Save game could be free, but if you don't pay the 99¢, you have to go back to the beginning of the game each time you die, and you likely can't win or see all the levels that way.

This encourages payment only if you are enjoying the game enough that you want to see the rest of the game, while never setting up any artificial limits like locked levels.

Interesting idea, stahlman. Seems fair in one-player games, and comes in right when things start getting hairy, e.g., "tired of restarting, buy unlimited lifetime spawn points for 0.99$". Doesn't seem too tacky to me. You might want to add a bonus to further motivate, like "10% lifelong discount at all in-game shops" (though that last bit may be too much).

@alexandre the 10% lifelong discount seems to be a offering that should be seperated.

if it was "buy unlimited lives" then it would stand strong by itself ( i think )

Interesting article:
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20120309/10571518053/valves-comprehensive-strategy-shows-how-to-go-fee-to-free-increase-revenue-twelve-fold.shtml

We dealt with the pay to win concern in a few ways. The first was to make items involve tradeoffs, so there's no clear winner between two items. But by far the biggest thing we did to change this perception was to make all the items that change the game free. You can get them from item drops, or from the crafting system. It might be a little easier to buy them in the store, but you can get them without paying. The only items we sell exclusive to the store are cosmetic or items optional to gameplay.

Another opinion-bender, yes, but I think a prerequisite of such success is the gathering of a sufficiently large fan-set, by "being awesome" like the write indicates. Multiplying revenues twelve-fold is great when you've got millions of fans, not so when your game doesn't (12 times nothing is nothing).

So, if one of the pillars of success is awesomeness, what is the key to that? I've read of 2 different schools of thought: listen to your fans and give them what they want, and listen to your fans and give them what they really need. I prefer the second approach, but that remains a big challenge for me: how do you distinguish the needed from the wanted.

Anyway, very interesting article. Thanks for sharing.