Is It Worth Developing Good Games For the Web? 82
SlashSlasher writes "A friend of mine started up a Facebook MMORTG game called Realm of Empires with his buddies as a personal project. Over the last couple of years, I've seen it grow up from an idea into a thriving community. A lot of money and effort has been sunk into constant improvement. As a result, it has become one of the most polished and substantial applications I've seen on Facebook. It's been quite interesting seeing the action behind the scenes without being directly entangled. Normal gameplay is free but certain premium features do exist. Recently, after allowing an open beta of premium features, the users complained vehemently that they would have to pay to keep these special features. They went so far as to start a petition to stop them from charging for premium features. People are getting up in arms about features that can be bought for less than $3 a month. I know the project hasn't broken even yet, and more money is put into it every day. I had always assumed that developers would receive a chunk of the ad revenue they attract to Facebook; apparently I was wrong. Facebook only gives the developer a very small (and shrinking) piece of real estate to try and make money with. How are these people supposed to break even, let alone profit? What working business models exist for the small game developer? Are people just too spoiled by free, throw-away games to be a target market for anything significant? Are developers who want to make any money for their work forced to move to restrictive platforms like the iPhone or the console market? More details of their story are available at their blog."
The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Children often do not understand what is involved with making the game ("but XYZ does it for free!?")
This [youtube.com] should educate them.
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Wow, +1 Informative on a link to the don't-copy-that-floppy video, my life is now complete...
Re:The problem (Score:4, Funny)
Complete? But you still haven't caught those Duke boys...
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Re:The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Children often do not understand what is involved with making the game ("but XYZ does it for free!?")
Seems to me the children understand perfectly. If XYZ offers people a better value proposition, then people will go for XYZ.
Basic microeconomics says that production cost doesn't dictate price: what dictates price is what consumers are willing to pay. If you can't turn a profit under those conditions, get out of the game. If other people seem to be managing - work out why they can produce to that budget while you can't.
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Basic microeconomics says that production cost doesn't dictate price: what dictates price is what consumers are willing to pay.
I thought basic microeconomics said price depends on both. Equilibrium price is where the supply curve (amount willing to be produced for a unit price) intersects demand curve (amount willing to be purchased for a unit price).
So production costs matter. If suddenly every producer of an MMORPG had to pay a $5/mo/user tax, price *would* go up by some amount up to (and probably very close to) those $5, depending on what demand looked like at those prices.
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Equilibrium price is where the supply curve (amount willing to be produced for a unit price) intersects demand curve (amount willing to be purchased for a unit price).
And on the internet, the two shall never meet.
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I thought basic microeconomics said price depends on both.
True, but slightly less basic and less micro than mine :)
The equilibrium price comes into play when there is competition driving supply and demand. I suspect that demand for MMORPGs would drop off sharply with increasing prices. A MMORPG tax could therefore kill off the industry. In the absence of a tax, I suspect production costs can be pushed very low indeed (with outsourcing, community driven content, etc.)
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Actually, basic microeconomics says that supply and demand interact to dictate price, "what consumers are willing to pay" alone dictates price only in the case of a monopoly, where the producer is free to raise price as much as is beneficial without pressure from competition. In a situation of perfect competition, the market price of any product will be equal to the marginal cost of
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The bigger problem is that for children/teens, $3 is actually quite a lot, and most of them have no way of paying (can't have a credit card etc).
Even adults are wary of signing up to anything with a monthly fee, because then they actively have to go an cancel it rather than just not paying again if they don't want to.
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also children either don't have money or have no method of transfering it via the internet (no credit card unless their parents let them use it).
citation please?
according to this, [clickz.com] kids don't seem to have any trouble spending online. Also, my wife plays some of those games on myspace/facebook and she's 30, so I don't think that's the issue. She only plays the free versions though, because we have other things we'd rather spend the money on.
There are always going to be people who bitch about the price, they'll even sign petitions to make things free because it doesn't cost them anything to try (at least in the short run). But, if the value received
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape [wikipedia.org]
The Web != Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes it's worth developing games for the web. You can make a big pile of money and have loads of fun at the same time. Loads of people have.
But Facebook is not the web. It's Facebook. They're different. Maybe Facebook isn't such a good platform for rolling out premium 'pay for' games. But even that I'm not convinced about. People do pay for stuff in FB. I think it's more likely to be the case that people just don't like having things taken away. The lesson here is that Facebook users are motivated by a carrot rather than a stick.
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Get a different publisher? (Score:3)
If facebook is so bad LEAVE THEM.
Or preferably, go elsewhere as well.
Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm reminded of Ferry Halim [ferryhalim.com], who seems to produce small web-based games just to test out specific game mechanics. Some good games there, also some lousy ones.
People are cheap... (Score:2, Insightful)
People are getting upset that EVE Online will require SM 2.0 and later SM 3.0 will be required. They whine and cry on the forums, threatening to quit, when an upgrade to a compliant computer would only be ~500USD.
In the end I believe that the whiners will cave in and purchase the upgrade, probably for far more than 500USD.
Either stand firm, or go for ads, either way people will whine.
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Yes, $500 is pocket change, since clearly people can use their EVE-honed mad capitalizt skillz to make millions in real life. Kinda reminds me of this quote from the webcomic Jack: "Mr. Star is right! If we all work together we can take him. After all, he's only God."
Of course one might wonder why
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They whine and cry on the forums, threatening to quit, when an upgrade to a compliant computer would only be ~500USD.
Plus a new $189.99 copy of OEM Windows [newegg.com] for this computer. And how long will this $500 computer remain capable before it has to be replaced with yet another $500 computer?
Yes, it (Score:5, Insightful)
And one more thing - never, ever expect users to be grateful or pleased. I work for company developing and producing Web-based MMOs, and one thing I've learnt over years is - even if you'll hire hookers to give every male player in your project one head job - the only thing you'll listen from them is "why only once ?" - they are lazy, stupid and greedy.
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As for sunk costs - terms can be discussed , venture capital can be found, even now, if they're having idea and half-assed implementation - they'll get funding to replace facebook ties (what are they, anyway ? authori
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I think it's actually even worse: it's not that people are lazy, stupid and greedy. It's that people who play free games are lazy, stupid and greedy. I don't know where I read it, but there's an old saw in software support: if you charge them a million dollars a year, they'll email you once a month with a major bug. If you charge them a thousand dollars a year, they'll call you every day to tell you how much everything sucks, and that you are a horrible person.
I don't know what it is, but that's exactly how
Web != Facebook (Score:2)
Developing games for the web is totally different from developing games for facebook. I'd claim that I was surprised that the summary got this wrong, but hey. Slashdot.
IMO, charge for the damn features away, and tell people they were lucky to have tested them for free, at the same time rolling out the next set of free features to test. Over time, people will get used to the idea.
But you'll never be able to eliminate all the bitching from internet games. Even if you write games for fun, for free, as I do, pe
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That said, I just loaded up the game, and it's pretty amateurish. Clicking on a popup window for the tutorial clicks on the icon below it, and then the tutorial bitches at you for leaving the tutorial, and the link to continue turns into a back link, and you get stuck.
Well done, lads, well done.
Re:Web != Facebook (Score:4, Funny)
It's in beta. Did you file a bug report?
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Similar business models that work on the web for "free" stuff may work for Facebook as well. I'm not familiar with your game's specifics, but developers generally offer MMO's (especially ones from Korea breaking in overseas) for free to attract people, then offer premium content for an extra price (cooler equipment, avatar accessories, etc). They offer everything from traditional MMO-style fantasy games [nexon.net] to online virtual golf [ogplanet.com] with the same basic business model.
If all the coolest stuff is already free, it
There's a huge gulf between free and paying. (Score:5, Insightful)
Are people just too spoiled by free, throw-away games to be a target market for anything significant?
In a word - "Yes". There is a heap of free gaming to be had on the Web, never mind Facebook itself. Once you start getting into paid-for content, you undergo a fundamental shift in users' perceptions. It doesn't matter how small the subscription is, the idea of paying for content means that you expect a whole lot more in every aspect of service. Once people start paying, you (rightly or wrongly) are competing against the big names for their money.
Are they getting a significantly better experience in your gaming world than they can get for free in Runescape ? If not, you don't have a business model.
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I would like to add a small detail to the parent post.
First, of course it is worth doing a good game for the web. Your friend (yeah, as my friend who buys horse porn every Friday) should continue to offer their product and ignore the people who bitch about the game price.
There is always going to be people who do not want to pay (hence, warez). With online games, they can only play the for-free provided content or pay up and enjoy.
Of course, the success of your game will depend on how *good* it is.
The main i
Petitions... (Score:2, Interesting)
Petitions are generally not worth the paper they are written on. This stays true for Internet petitions, and platforms running on the Internet like FB. (Internet not on paper, you say? Exactly.)
I'd say, go for some good old capitalist principles: the developers need to eat (at least) - one can only put so much free time into something before it becomes uncomfortable and finally physically impossible to continue. It's good to have a hobby to spend time and money on, but that time and money has to come from
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I would consider other ways of making money - e.g. merchandise and obviously advertising. Also - you could try something like slashdot's subscriber service where you get to use the new features first, but eventually they're free - like the beta but in reverse!
WHo are your most important users (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course you may have a few more scruples and want to make a good game. I'd say stand firm, keep your premium rate content. The valuable users are those willing to pay, the rest who don't pay and then complain are not worth much time or energy.
As a result, it has become one of the most polishe (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm glad that you know the developer. Maybe if you could convince him to fix the tutorial so that it can progress properly (as opposed to getting stuck at 17%), I'd agree with your statement about it being "polished".
Also, I'm not likely to pay $3 (or 50c) to play a game that announces that it is a Beta.
Minor little things like that.
Your question remains valid though and I'm interested by the replies.
Don't build games for Facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
Facebook is not the place for the games existence, IMO. It is a gated community, for starters, so you're limiting the reach of your game, because it is not a "web-based game" - it is a Facebook-based game. Furthermore, it is obviously limiting your friends' ability to be rewarded for your efforts because they don't control the revenue stream surrounding the game.
IMO, the game should exist independently outside of Facebook, and the Facebook-app should be a way to get people interested in that game. In fact, I would say that the reason the players of the game are up in arms is primarily because they are not viewing it as a game in its own right, but because they're viewing it as a Facebook application, which in turn is making them think that your friends are already getting a revenue stream, so why should they have to pay for anything?
Kongregate is an excellent example of a web-based gaming community that seems to thrive. I haven't done a lot of digging into their numbers, but they appear to do quite well. For example, Desktop Tower Defence is estimated [gigaom.com] to be making around 100K per year (if his current rate of pageviews continues). Of course, that's quite rare, but it demonstrates that true web-based games can be successful. You could also try and get sponsorship from people like Armor Games or Crazy Monkey games (although that's mainly for Flash-based games).
If their gamem is proving to be a hit, and is proving to be successful, then it certainly seems that they should consider taking the plunge and launching a proper web-based version where they can control the methods of earning the money.
Note: I'm not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned, nor do I design games myself.
sort of agree, sort of disagree (Score:2)
I think there's a potential niche for Facebook games, but there really has to be some reason for them to be on Facebook--- not just using Facebook as a generic delivery platform. The ones that attract interest usually do something with the social network; things like Parking Wars [watercoolergames.org], among a number of examples. These are usually fairly lightweight games that try out some idea about how to turn social networks into game mechanics, not heavyweight games that just use the social network as an advertising tool.
Of
Need a decent model to deal with free users (Score:1)
After playing various browser based games it's fairly obvious that these sort of games need to try and get some sort of revenue from players who aren't willing to spend anything on upgrading their account. Whilst I'm sure the developers might not want to put adverts in their game, they might have to. Less than $5 a month could be considered insanely cheap, but I'm sure people in their minds already have the opinion that the game isn't worth spending money on. Look at the entire web, most of it is free an
Trouble with Transaction Costs... (Score:2)
As demonstrated by the amount of money people spend annually on things like vending machine candy and coffee, people are not actually averse to spending surprising amounts of money for minor indulgences. Based on that, you'd expect browser games to be a shoe-in.
However, those are situations where paying is made easy and natural, just part of the routine, not an interruption of it. On t
The question is (Score:5, Insightful)
is worth developing games at all.
In a world wracked with hunger, poverty, ignorance, and environmental catastrophe, is writing games what you ought to be spending your time on?
Oh, wait.
You want to know whether you can make money.
Well, it looks like your friend has learned the first lesson of business: most customers are unreasonable. You can't expect them to care about your problems, e.g., keeping a roof over your head and keeping a wolf from the door. Fuming over the unreasonability of customers is a waste of time, and time is money. If you can't keep yourself from doing this, you should consider the first question, above, because you aren't cut out for business.
A corollary of this is that failing to manage customer expectations is like losing track of that bottle of nitroglycerin that you know is on your desk somewhere. This means keeping a careful rein on your salesmen, including your inner salesman. Salesmen have one imperative: sell. When you're a one man band, it's easy to sell because you have control over prices. You simply whip up expectations to the greatest degree you can, then drop the price until the product moves. This can work, provided that you can take your profit up front. For many kinds of software, especially software sold as a service, this is dangerous, dangerous because most of the costs of supporting a sale are downstream.
Your friend kind of screwed up here, because he's got a service based revenue model and he expected customer expectations to be reasonable. That's OK, because another important lesson of business is this: you screw up just as much as anybody else. If you want to win, you've got to learn from your mistakes faster.
I knew a guy who had a really extremely useful product, but it required a great deal of support. Such a product "wants" to be expensive. He could have made a decent living selling it to only two or three customers who'd spend 100x what certain other customers would pay. Once he had that under control he could have dropped the price a bit and got a few more customers, growing his business step by step by taking successive nibbles of the market. Instead, he tried to grab the whole market in one fell swoop by pricing low, and ended up with more support costs than he could handle, spending all his time mollifying unprofitable customers while profitable customers stewed.
Web businesses superficially seem to be a different animal. They often seem to run on no visible means of support, somehow managing to give expensive things away for free. In truth, the basics remain the same: manage expenses and costs so that you come out ahead. Web businesses make money by aggregating lots of small, sometimes infinitesimal bits of revenue that have even tinier increments of cost. You can make a lot of money selling a ringtone for a buck because once you have the customer's money in hand they never call you for support. Google is successful in the search business because the number of transactions they handle are astronomical. They're tough to dislodge from their position because of the massive investment you'd need to get your transaction costs down; start with the cost of changing a single customer's web habits, multiply it by the number of customers you need to succeed, and it's a daunting hole to climb out of.
It sounds like your friends are well positioned to make a good living with this kind of model. First, they have created a product people care about. That's a rare, rare gift. There's lots of money out there attempting to do this with conspicuous lack of success. One of the biggest costs associated with any sale is the cost of getting people to pay attention, so when people care about a product that's money on the bottom line right there, provided you have any revenue at all. If they can find any source of revenue at all, and keep support costs close to nil, they can very likely come out ahead. If they want to get rich, they sell the business to some operator who has
Re: (Score:2)
is worth developing games at all.
In a world wracked with hunger, poverty, ignorance, and environmental catastrophe, is writing games what you ought to be spending your time on?
Says the person who just wrote a Slashdot comment containing over 1,000 words.
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first lesson of business: most customers are unreasonable. You can't expect them to care about your problems, e.g., keeping a roof over your head and keeping a wolf from the door. Fuming over the unreasonability of customers is a waste of time, and time is money. If you can't keep yourself from doing this, you should consider the first question, above, because you aren't cut out for business.
God damn wolves.
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Ever heard of hypergraphia?
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A solid piece of text. Thank you for your in depth and insightful post; it makes me wish I had mod points for you.
I think the most important thing to take away from this is something that people often forget: there are costs that aren't monetary that you have to keep in mind.
Of course, the whole thing about managing customer complaints is good too. I develop iPhone games, and the staggeringly ridiculous comments we have for our games (free or not) are numerous and mind boggling. People just love to get thin
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At the end of your life, it is the experiences you've accumulated that matter, not the money; that's only a means to an end.
Nay friend, the experiences you've accumulated die with you. It's what you leave behind that matters in the end. The pyramids you've built. The munchkins you've raised. The books you've written.
What's it worth... (Score:1)
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Problems (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Venue not working out for you? Change the venue.
2) Finanical model not working out for you? Have a look at why, and change it if necessary.
3) Sinking thousands of hours into something and expecting to make money just because it took you a lot of work? Dreaming.
4) Customers unhappy? You have two choices - lose those customers or please them.
If Facebook isn't giving you the traffic you want, or the type of buyer you want, or the facilities you want, go elsewhere. If the webapp has a good following, then they will follow you off Facebook. If expecting people to sign up to a recurring monthly cost for your web app isn't working, try other methods (larger one-off payment for annual or even permanent access, advertisements, etc.).
If you're working hard on something, it doesn't mean that other people will either appreciate it or want to reward you for it... there are millions of webpages out there that have research papers, etc. that cost a hundred times more time/effort/knowledge/skill to make and they receive *nothing* from their end-users (which, in some cases, can make millions of pounds by building off that research). I'm not comparing the industries, but what you're saying is "It took me a long time, pay for that time"... instead of "Pay for this quality product which you really enjoy"... your time is only precious to YOU, everyone else just wants to buy a decent game.
Pleasing customers sounds REALLY good but if you follow that to its logical extreme, you'll give away the best game in the world for free for ever. You *might* lose a load of users, but the chances are they would *NEVER* have been paying customers anyway. If you lose 20 freeloader players to get 1 paying player, it might well work out better in the long run. Also, if your players don't *WANT* to pay, they can still earn you money with advertisements etc. whether they like it or not. It's all a balance between attracting *paying* customers and keeping *non-paying* customers around to entertain those who paid.
If you *want* to run this like a business, then start doing so - Get some demographics: who are your audience? Do they even *have* credit cards / Paypal? Do they have $3/month spare, or what *would* they gladly pay each month? Do they want recurring monthly payments? How many of them are even remotely interested in paying for the product? How many hours does the average player put in (if it's less than about 4 or 5 hours a week, chances are that VERY few people will pay for that privilege - but the website itself says "The game is intended to be played as little as just a few minutes per day, over many days, weeks and months...")? If you lost all your free players, what's the minimum number of active players you can continue running with (nobody's going to pay if there's nobody to play against)? If you just made it a pay-for app, would you get that number of players, would that number of active players make it profitable or break-even?
You are also trying to run a virtual economy here (you can't just make pay-for players invincible, if they are to compete fairly with non-paying players), so you have to do some very in-depth analysis... say EVERYBODY signs up, does that make the freeloaders disappear and thus kill the in-game economy because there's a mis-balance?
And, what you should have been doing is asking these questions *BEFORE* you put any money you weren't prepared to completely lose into the idea. You can "gamble" on a bright future, but you have to be prepared for the fact that there's a good possibility that nowhere near enough people will ever pay for anything you make - thus any money/time/effort you put in now is a knowing sacrifice. Be prepared to just lose all that effort overnight.
Basically, it all boils down to: Nobody is *required* to give you business.
You can either make decisions (tricky ones!) in order to try to attract some good paying customers, or you can just acknowledge that it'll never be a successful business model and settle for whatev
Desktop Tower Defense (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/ [handdrawngames.com]
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000872.html [codinghorror.com]
http://gigaom.com/2007/05/27/desktop-tower-defense/ [gigaom.com]
According to an interview, the Desktop Tower Defense guy is making $8000 a month from ads alone.
The real question is: can you make a game that is as good, as addictive and as simple as this?
The only course of action.... (Score:3, Funny)
Time to adjust your paradigm... (Score:2)
The term "loss leader" comes to mind.
The game looks nice, but once you get people used to free, it is hard to wean them off of it. :(
The problem with facebook... or any other social network, is that their own profits are paramount, and trumps the profit potential of all others.
If ad revenue is a primary income stream, then you need a bigger piece of the pie. And if that's the case, then the facebook application needs to be ONE of MANY avenues into the game, so that you can migrate people to your own web pla
rethink the payment model? (Score:3, Insightful)
I run a web-based game (www.twilightheroes.com), where the model is donation only. I don't expect most people to be able to pay, and assume that they won't want to give me any money unless they play the game enough to decide they really love it. What I do offer is a monthly donation item plus a small number of long-term donation options. None of these are required to play, they're just a little better, or they've got extra flavor/humor attached, or they make things easier. I'm very careful not to allow the donation items to give donators large amounts of content that non-donators don't get. Most importantly, these things are a one-time cost, and guaranteed to be beneficial as long as the game exists.
I do expect that people would be very touchy about having things change once they've paid for it, and I expect that a lot of people would cringe or even flat-out reject a required ongoing subscription. I simply refuse to try any game that demands a subscription, and I know I'm not the only one. On the other hand, a game that sort of inspired mine works on the same donation model, and I've given them hundreds of dollars for in-game goods on a month-by-month basis, where I probably wouldn't have given them a cent if I knew it was going to be an ongoing cost.
As for profitability, I've been working on my project for nearly three years now (really public and live for a year and a half). I wouldn't call it *very* profitable, but it is profitable. It's not my primary job, just evenings and weekends, and after costs I'm probably making minimum wage if you assume about two hours per day working on it, which is close.
For someone to say that's worth it or not worth it is highly subjective. I could certainly be doing better things if I just wanted more money. On the other hand, it's nearly as fun as anything else I've tried, and to be able to make minimum wage having fun and entertaining a few thousand people at the same time is a rare treat. On top of being a fantastic resume builder and a highly educational process, you could argue it's a great value. Compared to the opportunity cost of not doing other things (more lucrative programming, having more fun, playing someone else's games) maybe it's a loss. Everyone's got to answer that for themselves.
business model (Score:3, Insightful)
How are these people supposed to break even, let alone profit?
By thinking about that before they sink money into it?
Welcome back to the 1990s, when everyone thought any money you put into that IntarWeb (now 2.0) thing would magically return to you tenfold. Between then and now, we had a little clash with reality, and reality won.
If you don't have a business model, then don't complain when it's not working out financially. It really is as simple as that. Think first, then act. Pretty reliable process, suggest it to your friends.
Ads over sub usually (Score:2)
I suggest they just yank that band-aid off and start up their paid service. Sure, people will scream, and leave. However, that is no reason to deter others from coming. How would you react if someone said 'Game X sucks because they make you pay, and it used to be free'. Most wouldn't care and try it out.
When my friend and I launched U
Nickel and Dimed To Death (Score:2)
For a flat $6 a month I can add 10 unedited and commercial-free movie channels to my digital cable service.
If I want to introduce my kids to the online RPG, Disney [go.com] and Cartoon Network [cartoonnetwork.com] both have solid entries that are free of charge.
The Sims is a consumerist fantasy.
It's all about spending frivolously and living large - and can be enjoyed on that level.
But the world of Visa and MasterCard is something I want to put
I've played RoE (Score:1)