If you can get people to pay you, why not? Making money is one sure-fire way to keep you going on a project.

I plan on "charging" in my game, Spelloria... but not just to anyone who wants to play. Rather, players will be able to pay for enhanced priveliges, conveniences, and even a few powers.

My approach goes like this: make the non-paying game fun, but not necessarily convenient. It's psychology... my theory is that if people have to pay to play a game, they might go ahead and pay, if they already have the money in place to do it. On the other hand, if they're allowed to play a game, but have a terrible time of it due to inconvenience (not unfairness or persecution, these things will just make people more stubborn), they'll go out of their way to remove the inconvenience.

In Spelloria, anyone's character is automatically saved upon logout. However... if you're not in a town or other safe area, anything you're carrying is left behind! Since major accomplishments in the game are largely measured materially, this can be a major drag. I plan on making an item (I'm veering between an "adventurer's journal", or some sort of lockbox) that lets you save equipment anywhere. The catch? This item won't be bought with ordinary in-game coins... it can only be bought with Dimes, at special Dime Stores. The price will probably be cheap, somewhere between 1-3 dimes... because it's an item that can be lost, traded, etc., not a permanent privelige.

Another item will be a Coat of Arms. If you buy a Coat of Arms, you can establish a family name for your character. Why is this important? Because when you die, your character is deleted, and unless you spent money on buying a Will, your money and equipment are lost. The Will transfers your property to your next character, but you have to buy a new Will each life. The Coat of Arms will be like a permanent version of the Will, except that again, it will cost Dimes instead of game money.

If I ever put in player houses, those, too, will be bought and paid for with Dimes rather than game money, and so will any special furnishings. Another idea I have for "dime items" are passports which will be needed to get to certain expansion areas.

The idea is that the game is the same game for paying and non-paying players... if I have dimes to spend, my character's going to require a little less maintenance... but I won't have better weapons or stats just because I have access to real world money. I'll still have to make the same in-game accomplishments to get a magical boomerang as any non-paying player.

I wouldn't handle any of these things with a subscription (except perhaps the Coat of Arms, since that "item" is external to your character, it's linked to a broader "account"), since what you're paying for is an actual literal item within the game. I might make passports expire after a certain (long) amount of time, but other than that, they'd be items. If you want your character to buy 20 passports and give them to your friends, you could do that. If someone else killed you in an allowable combat and took your passport, they could do that, as well.

Whether or not I would handle these things in a certain way is immaterial, however. Depending on your game world, setup, motif, conventions, paradigms (pair of dimes?), what have you, the way I'm doing things may or may not make any sense for your game world. You have to look at what you're doing, and ask yourself (and your teammates, if it's a group effort), "Does this make sense?"

Right now, the Dimes that arein circulation don't really change hands very often. The more quality games that charge money for features, though, the more people will use BYONDimes, and the more quality games will be able to afford to charge.

That's why no matter what pricing scheme you come up with, I recommend charging small amounts at first, and having flexible payments (like my game, with different items available for different price ranges... perhaps another game could have multiple levels of subscriptions... free or cheap accounts can only create one character, only explore the newbie area, not advance past level 3, whatever... full accounts can advance to any experience level, go anywhere they can physically reach, have multiple characters and backups, and of course, you can have intermediate levels of accounts between the two extremes.) Maybe there isn't anyone in BYOND right now who can or will pay $2 a month to play your game (that works out to $24 a year, after all), but if you put that option in, and have several "lesser" versions available, it gives consumers/players a goal to work for, and a motivation to work for it.

I'm sorry, but i really must step in here and express my opinion. I think it is stupid to charge real money for in game items. Think about games like Ultima Online. That is rediculous, the only way to get a house on Ultima Online now is to buy it off of someone with real money, that already owns one, because all of the land is full. I would never use REAL money to buy IN GAME items, it just sounds completely rediculous to me.

FIREking

p.s. No offense, just felt i needed to express my opinion.

I'm not offended.

Would you think it's ridiculous to have a game where players can pay a subscription fee to get special account priveliges, like enhanced saving, in-game discounts (10% off items bought with normal everyday gold pieces), the ability to start a clan, the ability to move freely to new areas, or have a character that doesn't permanently die? I don't think so... these would seem to be fairly standard "upgrades" from a free or test account, wouldn't they?

Now, it's all very well to have buyable upgrades to your account, but is there some way to represent any or all of these things "in game"? To make some sort of logical explanation for why some characters are able to go hither and yon while others are stuck hither? There had *$@! well better be, or I wouldn't put such features in my game. Luckily, there's an obvious solution: having items, little in-game tokens, to represent special account statuses. This solution is doubly attractive because it can save some time coding... rather than creating complex data variables, you can simply attach new behaviors to the items themselves. Form and function... what a deal!

The MUD Medievia, which has many onerous faults, had (when last I played it) a donation system whereby players who spent X amount of dollars supporting the game were given special items... these were not Magical Swords of Smiting, or Armors of Invincibility... the one I remember best is a magical pocket, which was sort of like a bag of holding x1000. It made life in the game a lot easier, without shortcircuiting the game in any way. You could carry an infinite supply of food and gear with it... but you still had to find the food and gear. Other donation items gave permanent stat increases, I think.

As far as the comparison to UO goes... you and I are talking about two completely different animals. In UO, houses are being bought or sold outside of the game, often in places like EBay or over message boards. That's got nothing to do with the game itself, except maybe the poor planning in making land both a finite resource and a permanent investment. The equivalent in Spelloria would be if someone posted a message saying, "Give me $5 and I'll give you my magic boomerang." Anybody can get a magic boomerang, who's willing to spend the time and the effort, so this would be pointless. Same thing with player houses, if I ever set them up... due to the unique "screen" set up in Spelloria, I can have as many houses held in abstract space as the server can hold, not just as many as there's available real estate. There will never be a situation where people are bidding real money on houses, because anybody can buy an identical house for the same amount of money the original builder paid.

Lesbian Assassin wrote:

As far as the comparison to UO goes... you and I are talking about two completely different animals. In UO, houses are being bought or sold outside of the game, often in places like EBay or over message boards.

EverQuest had a policy against allowing people to transfer characters to other servers. It was both a software hassle (their server setup being pretty sucky) an administrative hassle, and a balance problem, because ultra-rare items could become too common on some servers if everyone started transferring to the same servers and because all the players in the universe might descend on "popular" servers.

After years of player complaints (because growth would force server splits, and you'd end up separated from friends with no way to change your mind, etc), they implemented this policy:

You could change servers for some large amount of real money ($50 or $75 I think), and your objects wouldn't go with you. You would retain your level and your stats, but you'd have to get the objects again.

You can debate the ethics of charging...but for them it was basically "This has a big impact on us, but it's also very important to players...so if it's important enough for you to spend a bunch of money and offset the impact, then we'll do it for you".

Also the cost naturally prohibits trivial server-switching. You'll only do it if you really need to.

I will most likely let the non-paying user roam around free on the "Newbie Island" part of the game (It's a small island when your on the world map". And only paying users can take the ferries to the rest of the world. I will most likely charge like 5 BYONDimes a month for access to the ferries to go to most of the places. And maby charge BYONDimes in addition, if they want to take the ferry to a rare land.

I may add "Save Pads" that, instead of having logging-off do the saving, make it saves ONLY when they step on the pad, giving it that console RPG style I strive for ^_^

Ensya works on a very similar idea of money for "enhanced features". In Ensya, you convert Dimes into Credits at the Dime Exchange Program (DEP) building, and with those credits you can buy "effect gems", specialty books (blank ones with lots of pages), paint (for being a color you aren't normally allowed to be), and soon for copying books you've written (which you can also try to sell for more credits).

Effect gems are generally the most popular, and therefore are also the most expensive. No one is required to have thw ability to see through walls, to turn invisible, or to teleport across the map. It's not vital to the game, being as it's only a chat, to do these things. But it's fun regardless! And, anyone who's been there knows that walking from the starting island to the archive tower across the way is a paint in the butt on my 56k, but it's so much easier if you've got a recall gem (luminous sapphire) to just save your location there and return anytime.

Credits run cheap, 100 credits for each dime. That means for the price of registering games like Tanks, Snow Boarder or Runica you can practically buy out the store, since gems run from 5 to 200 credits, but most of them are at the lower end.

In my view, this is more like a way of contributing to a game you like whilst getting something out of it. It's more fun to put 5 dimes into a game and be the envy of everyone else for it than to just put 5 dimes in because.

Of course, if you really like the game and you want your on perminant place there to store your items (moving around with 20 gems, some people have noticed, is yet more of a pain), then you're free to dish out money to buy a private island with a small, medium, or large house, a tower, a keep, or even a castle ranging from 1000 to 12000 credits, depending how ridiculous you want to get :o)

Oh yeah, did I mention that incomming money tends to be one of the few motivational things that keeps me working on it? I'm sure Ensya would have died out for lack of interest if it hasn't been for people wanting nicer homes in the original. Incomming money gives you insperation to keep working on a project which can be vital if you want it to keep going or ever be completed!

FIREking wrote:

What about a game that generates money for it's users? You could charge money to play the game, and all of that money sits in an account. Then, each player can some how gain money through the game, coming from the game's source of income. Basically money is always moving in and out of the game.

For example(not a good one), a car game where players pay for each car with real money. Player A could sell Car B to Player C for real money, and so on.

You have to be Very Careful with anything that has players trading money...anything that is gambling is illegal, for example.

Also, players WILL find ways to cheat each other, etc, and that's a huge headache to deal with. I'd say Don't Go There.