You're right in saying that 2000 people paying $0.10 for a game represent more operating expense for Dantom and that a $200 game wouldn't garner many subscriptions. However, those are basically straw person arguments... I picked extreme ends of the spectrum because I'm given to hyperbole. The example holds equally true for 100 people spending $2 and 20 people spending $10. No one would charge $200 for a subscription (or if they did, their game would have no players, and thus wouldn't represent a loss or a profit for anybody).
As for the 2,000 people spending a dime... don't you think that the very fact of Dantom taking a cut will tend to drive up prices into more reasonable levels? It'll be a vicious (but good!) cycle, as more developers charge a realistic price for a quality product, other developers will see that they can get more money that way and follow suit.
You basically say that you don't want your quality games supporting the crap. Why not? The crap supports you. Free games aren't just resource sucks... they're free advertising for your quality, professional, pay-to-play game. "Come for DBZBVD123, stay for Tanks Professional Edition!" Free games suck resources out of the system because they suck people into it.
Now, there will always be free games. Dantom couldn't charge for the free games, there's no money in them. That's unfortunate, but there's no way around it. If we kill the free games, we kill BYOND. Do we have a choice but to support the free games? Well, as others have pointed out, we do. If we don't want to support BYOND, we can relinquish BYOND's support... by coding and/or publicizing outside BYOND.
Deadron wrote:
ACWraith wrote: Hopefully, my argument does make sense. I meant no offense to anyone and mentioned no names. My point was that the arguments supporting the percenatage plan in this thread (yes, I know you want Dantom to get money, Deadron) were often of the "whatever's fine with me" variety. It was not a slam. People don't want to hurt their friends. I didn't say it was a bad thing. It just does not provide a valid argument for that particular part of Dantom's funding. If my words are phrased crudely (which I hope they are not) then please understand that I am trying to represent people outside of BYOND who do not care about anyone here, including me. I beg of you to please read the full post. If the postion I argued does not hold then Dantom's decision will at least have been made after viewing more possibilities. If you refuse to read my posts on this subject and vocalize that fact then all those influenced by your senior presense on the forums may also not bother. (That's not to say that Dantom lacks the final say anyway.) The politics of the situation disgusts me as well. However, I would really appreciate it if you would instead tell me what strengths of the percentage plan in question I am missing and how the percentage plan avoids the weaknesses I mentioned. Thank you. PS: I was hoping for a slight chuckle from the racing stripes thing actually. ;) | |
ACWraith wrote:
I beg of you to please read the full post. I'll make an exception and read it, but don't expect to be persuasive while impugning the motives of people posting civilly in the discussion. You didn't say "they don't want to hurt Dantom's feelings" or "they are letting their personal feelings get in the way of seeing what will work here", you said they were trying to stay in Dantom's graces. This insults Dantom and the people posting, by implying that people fall out of Dantom's graces by disagreeing with them, and by implying that people posting supportive messages were doing anything other than being supportive because they happen to like the system or the people, or even Tom's proposal. There's no other way to read your message. | |
Maybe instead of charging percentages for everything, you could just put together and sell some kind of BYOND Developers Kit (BDK) or something. Sell that for whatever fee set or monthly, and have it provide all the support that people will ever need from BYOND. Of course, the software itself is always free, and so long as there are plenty of ways to use BYOND without needing the BDK, it's still considered Freeware.
But if someone wants to easy conveniences of having the BDK, then they'd have to pay a decent fee for it. (Note, BDK could include things like the blue book as well.) | |
Just remove the Guide, Reference, and Tutorials from the website and hold them for ransom. People will pay.
*runs off to make a copy of the reference* =P | |
Foomer wrote:
Maybe instead of charging percentages for everything, you could just put together and sell some kind of BYOND Developers Kit (BDK) or something. There isn't enough money to get from developers. And it's been made clear by person after person over time that they never would have tried the system if they saw a charge for the software itself in any way. | |
ACWraith wrote:
You might not gain anything for the merchant and storage fees, but you won't loose because of them either. If you're having financial troubles then cut the costs and don't offer those services for free. Our financial troubles have nothing to do with the merchant and storage fees. They are a negligeable part of our expenses. We could charge for all of these negligeable expenses and not come anywhere close to breaking even, much less making enough of an income to maintain this project with any amount of time committment. I don't know how may times I have to say this. Our expenses are due to the user base. Not the developer base. The user base by and large pays nothing. We could change this and start charging for the client. That would be a traditional business approach. We might make enough to survive there, but it would cost us most of our users and would severely limit the impact BYOND can have as an Internet presence. You keep talking about charging for the things that cost us money (scaling them to profit), while conveniently overlooking the biggest expense for us, which is keeping a free product out there. I haven't heard you once suggest that we should charge for keys or the client or any of that stuff, probably because it appalls you as a developer. As I mentioned before, the goal is to make, at minimum, $1/user/year. At that point, it doesn't matter how many users we have, because everything scales. Expenses do scale with the user base, but so does the income. Looking at our figures, if we took 50% of BD subscriptions, we would be close to meeting this goal. We'd have to give it a trial run for a few months to get a better gauge, but I am optimistic that it is a satisfactory model. At that point, we have resolved half the battle; the next step would be to increase the user base. However, it's NOT just the principal. I can leave and BYOND won't miss me. However, Dantom will go belly up with this precentage plan. Your precentage plan requires developers. Your percentage plan requires that there are developers who charge subscriptions. Your percentage plan requires that those subscriptions are high enough to cover their costs. Your percentage plan requires that those subscriptions are high enough to cover the games which can't recover their costs as well. Relying on developers to earn us an income is no different than relying on customers to buy your product. We offer the biggest incentive of all for people to sell their wares-- they can make money off them. Even in our minimalist economy we are getting enough of a percentage of sellers to almost sustain the income-per-user, if we take enough of a cut. I only expect things to rise from here. If it doesn't work out, we can go with a different model, but in my opinion this proposal is most likely to be best accepted by the masses since it doesn't introduce lots of costs. | |
ACWraith wrote:
*I* have not suggested anything that would make you money? I find this message extremely difficult to reply to. It is filled with mischaracterizations of other people's arguments, as well as of their motives. I'm not going to get into a debate about those things, but I'll try to find a concrete point to respond to. The small BYOND audience is supposedly willing to and capable of financially supporting every fangame, bad game, and game unable to regain it costs. People outside of BYOND are supposedly just as willing and capable. I'll try to cast this in terms I understand, in part from one of your other messages: You don't want to pay for various stuff other people are doing that you don't care about. That's fine, but has nothing to do with anything in this debate. It doesn't matter in the slightest what is done with the money you pay or help contribute. All that matters is whether enough value is provided that you are willing to contribute that share of money that comes into your game. If not enough value is there, then you won't. If enough value is there for you, then you will. Whether the money goes toward supporting bad games, or Tom's haircuts, or a jacuzzi is irrelevant. Dantom has to provide enough value to bring in money; the more value they provide of the right sort, the more money that can be attracted. A certain amount of that has to get sucked into costs, and whatever is left over becomes profit. That profit might be re-invested into BYOND, might be distributed to people helping keep the system running, or might be used to pay for people (including Dantom) to work on the project full-time. Whether you approve of what the money is used for is irrelevant, and probably not a question you ask yourself when buying Grand Theft Auto or some other game. Your precentage plan requires developers. Your percentage plan requires that there are developers who charge subscriptions. Your percentage plan requires that those subscriptions are high enough to cover their costs. Your percentage plan requires that those subscriptions are high enough to cover the games which can't recover their costs as well. This paragraph is a good description of things. Yes, these things are required. Now to figure out how to make them happen. | |
Lesbian Assassin wrote:
You're right in saying that 2000 people paying $0.10 for a game represent more operating expense for Dantom and that a $200 game wouldn't garner many subscriptions. However, those are basically straw person arguments... I picked extreme ends of the spectrum because I'm given to hyperbole. The example holds equally true for 100 people spending $2 and 20 people spending $10. No one would charge $200 for a subscription (or if they did, their game would have no players, and thus wouldn't represent a loss or a profit for anybody). No. I don't think that Dantom taking a percentage cut will drive prices up to reasonable levels. I think a $0.10 subscription will cost $0.20. That will not cover their costs. Dantom cannot control the prices developers set. The vicious cycle comes when Dantom has a base cost per subscriber. They can raise and lower that base cost. You basically say that you don't want your quality games supporting the crap. Why not? The crap supports you. Free games aren't just resource sucks... they're free advertising for your quality, professional, pay-to-play game. "Come for DBZBVD123, stay for Tanks Professional Edition!" Free games suck resources out of the system because they suck people into it. No. That's not what I say. I admit I mentioned that some games may not be up to some people's standards and I have no illusions that my standards should hold for the community. However, merely bad games are not the problem and I believe I pointed that out. There can be good games which do not recover their costs either. No matter what the game, they use Dantom's resources without paying. If those games advertised outside of BYOND consistantly, bringing customers here, instead of on the hub then I would agree with your argument. However, the attention given to a single game on the hub decreases as the number of games on the hub increases. Only so many banners can be shown a day. Only so many links can be focused on in a listing. Now, there will always be free games. Dantom couldn't charge for the free games, there's no money in them. That's unfortunate, but there's no way around it. If we kill the free games, we kill BYOND. Do we have a choice but to support the free games? Well, as others have pointed out, we do. If we don't want to support BYOND, we can relinquish BYOND's support... by coding and/or publicizing outside BYOND. Supporting free games could be done without the percentage system. I argued about how an outsider would view supporting the competition, but it is the percentage system itself which is troublesome. (I also sway towards that outsider view, but I alone should not be a problem.) Dantom should not need to depend on arbitrary numbers. Dantom could use a set amount of money from each subscription to support free games. Whether or not an acceptable price could be reached seems to be a problem that needs investigating. *** You do realize that I'm not upset with you or Gughunter or anyone else supporting the opposing view, right? I admire you guys sticking with Dantom. I just wary of the percentage plan. I'm sorry if I made you feel otherwise. Also, I apologize if you reply and I don't respond. I am not dismissing you. I write slowly and Tom brought up information which may quite possibly make me shut the heck up after thanking him for providing it and mentioning any possible misunderstandings I had so he can gloat. ;) | |
And it's been made clear by person after person over time that they never would have tried the system if they saw a charge for the software itself in any way. I didn't say charge for the software, I said charge for extra services. | |
I've been trying my best to avoid jumping into this conversation, since I know my words will be picked apart, but I figure I might as well.
Anyway, if we're going for anything, these are the things that I would suggest: Pager: $12 yearly for all features, $6 yearly for basic features, free one-month trial. (Before this could be implemented, the pager needs to become the focus of a couple updates. AIM, ICQ, and MSN Instant Messenger are popular because they have lots more features than anyone would ever care to use. The BYOND Pager has very few features -- certainly nothing to warrant a $10 fee per year in its current state. People will just use another pager system.) Subscriptions: $25 for a license to make as many subscription-based entries under your key as you'd like. Donation-based subscriptions require no license. (Will cut down on spam and fraud, will still allow freeware or donationware games in the system, *and* is large enough to bring in a fair amount of money.) Banner Advertising: Preferred Status (10x weighting): $0.005 per clickthrough. Associate Status (1x weighting): free. (Clickthroughs are a much fairer way of charging for banner ads -- if your ad isn't followed, you don't get charged. This means that if other people start mooching off of the time your ad is visible, you won't be forced to pay the same amount for less time.) Technical Support: $10/year. (Have to move it out of beta first, though!) Hub Storage: $1 per year per MB, first 5 MB free. (Works for freeware one-shot-wonder folks. The more prolific freeware developers would still get bills, but I don't see that as really such a bad thing -- they're loading up the server.) Hub Forums: $1 per year. (Cheap and enough to bring in a tiny profit (the service certainly doesn't cost $1 per year).) Server Hosting Rates: $10/month for lowest service, $15/month for middle service, $20/month for highest service. (These are the same hosting plans you had before, albeit with far more realistic prices.) Transfer of BYONDimes through system: 10% of transfer. User Fee: 10% of any purchase. (Just like Goods and Services Tax. You want to buy a $5.00 game, you pay $5.50.) Associate Fee: 40% of income (calculated quarterly and sent as a bill -- NOT a cut of every transfer). (This seems about right. It's not the majority, and it's not negligible. Plus, earning $60/$100 seems like a lot more to the consumer than $50/$100.) I also think the BYOND currency should be dropped entirely, and the system changed to use U.S. dollars and cents. As much fun as the word "BYONDimes" is, it's a source of confusion and it makes things a lot more complicated than they need be. 20 BYONDimes sounds like way more than $2.00; plus it prevents you from charging prices that look like less, such as $1.99. I agree quite strongly with ACWraith about his payment-for-services-rendered argument. Just look at a bank -- they have a teller fee, deposit fees, monthly service charges, and fees to transfer money between accounts. They never take a set percentage of your money. It doesn't cost half of the money you're sending through the system to send money through the system -- if you're looking to finance other aspects, then you should separate those aspects and associate prices with them. The only things that people need to be able to use BYOND are copies of Dream Seeker, Dream Daemon, Dream Maker, and the Newbie Central forum -- keep those free, charge for anything else that you want to charge for. (I personally ascribe to the belief that the main BYOND forums should remain free. They're taxing on the server, yes, but without them people would be forced to rely on other websites, and since other BYOND websites aren't exactly the most common thing on the internet, people would lose interest in the system.) | |
The "negligeable part of our expenses" information is something I would have starred and underlined in the list I made. (Yes, that's a good thing.) Thank you for providing it. If I missed it before, then thank you for providing it again. Please understand that when a company says it can no longer afford to offer a service, the costs of that service are the first things to come to my mind. I don't find that unreasonable, but if you do then I apologize.
I also apologize if my statements against the percentage system overweighed my suggested solutions. You said you did not like selling the kit and I did not wish to pressure you on it. I did not mention that option before because I felt that a proprietary system would be easier to market if the initial kit was free (as the MS startup stuff supposedly goes). I am indeed in favor of charging for keys. I did make a post in an earlier thread stating that I thought a test key, useless for games outside of the local host, would be a good tool. However, charging for keys is good. Those options do not appall me. I might not be able to afford the kit right away, but I would respect the decision. I would not even mind being charged for my current two keys if necessary. You have numbers I do not. If the money scales the way you expect then congradulations. I don't feel comfortable being in on the experiment early, but I respect that you allow me an alternative. I have given you no money and you are not at all responsible for my personal welfare. None of this means I won't give your system a shot with my current game. I already have most of it done anyway. You also should not have to hear from me if I happen to do poorly. I consider myself warned of the risks of your business plan. Thank you for trying to listen. | |
Well, from how it seems, the greatest load from the users seems to be when they download the game off your servers. My suggestion, in order to cut down on the load (although NOT as an alternative to the 50% cut, only an addition to it) is to only add approved and paid for game/utilities onto the HUB for download. Everyone else is free to host their own program for others to download off of their computer. I don't know the inner machinations of BYOND, but shouldn't this cut down on the bandwith costs very much? Also, maybe a single program (and, for fairness to the newbies, a single developer's item in addition, possibly) hosted onto the HUB for free would be a good idea, so that those who are inable to pay for the hosting can put it up (once it's reviewed), and charge for it as a fund-raiser to get more space for their other projects. Of course, I think this is exactly what you had in mind, but I wasn't very clear on it.
| |
People will supposedly jump into deals with the mob. Well, there is historical precedent for it! I think there probably is still a fair case to be made for a service-charge-based model. However, I don't have the background information, nor the business expertise, nor the personal resistance to seeing the percentage model applied to my own games, nor the apprehension that the percentage model will ultimately harm BYOND, that might justify my further involvement in the debate. Thus, for the foreseeable future, I will limit my participation in the business model debate to making occasional smartass remarks. | |
> Subscriptions: $25 for a license to make as many subscription-based entries under your key as you'd like. Donation-based subscriptions require no license.
(Will cut down on spam and fraud, will still allow freeware or donationware games in the system, *and* is large enough to bring in a fair amount of money.) And as I've said many times, it gives developers an excuse to charge more for their games. If people know if cost you $25 to get the subscription setup, they'll understand why you're charging $1.50 instead of $0.50 (or whatever). It also forces people to make decent games before they sell them. If they make junk and try to sell it with no success, they just lost $25. So they either make a decent game, lose $25, or just keep the game free (which keeps players who like free games around.) > Banner Advertising: Preferred Status (10x weighting): $0.005 per clickthrough. I can see that as a potential nightmare, seeing how easy it is to repeatedly click the banner of a game belonging to someone you don't like. And we all know how good those DBZers are about clicking things repeatedly. > Hub Storage: $1 per year per MB, first 5 MB free. (Works for freeware one-shot-wonder folks. The more prolific freeware developers would still get bills, but I don't see that as really such a bad thing -- they're loading up the server.) It'd be simpler to just merge storage space and your own server in one. Having your own you.byond.com spot gives you somewhere to upload files and host your games at the same time. This is the type of things I'd meant when suggesting a BYOND Developers Kit. You could probably stick forums in there too, since they take up space. > Transfer of BYONDimes through system: 10% of transfer. As reasonable as it sounds, I'd hate to have it. It's downright annoying when you want to send $5 to a friend to subscribe to a game and they'd only get $4.50. > I also think the BYOND currency should be dropped entirely, and the system changed to use U.S. dollars and cents. As much fun as the word "BYONDimes" is, it's a source of confusion and it makes things a lot more complicated than they need be. 20 BYONDimes sounds like way more than $2.00; plus it prevents you from charging prices that look like less, such as $1.99. Some kind of PayPal type system would be ideal. > (I personally ascribe to the belief that the main BYOND forums should remain free. They're taxing on the server, yes, but without them people would be forced to rely on other websites, and since other BYOND websites aren't exactly the most common thing on the internet, people would lose interest in the system.) Anything that helps new people get "into" BYOND would want to remain free (assuming it's not printed). So all the tutorials and user-resources would be good to keep free, as would the forums. Can you imagine how annoyed people would be if they wanted to post some questions on the forum and got a "You must be subscribed to post here" message? "Hey, I thought BYOND was supposed to be free?" Anyway, those are my thoughts. | |
"Clickthrough", by definition, means following a banner's link and then purchasing something on the other side. =P
As reasonable as it sounds, I'd hate to have it. It's downright annoying when you want to send $5 to a friend to subscribe to a game and they'd only get $4.50. Actually, they'd get $5.00. You'd lose $5.50. =P | |
This has become a rather involved thread. I'm glad to hear people chipping in, and I don't take any personal offense to criticism of the proposals.
I want to clarify a bit about the BYOND income and expenses. I do not consider the various developer services to be significant expenses, simply because the number of developers is a relatively small percentage of our total user base. For instance, it makes very little difference whether we charge for game hub entries, banners, forums, and the like. If we really wanted to go that route, we would simply package up the software and sell it as a developer kit. That would most likely involve signing on with a game publisher and writing a new manual. It would be a totally different direction. For the time being, we have decided not to do this. The primary BYOND expense is simply accomodating the volume of users. The most direct expense is paying for the website and pager bandwidth. Since games are not hosted on our servers, this scales rather well, but it is by no means free. Right now we are spending about $500/month on various server expenses. If we scale our user base to the desired 100K, I project that this will be on the order of $2000/month. Since we are streamlining things and still making changes, it is hard to make an accurate estimate, but the exact figure isn't relevent to this discussion anyway. The point is that these things cost money. If they weren't, so many Internet companies wouldn't be going belly-up with their "business plans" of attracting as many users as possible. There is a much larger indirect expense, of course, one that is shared by all companies. We have to pay our employees. Right now, that's Dan and myself, but if we want BYOND to truly expand in the future, we'll have to grow in this department too. As you can see, my bottom-line income of $1/user/year doesn't give a heck of a lot of room for an employee budget when you factor in the machine expenses, but it'll do as a start. I am willing to try to find other work (Dan already has), but if I am going to continue to put in the hours required to maintain this project, I'm going to have to make some income out of it. If we can't get to a state where that is even possible, then we'll just undock BYOND from the central servers (or find a volunteer willing to take them over) and make the programs available on free mirror sites. I think that would be a real shame, because one of the neatest things about the software is that it has this tied-in community through the pager and hub, but that requires people and expenses to maintain. So how do we get that $1/user? My proposal is to take the simplest route possible and take it out of the place where the money actually exists-- game subscriptions. I'd much rather do this approach than introduce a dozen different fees for various operations. If we do want to have auxilliary fees, they'd have to apply to a large percentage of our audience in order to be worth anything. That's why I brought up the pager, but even in that case at least 5% or so would have to sign up, and developing it further is out of the question for now. It seems clear to me that the only way BYOND is really going to succeed is if someone develops a real hit game and we get in on the profits. If someone comes along with the next Tetris, everyone wins. We can piddle around with a multitude games with ten or fifteen subscriptions, but the real money is in the big hits. I suppose we could come up with a better "tax pyramid" to anticipate such a thing, but for now the 50% figure seems sensical to me. Will it drive away developers? Inevitably. But I think most amateur developers are more interested in creating a game than making money from it. They only start charging when they realize how easy it is to do so. May as well make a few bucks on the side, maybe it'll strike gold, that kind of thing. At that point, I think the 50% suddenly doesn't seem like such a big deal. One more thing: the proposal is to take 50% of all passport subscriptions and maybe 10% of PayDimes() transactions. There would be no other fees. So it wouldn't be like the bank that takes half of your money-- the dimes you put in are the dimes you take out. It would affect developers, who would then likely pass the costs onto their consumers by hiking up their game prices. But that needs to happen anyway. And I also agree with the notion that the BD terminology maybe contributing to "perceived dime inflation syndrome". We'll have to think about moving to the $ system. Too bad it's such a pain in the butt... sigh. | |
Tom wrote:
And I also agree with the notion that the BD terminology maybe contributing to "perceived dime inflation syndrome". We'll have to think about moving to the $ system. Too bad it's such a pain in the butt... sigh. Would it still use a special form of currency? I think if its just normal cash, then people arent going to spend as much. Youve got $10 worth of dimes, you'll spend it on a bunch of games. Youve got $10 you'll spend it on a bunch of stuff other then BYOND. Also, dude. Your making me feel guilty about having a 'non-profit' attitude towards BYOND... I want to help BYOND, but I dont want to charge for stuff... =P -DogMna | |
I don't know if your latest argument makes sense, because I stopped reading at this point.
I thought we were having a discussion. It appears you are involved in a name-calling contest (or a "casting aspersions" contest). I'll focus on people who can discuss the situation civilly.
(And assuming you are referring to me, I'll invite you to search the forums to find the many many many times I have offered critical comments to Dantom.)