With the increase to 20 dollars, how about making special 'sale days'? Like, during Holidays, or something, or matching up with Black Friday/Cyber Monday reduced price, or something. Maybe on April Fool day, a yearly membership could cost 40 dollars.

Cyberlord84 wrote:

QUICK EVERYBODY, BUY YOUR MEMBERSHIPS BEFORE THE PRICES RAISE!

Already did!

I refuse to become a BYOND member, simply to make new hubs. Terrible idea, and by the way why don't you just chuck in ads and gain money from them instead of telling us that in order to make new games we must pay you however much membership costs. I bought membership once, I regretted doing it because I never had any benefits of it. I used to love BYOND because I could spend loads of my time programming and making games on it, and now I've just come back from dealing with business in my own life. Do NOT make creating new hubs require BYOND membership, or you will lose a great portion of your programmers of which refuse to pay for membership as you advertise BYOND being free to make your own games and play others'. Aswell as this, what Ganing previously mentioned, new hubs by those stupid money pestering BYOND members will be selling HUBs for amounts of money. Take my advice along with the examples of why I said it and shove those big money fines for creating new hubs back where the sun don't shine.

Not happy,
Simcra.

Oh and by the way, what the hell is Ramen?

Simcra wrote:

I refuse to become a BYOND member, simply to make new hubs. Terrible idea, and by the way why don't you just chuck in ads and gain money from them instead of telling us that in order to make new games we must pay you however much membership costs. I bought membership once, I regretted doing it because I never had any benefits of it. I used to love BYOND because I could spend loads of my time programming and making games on it, and now I've just come back from dealing with business in my own life. Do NOT make creating new hubs require BYOND membership, or you will lose a great portion of your programmers of which refuse to pay for membership as you advertise BYOND being free to make your own games and play others'.

Thank you for reading,
Simcra.

I think you should put your self in their shoes... They've created something for people to enjoy and have barely received anything back for doing so... You don't expect to go to work at your job tomorrow and not get paid for it, do you?

Simcra wrote:

Terrible idea, and by the way why don't you just chuck in ads and gain money from them instead of telling us that in order to make new games we must pay you however much membership costs.

- Ads are for free users who won't spend their money on a membership. Members already spent their money on the membership, so they don't need to see the ads.

I bought membership once, I regretted doing it because I never had any benefits of it.

- Well, now you do!

Do NOT make creating new hubs require BYOND membership, or you will lose a great portion of your programmers of which refuse to pay for membership as you advertise BYOND being free to make your own games and play others'.

- It seems we already don't have enough programmers committed to making anything notable. There's not much to lose there.



I don't think I can form an opinion about the new site until I've seen it in action myself. I'm looking forward to it, and I can't wait to explore it!

Well, there are other ways to advertise a game besides having a hub page for it.

Anything linked to a hub will appear in that hub's forum. I would also like users to start attaching hub entries to any posts they make about them, because that will keep the site much more organized (for hub owners, it's especially beneficial because those posts get crossposted to the main forums AND the hub forum).

Oasiscircle wrote:

@Simcra: The only developers you'll lose are ones that aren't doing work that's worth making hubs for.

that's a broad way of saying things and I wouldn't except someone like you to say something like that.

It is true that a lot of Narutard kids are on BYOND, but there is also a small percentage that aren't and could actually make a good game that isn't a rip.


The percentage of people who play BYOND who are over 18 is probably less then 10%, whether you like it or not and I'm sure a few of them could make a good game worth BYOND's time.

How about non-members can edit the hub, but not submit it, or is that already the system in place? I think it is, but what is the point of changing it so non members can't even edit? It describes the game and tell them what they need to know and what if they need to change the hub password!? I can list various reasons why someone would need to change their hub password.

How will this increase sales in memberships, how about the other countries that play this like Brazil? I'm sure even most of the adults their don't have a credit card, so what the hell? Tom didn't think this through, he just wanted to take away an important feature of BYOND and limit it to paid members.

Yusuke13 wrote:

The Narutard kids without access to their parents' credit cards are the problems with the site and community. Why accommodate them when you could accommodate potential developers that would contribute something WORTH HAVING!

Not all kids are "narutard" kids, why not give those 5% maybe even 10% a chance to make something good? That isn't Naruto?

Ganing wrote:

I can see it now... selling hubs to non-members for 10$ and making them the helper so basically it's theirs.

LMAO, I can see the same exact thing happening, some idiot with membership will just give the hus out for free or 5-10$.

This turned out longer than I intended. I'm not criticizing, just giving my honest evaluation of the situation:


Tom wrote:

There are some things we can do to encourage or even enforce usage of our sub system, but I don't really want to do that either.

Unfortunately, this mindset is exactly why BYOND hasn't been a profitable endeavor so far. You've had all sorts of success with the software and an exponential growth of users over the course of the past decade, but the business side of things has flopped because you seem to have a strong aversion to the idea of selling anything. The idea of a system like BYOND being supported by an enthusiastic and charitable user base is a nice thought, but in reality that type of thing never happens. Businesses are operated by offering a product for trade: value for value.

In order to make money off of something like this you need to A.) Have confidence that what you're offering is worth it, and B.) Insist on getting paid. That doesn't mean doing a hard sell and charging up front, or even charging for key features. What it means is making an equitable trade with people who are benefiting from the use of your software.

You can't take a passive approach to this: you need a strict policy of taking a cut of all subscription revenue from games created with BYOND, whether or not they choose to use your built-in subscription system (or even BYOND Keys). Either that or some sort of negotiated licensing fee for games that charge money. No exceptions. You'd need to be willing to enforce a policy like that in order for it to work.

BYOND can make a lot of money. Heck, with the size of your user base it should already be making a lot of money. The only thing lacking right now is your will to demand that money instead of apologizing for the very idea that you might need a bit of compensation to support your ongoing efforts.

If I were you, I'd divide and conquer and make membership absolutely critical to anyone who isn't just a casual and/or adolescent developer. Ex: only games created by members can host servers with more than 10 players online at once. That sort of thing wouldn't dissuade new developers from starting up, especially once they can see lots of big successful games created by paying members.

Knowing that you'll have to eventually pay for something to get the full experience doesn't scare people away. So long as your core functionality remains free, BYOND will still be considered free by onlookers. Look at every single article ever published about NEStalgia: it's always called a "free to play" game in spite of the fact that the paid option is presented front and center.

Anyway, that's my two cents. I picture you as someone who is sitting on a gold mine but going broke because you're morally opposed to using anything other than picks and shovels to get to it. A little bit of dynamite would go a long way.

@DarkCampainger: I think you'll like it. It's really easy to use and, most importantly, self-consistent.

@SilkWizard: I consider the hub to be a pretty valuable feature for the average developer, because it gets their game some exposure (and the new site structure only enforces that). So I hope that by asking for a rather small yearly amount, we can get a higher percentage of users on-board. I don't think there are really any other developer-oriented perks that will usurp this; eg, the number of devs that make a game that get more than 10 simulataneous users is probably smaller than the number that would benefit from a hub entry, and that's harder to enforce to boot.

The subscription cut is another issue because that is potentially a lot more lucrative (instead of $20/year we're talking possibly thousands). The main issue there is getting developers to agree, since currently they can workaround it with their own system. Sure, we could pull such games from the hub, but that's a bit counter to our goal since those are the rare games we actually want on the hub! What I am thinking of doing for the Flash version is limiting the use of guest accounts so that games will at least require BYOND keys (which we'll make more accessible as per item #2 in the software list there). By controlling the registration system, at least we can somewhat enforce the usage of subscriptions, because a game would be more reliant on the hub.

That said, if we can ramp up the player base and make enough off Memberships, I'll be perfectly happy using that as our only means of income. To be honest with you, running an "app store" comes with its own host of problems!