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."
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
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.
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.
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?