How to Make Money with a PBBG

[mobeamer]

Hey Folks,

I've got a game coming with lots of potential, I've thought up a number of ways to make money from the game, if you have tried any of the following please let me know how it has worked out for you. (And of course if you have any other ideas please shoot them out. (some of this may be summarizing other posts on this site, not all of these are "mine")

Background: This is an RPG game, utility management game. Let's say a user gets 1  pt every 1 min

Idea 1: User can purchase more action pts/turns/ticks.
The trick with this is that in order to maintain a balanced system, when one user buys pts. All users get points. IE: You are actually bying everyone in the game an extra 500 action points.
Alternativly, you could randomly give the purchaser and 10,20 or 30 other players the same amount of points.

Idea 2: Membership
Two types of Membership, a lifetime or a monthly. While monthly is more attractive to me, lifetime is more attractive to the player.

Membership gives you additional benefits that make the game easier to play. Maybe the ability to have a custom avatar or screen. You are allowed to buy items, units or equipment that functions in the same manner as a non-member item but it has a different image.

Idea 3: Special Items
Allow users to buy items/units/equipment that does special things or have special/higher stats. I go round and round about this one, as it has the potential to devastate the game balance. But everywhere that I read says that while the players grip about this feature, they will buy these items. This also seems to be the starting point where items in your game begin to have an external real world money value.

Idea 4: Earn Refuge
Most games give refuge to new players, they can't be attacked for 24 hours. A player could by refuge and not be attacked for a given number of hours. This has the potential to mess with game balance if a player is able to buy this for extended period of times.

I'd like to hear what your thoughts are about this...


FYI: This is posted on my blog as well. http://mobeamer.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-to-make-money-with-your-game-pbbg.html

[Hypemaster]

I dont like the idea of making payed people stronger, like get more action points regain or get better items, i will never implement something like that in my games. I more prefer the idea of premium membership wich give benifits wich doesent make the player stronger but makes the experience for that player better, for example a better map or longer move que, just to make that user game experience better and easyer without giving him any real or big advantage. You can also make premium only games etc. Think best way for income is this and advertisement. This is just my idea bout this.

[Advisador]

I focused on idea #1 initially, but added the ability to buy faster "action point regeneration" for a period of days (week and month).  This has been very popular with the players.  For numbers, we found that 2-3% of the active playerbase spend $1 per day.

The we started working on virtual goods.  Sort of like Idea #3, but more vanity oriented than practical.   You couldn't buy better weapons, but you could "own" a piece of real-estate in the game.  Owning gave you the ability to name your location.   This hasn't been as popular, but I really haven't had the time to tweak it effectively.

http://www.friendsandfoesstudios.com/toothandclaw

[mobeamer]

To: Hypemaster
I've come to the conclusion that any site that gets less than 5,000 pageviews a day is not going to make enough money to sustain the game from ad revenue.

I'd be interested to know how many pageviews your game gives and how much you get paid based on Ads. (If that is ok with you...PM me if you dont want the world to know)

Advisador
That is very encouraging to hear! That the point regen works for you.

[MystressNyx]

We do something a bit different for each of our games. It really depends on several factors such as whether the game is persistent or round based. Also, each community tends to determine what they will accept with a bit of griping and what they will actually leave over (regarding unbalancing).

We use #1 in Cypher, though when someone buys turns, all players get them. I would definitely suggest avoiding using a random giveaway as I think that would actually cause even more discontent given that some people are getting something for free while others are not.

We added #2 to Bordello Battles and cut our playerbase by 2/3 or so. lol Mind you, had we started out with the feature, it might have been different, but I don't think the game would have ever taken off like it did in that case. Granted, that was 9 years ago and times have changed. We've just found that paid memberships don't seem to work well with our games and will never go back to using them.

We use #3 in State of Crime and Galactic Lords Blue / Red. While they do certainly give advantages to the buying players, we put limits on the purchase amounts of each item based on its impact within the game. For instance, bullets on SOC are extremely valuable. You can buy them with points, but at a heavy cost and only in small quantities. It allows them to be a bit lazier (not having to click the purchase bullets button every X mins) while not giving them a substantial advantage. This model results in the highest income at this time.

We've never tried #4 and likely never would for the reasons listed. Very little chance of it not being seen as too valuable and unbalancing.

[codestryke]

I would just like to add a bit to what Nyx stated.

Personally for us when dealing with tokens or whatever you want to call them. We tend to give them away just as much as people buy them. We like to have contests with in the game chat for players to participate in to earn the tokens. What this has shown in the past is it pushes those who normally wouldn't buy them, they get them for free and enjoy the experience so they end up starting to buy them.

It also doesn't hurt the word of mouth advertising either, they get excited when they get stuff for free so they tell there friends about it

[Helderic]

A highly successful game I have been watching on Facebook called Mousehunt, which has like 200,000+ active users a month, allows players to donate money to get superbrie (the best cheese in the game), along with completeing offers for superbrie (offerpal?) and they recently released a toolbar which allows you to get free superbrie for using it's search function (freecause.org).

[FirePenguins]

I don't have any personal experience with paid benefits or memberships in my games, but from watching other games it seems like it's best if you can find a way so that paying players get a good benefit but the free players are not disadvantaged.  <-- Captain Obvious :p

Anyways a way to do this will be unique in every game.  Say something like players can either refer five friends to the game every week to get the best unit or just pay a $5 lifetime fee and get the best unit with no referrals.  Or paying players have no ads on their pages so they load faster and aren't as obnoxious.  A slightly more gameplay based membership would be a game with multiple ongoing rounds or servers.  Some would be open to any players with the basic features and others would be for paying players only and have a lot more game content.  This gives members benefits but doesn't let them own the free players because they can only use these benefits in the members rounds.

[AcidicOne]

One thing i've noticed especially in tribal wars is the premium members are able to adjust tool bars, there is also scripts to help automate things(within reason) of which i think the best feature from my experience was when you attacked someone, you could favorite the map location. aka you had a barbarian village you where not ready to capturing yet but wanted to farm its resources. after your initial attack, you could view your attack history and favorites and it would auto load the chords for you.Also keeping with tribal wars(its really the only browser game i've stuck with) was the "premium free trial" in which once a user reached a desired power rating the user was given a option to try a 7 day trial of premium membership to see what they where missing.

[Qwerty]

A good one is to let users pay to remove the adverts.

[Chris]

We use #1 in Cypher, though when someone buys turns, all players get them.

You mean, one player buys 10 turns and everyone in the whole game gets 10 turns? What if you have 100 players that buy 100 turns each, wouldn't this destroy the whole balance (since everyone would get tons of additional turns)?


As for Lords there are two options:
- monthly membership (improved interface and no adverts)
- 100 additional turns to buy per month

I also find an option to send donated virtual currency to other players very useful (there is quite a lot of people who buy for their clan mates/friends/family members).

[codestryke]

We limit the amount per day that can be purchased in total. Also helps too, some people don't like to be told something is sold out so they come back the next day early and buy them out before anyone else can

[Chris]

We limit the amount per day that can be purchased in total. Also helps too, some people don't like to be told something is sold out so they come back the next day early and buy them out before anyone else can

Oh, so there is 10000 turns per day to buy. When a player comes and buy 10 he gets 10 turns and there are 9990 left for others to buy that day. Correct? What if one player buy out all 10000?

You say the "sold out" threat makes them buy more total than "buy as much as you want"?

[codestryke]

We sell turns in sets of 100, every day there are 20 sets available so 2,000 turns are available for purchase each day.

As soon as those 20 sets are sold out if the player clicks the Buy Turns link they get a message like "Sorry the turn purchases for today have been sold out". Once the clock hits midnight of said day the fields are cleared in the DB and 20 more sets are available. So yes one person can (and they do) buy them all in one shot, hell some players wait till midnight and try to be the first person to buy out all the turns for that day

Well it's not a threat its the only way we can control the amount of turns put into the system for the given round to keep the game balanced. It also helps with money burn out with the players, allowing them to only spend a certain amount. Turns are the biggest resource so players sit in chat talk about buying turns or give out offers if I buy 5 will someone match me, or others will buy them and everyone gives out huge kudos. It does help build the community, at least from what we've seen.

It does limit the amount of money we can make from the game but for us it's worked out quite well for this game.

[Chris]

"You can now purchase 100 turns for $2.50! The kicker is ALL players will receive the 100 turns! "

How exatly it works:
1) You get 100 turns, other players get 100 turns.
OR
2) You get 100 turns, all players (you too) get 100 turns (so you get 100+100=200 turns).

How many turns daily a player gets (assuming no one buys anything)?

So, you can get from Cypher $50*31 per month max, regardless of number of players? Wait... this will be more than I get from all my games summed together


I love crazy ideas like this one that works in reality

[MystressNyx]

All players get just the 100 turns, including the purchaser. Yes, that's the max we could earn. Sadly, no, we don't get nearly that. lol Players get 2 turns every 10 min tick so that is 288 turns every 24 hours.

[Chris]

So the only reward is the community praise and the wellbeing of everyone... Do you think that players do it because they are listed on the donation page? Or maybe more because they need these turns for themselves and don't care if someone else get them too?

Hmmm, 288 vs 2288 turns, sounds like if no one buys additional turns the community as a whole have a very slow paced gameplay I wonder if this would worked out if this were like 1:1 ratio...

[MystressNyx]

It's definitely the fact that they need them above all other reasons. We only added the list of buyers a few rounds back, though it did always announce the purchases in chat. Also, since there are factions, what benefits other members will benefit the faction as a whole.

As for the game pace, yes, it would be quite slow if they relied solely on system turns, but I always supplement as needed and frequently do partial turn matches as thanks for donations.