If I recall correctly from when this was brought up previously, there was a concern that users would buy a 1-month membership, create/update/submit their game hub, and then let their membership expire once they had what they wanted. This would effectively allow people to "game" the system so long as they stuck with one game for a couple of months at a time. If you factor in the ratio of overhead-verse-profit on these smaller transactions, it could actually result in a decrease in BYOND's revenue. One option to combat this would be to hide a user's hubs once their membership expires, but I think that would have a lot of collateral damage.

Deathguard wrote:

BYONDimes. Ceased to operate. Because the charge-back rate was so high.

As I already explained, memberships are not at all comparable to BYOND Dimes. Memberships in general are not microtransactions, as everyone keeps calling them, regardless of how much they cost.

It's not malicious scammers mostly, it's people taking daddy's credit card without asking, as I said before.

How are those people not malicious scammers?

It's pretty easy; Daddy notices a charge on his card, and then they just go "That charge doesn't look right to me, I'll complain." BYOND ended up making a loss.

And as I already explained, this is even more likely to happen when that charge is for $24.00 instead of $4.99, and when it happens on 24 dollars, BYOND loses even more money.

The fact you can't afford to buy 2 gift memberships and the fact BYOND doesn't offer very short, cheap memberships are tangentially related.

Those things are, in fact, quite directly related. I have personally denied 1 gift membership because there is no respectable time-period/pricing option. It is not only much more likely that people would gift memberships if they could afford more of them, but more likely that they would get themselves one to start with. A quick impulse buy for less than the price of lunch is much more likely than seeing the price for what could instead get you a great game on Steam, and seemingly wants a 1 year dedication or nothing.

@ATHK; just buy one of them a membership, if you're that eager to donate. They're not missing out on money, they're protecting the assets they have.

They are missing out on money, they aren't protecting their assets, and they seem to be admittedly going under. Every other online service in existence has a 1 month option (as their primary offer no less), all of those other services actually offer something in return for your payment, how does BYOND expect to get by charging ridiculously high amounts of money because they only offer long-term access to a complete lack of features?


Albro1 wrote:

Actually, he's completely right.

He is not right, and even if he were, attacking the community isn't proper behavior for a moderator.


Super Saiyan X wrote:

the execution would be flawed. Mostly due to it being micro-transactions, and the fees, if someone were to challenge it, would actually take money away from BYOND, this has been already explained countless times.

Not microtransactions. What fees? Scams are a bigger issue on bigger payments. You can "explain" your wrong opinions as many times as you want, it doesn't make them right.

The members who would buy low-costing memberships for short periods, would be those who think they can squeeze out 5 dollars out of their mother's or father's credit cards without being caught.

That is a ridiculously unfounded claim, and mostly irrelevant anyway.

They get caught. The transaction would be challenged. While such transactions and charge-backs might work without affecting Falacy's Strai Games subscriptions, it won't do any good for BYOND.

Saying that it would work for one application while not working for a nearly identical one is even more ridiculous than your previous claims, cheaper/short-term memberships would definitely be good for BYOND.


DarkCampainger wrote:

If I recall correctly from when this was brought up previously, there was a concern that users would buy a 1-month membership, create/update/submit their game hub, and then let their membership expire once they had what they wanted.

That should be a concern regardless of how long a membership lasts, but it is a problem with the way they handle hub management, not with actual membership terms/prices. Considering 99% of BYOND users are not developers, and 99% of members don't buy their memberships with the intention of making hubs, that should be completely irrelevant anyway.

Deathguard wrote:

They are completely comparable. BYONDimes and 1-month memberships. Similar purchase costs, the same method of purchase, the same inherent risks and flaws.

I'm pretty sure every single part of that is wrong. The prices were not similar, BYOND Dimes were literally in dime increments. The payment methods were most likely not similar either, aside from on the most basic level of going through PayPal. Most importantly, they do not have the same "risks and flaws", because they do not have the same application, which is the biggest and most important reason that they are not comparable.

From wikipedia Microtransactions:
"A micropayment is a financial transaction involving a very small sum of money and usually one that occurs online. PayPal defines a micropayment as a transaction of less than 12 USD"

Yes, "micropayments" are "small payments", woopty do? Microtransactions and micropayments are not the same word, and you have not been using the correct one if your intention was simply to redundantly imply that cheap memberships are cheap.

So an increased number of transaction fees, plus an increased number of charge-backs ( same percentage, higher volume of traffic, higher number. )

Assuming you maintain the 8% (lets just round up to 10%), that means out of every 10 payments, 1 would be lost. 10 payments at $5 each, minus an overestimated fee of $0.50 cents means $4.50 per payment. That's $45 total. Say that 1 scam comes in and you have to pay the fee, that means you lose the initial $5 plus a $20 fee. That still means you made a profit of $20 from those payments alone, which is almost 50% profit even after all the fees and a scammer loss. That $20 fee is also not guaranteed on all scams, and I would expect the scam rate of cheaper payments to be lower (as I have mentioned).

I'm not sure why you feel BYOND should balance financial risk and lower profit margins against you feeling like tossing them $5 now and then.

Because there would be no more financial risk, larger profit margins, and when the "you" in "you feeling like tossing them $5 now and then" applies to multiple people on a daily basis, that adds up to a lot of lost money.

If you feel memberships are so valueless, why are you so concerned about them being offered in ultimately more-expensive recurring installments?

They are worthless, which is a separate issue that needs fixing, but BYOND wants money, and this is how to get it. Regardless of all that, a 1 month option is standard, and it is a bit ridiculous that they don't offer one.

Actually, it is completely founded. During the period where BYOND offered a low-cost digital good ( BYONDimes ) the rate of charge-backs was notably and significantly higher than its rate under $18 yearly memberships ( around 8%, as I've said before. )

The fact (assuming it even is a fact) that more people filed scams against payments that were essentially just paying for fake currency with real currency, fake currency that was then spent in BYOND games that BYOND itself had no real control over, that doesn't make his ridiculous claims any more founded, if anything it just further supports the point that these systems aren't comparable, why dimes were shut down, and makes it more obvious how wrong his claims (and your agreement with them) are.

Paypal takes a fee when you use them for business transactions. Then you get charged another fee when someone revokes a payment.

I know this. I use PayPal. The "fee" all of you are referring to is an amount taken from the money made, it should not be considered a loss. If the payment is then filed as a scam by the buyer, that fee becomes completely irrelevant, and a completely different one is force payed to PayPal.

Listen to what people are telling you, please, and stop just disregarding it as being erroneous.

Take your own advice.

I just got done having a conversation with a handful of friends on a game of theirs, you just missed out on about 13 1-Month-Memberships.

I've done some quick calculations and browsing shopping sites, and this would amount to 3.2 months worth of Top Ramen(!), including shipping and VAT, but not including paypal's fee.

Shame on you, Tom, for missing out on 96 delicious, chicken-flavoured soups.

as Falacy has stated more than once, that more memberships would be bought and the likely hood of 5$ mattering to a parent even if "used without permission" is minimal at best."

The problem here is that the figures don't work out, and past figures show he's plain wrong about enough people's parents "not caring" and enough new purchases being made for it to balance into a profit.

Falacy saying it, unfortunately in this instance, doesn't mean it's true. His statement was factually inaccurate.

I'd rather go buy Arma2 or maybe an Xbox game at the current price rather then spend the money on a membership where all I get in return is 2 litte icons and the ability to make hubs.

This is your prerogative. Memberships are optional, and your simply being here and contributing is great for BYOND.

BYOND needs change and they're doing it completely wrong.

BYOND is the business here; it's decisions, even small changes, have potentially long-reaching impact on the future.
Rather than expecting BYOND to change on some allegorical 'evidence' ( I know some guys who'd buy memberships ) and some opinons - 'I think it'll make more money' - you really have to sell the idea using hard data.

Is there a parallel system somewhere being used? What does it turn over? How would our userbase react to it? ( And this doesn't just mean 'I think they'd like it,' or 'I asked 30 people and they'd like it,' )

In all honesty , most players would buy a 5$ membership just to say they have one. (Its what I would do ;])

I'd actually really like to see some legitimate figures on this.
It's very easy to say 'I'd buy a $5 membership' - but some people who say that won't want to or be able to buy such a thing.
I'd also like to point out that $24 a year is $2 a month. I find it difficult to believe that someone who can afford $5 a month can't wait 6 months, and then get themselves a year's membership for around 40% the cost.

I have no problem with this in principle. The main issue is that Membership currently gives you unlimited ability to create permanent hubs, so for most people the one-month would be the same thing as the one-year. If we had the hubs inaccessible when Membership lapsed, it'd work better, but I don't think many would appreciate that (and also we don't want the many good games becoming delisted over money).

What we need to do is rework the Membership perks so that the actual time period of operable Membership has value. For instance, when the Flash comes out we will probably make it so that Membership skips interstitial ads (or whatever we do there) and that seems like it'd have some value. We could offer a hub-based chat and a few other minor things. If everything associated with Membership only has value when the Membership is in use, then we can have arbitrary time-periods without any loss. I agree that, financially speaking, a $5 offering makes a lot of sense.

Yes, I've considered a small fee per hub instead of a catch-all Membership bonus. It does seem like it'd fit in with this scheme better, and would have the side-effect of letting us make certain hub types (like demos) freely creatable. Of course, existing Members would still get some free reign to create hubs (at least for some time) since many of them paid for the privilege already.

Tom wrote:

Yes, I've considered a small fee per hub instead of a catch-all Membership bonus. It does seem like it'd fit in with this scheme better, and would have the side-effect of letting us make certain hub types (like demos) freely creatable. Of course, existing Members would still get some free reign to create hubs (at least for some time) since many of them paid for the privilege already.

Why not both, for BMs you can make set # of hubs a day & for non-BMs $$ for each hub

Tom wrote:

What we need to do is rework the Membership perks so that the actual time period of operable Membership has value. For instance, when the Flash comes out we will probably make it so that Membership skips interstitial ads (or whatever we do there) and that seems like it'd have some value.

why dont you make a byond membership perk to receive the flash client. Or lets say if you run out of the byond membership the flash client part of byond locks up or something. That would be a good turning point since lots of people are looking forward to it and some people could pay for 1 month of byond membership to just test it out and see if its worth to buy the whole year for the flash.

What I meant to say is. When you buy a byond membership the flash tool in your Dream Maker unlocks and you can make games with it. When the membership runs out it locks up. You can still play games that are made with the flash client you just cant make them. Sorry if I was unclear in the last post. I like the standalone idea too since its sometimes a pain when you have to have byond to play the game or you have to update your byond to a certain version to play a certain game. That could also draw in professional companies to make games with byond since the build would now be an exe or something which could be ran without a needed tutorial or an attachment file to which it would state that byond is necessary.