Slashdot Mirror
Is It Worth Developing Good Games For the Web?
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 is if you develop web-based games then you are going to attract a young target audience, even more so if your application is for a social networking site. Children often do not understand what is involved with making the game ("but XYZ does it for free!?"), 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). In my opinion, you're not going to make any significant profit out of such a target audience unless your profit does not come directly from them, ie. advertising; whether it be on the page or in the game itself.
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.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Its totally worth it cause it pushes the boundaries for when things are worth paying for.
Im an user, not an developer so please continue develop and push the competition so I get more for value my buck.
If facebook is so bad LEAVE THEM.
Or preferably, go elsewhere as well.
I think generally most people who are producing web games are doing so less to make money in the short term and more for the experience that it gives them. Producing a web game lets people test it quickly and you'll get a fast response as to whether they like it or not. Seems like most people I know producing games online do so to expand their personal work portfolios. As for facebook, it's not exactly a great cross section of the average web user.
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.
Totally worth is. But forget Facebook and other closed platforms - go for your own infrastructure. Basically, what facebook gives developers is audience, an ability to quickly announce your project and make it known among huge auditory. This is a plus on early stages, but it becomes not so significant later, when you'll afford to advertise independantly and effectively, but Facebook-as-an-app-platform limitations will remain.
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.
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, people will still bitch all the time, and if you give in to the bitching, then suddenly other groups of previously silent people will start complaining. It's best to just do whatever it is you think is best for the game, and ignore everything except well made arguments.
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.
Squirrel!
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 somewhere. If the devs can't get the rewards out of it what they feel they need to be comfortable in return for their time, money and energy, they should scale back or not continue development at all, and spend their time on more rewarding projects. We all would like to work full-time on our hobbies that we love, and make good money out of it to boot, but the realities of the world don't always work that way.
Also, nobody's keeping the players chained. If they can find similar entertainment for the price they are willing to pay, they should rather go there. Basic supply and demand economics. The world will certainly not end one way or the other.
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.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
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.
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 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.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
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 and funded by advertising, people expect sites to be free.
It's hard for people to relate to something being valuable in a web based game, just think twice about what users are paying for - they're paying for a few extra strings of text (rows in a table/database, etc) to get some extra stats, faster experience, new items, etc. All too often these bonuses disappear after a certain amount of time, making it hard to get any attachment to the value of it. I'm sure the developer and anyone knows about developing software realises that it's something else people for (funding the developer so he/she can continue working on it), but players will see that their wonderful web game is now trying to charge them money instead of being something great and free!
Just don't have high expectations for web based games. Some might get lucky enough to pay their developers wages, some might be good enough to expand and get profit. But certainly don't spend hundreds of hours on something and expect users will instantly rush to you with their wallets wide open.
I suspect that, in part, the problem you are running into is that of transaction costs(both literal and psychological).
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 the internet, things are trickier. Anybody can pay cash; but not everybody has a credit card. Some people don't trust random interweb businesses, everybody hates filling out sign-up forms. If there were some way to get your $3/month paid in pocket change, nobody would even notice; but once credit cards are involved the whole thing is a pain.
Barring the establishment of micropayment systems that actually work(how many of those have we gone through by now?), I don't know that the problem is really solvable. There are really three ways you see people going: 1. Ad-supported free 2. upmarket and relatively expensive(WoW type stuff) or 3. Part of a system that aggregates transactions(this is why $1-$5 iPhone games are booming, and shareware in the same range is dead).
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
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Take a look at what you're offering for $3 a month and ask yourself if you'd pay that money for it. With web games, the answer is usually no. I haven't seen many web games that a) couldn't be replaced by a chat program b) couldn't be replaced by a better offline game c) aren't already available in some form for free on a million different online game websites.
mmmm...forbidden donut
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
http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000872.html
http://gigaom.com/2007/05/27/desktop-tower-defense/
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?
Time for me to pull out the stodgy old man attitude:
1) I don't want MMORPGs on Facebook.
2) I don't want your "lil green patch" or "monty python widget" or whatever else on Facebook.
3) I don't want random people joining Facebook who only join to waste time on the little applets.
I can't be the only person who feels that Facebook went from a "much better than MySpace" place to a "omg what a freaking timesink" place in barely a year.
If Facebook not giving ad revenue or lots of real estate to developers helps keep the developers in a sandbox and helps prevent Facebook from hemoraging into the AOL of 2010 then I'm all for it.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
The only course of action your friend can take now is to start up his own petition telling the users to pay up or quit being emo... :)
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Your friend should talk directly with marketing departments at big companies for sponsorship. Turn his MMO into "Mountain Dew presents MMO". If his game has 10,000 dedicated users (who play the game an hour a day), just slathering X brand into the game's title with a multi-year exclusive contract will net a solid development budget.
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 platform, where you control and stand to maximize your proceeds from advertisements and the like.
If you can't make enough to survive being a serf on someone else's land, it's time to get some land of your own...
Winged Power Photography
I'm not sure there's a definite "yes" or "no" answer to "is it worth it?" Too many variables. That said, taking a long look at the payment model may be a good place to start.
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.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Get creative about it.. facebook wont pay you for what they already have of yours for free.. but you could look at alternatives like selling product placement or sponsorships.. look at who's already advertising with Facebook and find similar companies and find a way to incorporate their product or business name into the game, as a town name, item, etc.
Also: i hope they are keeping track of growth/time and user counts.. good for the resumes.
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, 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 course, I'd say the number of interesting ways to turn social networks into game mechanics that have appeared so far is fairly small, and most of them are good mainly for novelty value and get old after you've figured out the dynamics of how they work and spread. But you can make some money at it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As mentioned in other posts, the trend tends to be that more money can be made from ads than subscriptions. However, it is good to have both as many people hate ads.
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 UrbanLegions.net, we made sure our beta/free period was short. Like your friends, the game is fully playable as free, but you don't have ads and get more features if you subscribe. However, just from past experience, like reading this article, when it comes to money, you have to embrace your revenue setup from the start, before you start getting a big following.
If youre not collecting users personal information and friends network and selling this to 3rd parties for big payola... youre not doing it right
If youre not selling targetted ads within the game for mucho denaro... your not doing it right.
If youre not threatening to move your entire app to be a MySpace exlusive to black male Facebook into giving you a bit of their fat wad from side ads... youre not doing it right.
Get a marketing/business consultant.
Of course maybe you dont have the numbers to substantiate any of these. Either way you should still "borrow" your user data for facebook. That's doing it right.
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 and Cartoon Network 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 behind me as much as possible when I come out to play. I particularly don't want my status in the game world to be dependent on my credit line.
I may not be counting every penny these day. But I do shop for value and I am not interested in open-ended commitments, "hidden" charges or fees.
People are getting up in arms about features that can be bought for less than $3 a month.
So? Obviously people want stuff for free. If it seems you'll lose enough free players to have game collapse you'll have to make adustments. Otherwise, who cares? Some may leave, the rest won't, and some of them who don't leave will pay up.
I have a story that is not directly applicable, but the moral of it is BE FIRM.
I work at a computer surplus (open 1 day a week, the rest of the week we're getting things ready). Under previous management, they were pricing computers at around 1/3rd EBay rate, and letting people haggle on them. We price them now at a little under EBay pricing, no price cuts except on bulk purchases. Some people literally came in every week for MONTHS to bitch about it. BE FIRM! Our sales dropped off for only 2 weeks, then we sold at least as many as before.. it was real easy to tell them to quit bitching or take a hike when we were selling out nearly every week. Some of them quit bitching, some took a hike.
Your situation is a little different, but as long as your playership doesn't drop off too much, don't worry about losing some players who make such a fuss over having a few extra cost features.
Anyone?
Find alternate ways to offer the premium membership to players that don't require them to pay for it. I didn't play the game, so I don't know exactly what would work specifically, but in the app I run we offer players the ability to earn the 'premium' privileges instantly through shelling out money, by putting a lot of time into playing the app (viewing ads) or by completing surveys/offers provided by a third party that pays the app developer upon completion of the survey/offer.
In my experience if there are several routes to attaining the premium membership players don't seem to feel as angry since they usually can get it some way, especially in the case that their main beef is that they don't have access to a credit card.
I can say its probably one of the highest quality games I've seen on Facebook. I was shocked to find out that it was not being developed by a large game studio, but an independant development team. There definately have been significant costs in developing the game and I hope the Devs find a way to keep it sustainable and growing. BTW, There is a huge war going on between the two largest clans that can only be described as Epic!
Yes, it's a good game.
But the developers nearly ruined it a couple of weeks ago with their greed. It hasn't been the same since.
But... it's a good web app and pretty addictive.
I've paid for nothing and still play fine, for the most part.
It's entertainment. I personally think a $12/year subscription would be perfectly acceptable. People pay a lot more than that to have television service available, and I know of some of those that spend half a day every day on RoE...