Self-sustaining Game Servers

I'm hoping there is some money to be made by offering product placements.

Purchase price only - Running a server incurs ongoing costs. If you are paying for that with the money users paid to buy the game you either need to charge a lot more money (which may put them off buying) to cover running costs or keep on signing new customers. The problem is that in order to keep the hardware running and develop new content you are forced to get more and more new players regardless of if the servers can support them. In fact your business model would encourage you to drive away old players (by not adding new content) because they take up server resources but provide no new money.

The advertising route at least supplies an ongoing revenue, but I am not sure how good that is. www.swirve.com run ad funded browser based games but they show a lot of ads to make money (which gets a little annoying after a while).

Advertising is one way to (indirectly) get money from players.

If you take a look at Ferion (www.ferion.com), you get another idea. Here you can play for free, but you are limited to a certain technology if you dont buy a key.

In Magic Online, you have to buy cards but playing on the server is free.

We (Eternal Lands) get some money from donations and non vital services, such as a name change, an ingame house, etc. (almost 2K in less than 1 year). But the server is provided by a hosting company we have a barter with (they give us free hosting, we give them a free, non exclusive license to run their on game, but a French version).

Hey, I just got a fun idea. The game itself is free, but you have to use real money to buy things in the game. In effect expanding on the trend of people selling chracters and game-money on ebay.

Players buy game credits/GP/whatever for a set price, say 1000GM for $1. Players can buy and sell stuff to the stores and other players. Profits for the stores goes partailly to the server-owner, and partially to "pay" for items for NPCs. The items dropped by monsters can be sold at stores, and the game-money can be converted to real money and transferred to the players bank account. The biggest problem would be to avoid inflasion. If every monster dropped extremely valuable items the entire wealth of the game-world would be greater than the cash put into it by the players. The selling price would naturally be a bit lower than the buying price, so now you get $1 for say 1100GM, just like in the real world.

I think this would be an extremely cool idea. People might actually be able to make a living playing a computer game! :)
The economy system of the game needs to be completely solid and well thought out of course, but I think it would be possible.

In effect you have a lot of NPCs that go around making money for you :)

  §§§  $ $   |  \_/

CLAIMER:
I hereby claim the intellectual rights to this idea. No one may patent it or anything. I'm probably not going to do that myself, but I don't want to be unable to use my own idea because some p**ck saw it here and decided to patent it. If you want to use it, tell me first!

DISCLAIMER:
If you do use it, I will not be held responsible for your economic loss, be it gross inflation, virtual bank robbery, or any other reasons.

Vemund Dyrkolbotn

PS, sorry for the claimer/disclaimers, but I feel this might actually be something that could make money.

Quote:

Hey, I just got a fun idea. The game itself is free, but you have to use real money to buy things in the game. In effect expanding on the trend of people selling chracters and game-money on ebay.

1) Your idea is good enough to have been thought of and implemented before. Most notably: http://www.project-entropia.com/ See also http://secondlife.com/ (somewhat related).

Quote:

I think this would be an extremely cool idea. People might actually be able to make a living playing a computer game! :) The economy system of the game needs to be completely solid and well thought out of course, but I think it would be possible.

2) In my opinion, the idea doesn't float. Looking at the game as a system, there is only one inflow of money, and one outflow of money. The cost of running the servers (including employee salaries) is the one money sink. The only source of money entering the game is from players in the game (without considering advertisement). The average player will not make money playing your game, as if players on average made money, it would imply another source of money flowing into the game (out of the owner's pockets?). Think of it like gambling - everyone has a chance to make money gambling, but on average the house pretty much guarantees itself that it will make money, so on average gamblers spend money instead of making it.

So, although it is a clever disguise to a subscription service, users of the game still end up paying for the cost of running the server, although it does have advantages of possibly "charging" more for those who use the service most often.

I'm not sure what you mean by it won't float.

Of course the "house" will win. It has to, or the servers couldn't be upgraded etc. Stores will buy stuff at lower price than they sell them, things will be taxed, one use-items, food, boarding, healing, temples etc are "free" money for the house, there could be tolls to use bridges etc.

It's a bit like gambling, but it's not all luck.
Good players will win, while poor players will loose. To become a good player you must play a lot etc. When I said people could make money playing the game I was thinking about the kind of people that plays Everquest for 12 hours (or more) a day. With a system of trade and crafts it would be possible to earn money that way as well (or at least lower the cost).

When you're not playing the game you pay a fixed cost (same for 1 day as for 20 days), or a cheap rate. When you play the game you have to buy food etc.

But every game needs to earn money somehow, either by ads or monthly subscriptions. I just think this is a more "natural" way of doing it.

The biggest problem as I see it is how to regulate the total amount of wealth inside the game. One way of doing it is to regulate the exchange rate with RW money, another is to modify prices inside the game. It's kinda cool really.. If we need to buy an extra server or hire another staffer the monsters and store owners become poorer :)
One thing's for certain. Rouge classes will be seriously frowned upon :)

Darn.. I had hoped I was the first... Well, well.. so much for intelectual property :/
I've actually looked at Second Life, but I didn't think about it when I came up with the idea. It looks cool, but I was thinking on a more RPGish MMORPG.
Project Entropia's site is down, so either it's not as good an idea as I thought, or they didn't implement it as tight as they'd have to. Or maybe they only have some technical problems :) I saw in an article however that they have a fixed monthly fee, but players can cash in their in game cash (EDIT: I saw in another article that they're using the same system I proposed). My idea was to have no monthly fee, but letting players buy ingame money. It has to be capped or something though, otherwise people could get so addicted they'll spend everything they own inside the game. It could also use the system that some mobile phone operators use, you pay a monthly fee, but you can spend all of it in the game. If you need more, you buy it. If you don't spend it all, it's carried on to next month. When you decide to stop playing the game you can get it back at the exchange rate. Well.. that must be thought through, because the exchange rate may fluctuate if the in game wealth is not controlled.

I thought of doing that a while back, may still if i ever get servers...

Quote:

Original post by frostburn CLAIMER: I hereby claim the intellectual rights to this idea. No one may patent it or anything. I'm probably not going to do that myself, but I don't want to be unable to use my own idea because some p**ck saw it here and decided to patent it. If you want to use it, tell me first!

The following isn't quite correct so I corrected it below 1. You can't claim the intellectual property rights on an idea - ideas can not be protected, only the actual implementation of an idea (you would have to actually make a game that worked that way and then patent the method used to implement the idea).

1. You can't claim the intellectual property rights on an idea - ideas can not be protected, only the actual implementation of an idea (you would have to come up with a proper design as to how you will implement it then patent that). The only way to protect an idea is to not tell people (or only those who sign an NDA.

2. It's far from new. In addition to the similar examples mentioned above there was a discussion on this topic in the IGDA forums (www.igda.org/forums) some months back.

3. There is also a potentially serious legal downside to this suggestion. If a company sells a subscription to their game then the only thing they are liable for is providing access to the game. Players might claim a refund if the system wasn't available but that would be all. If the data became corrupted or the game was terminated the player would only get their subscription back.

However, if you allocate real monetary value to objects in the game and sell those objects to players you become legally responsible to the players in a host of different ways. If game data becomes corrupted people can sue you for loss/damage. As most transactions would be made by credit card the sale of objects would be covered by various countries "distance selling laws". If players don't like the Blood Sword they purchased they would have the right to claim back their payment or action a charge back through their credit card company (which would cost the publisher a fee). If (when) cheats hack the game and create 5,000 of their own Blood Swords, the players one would be devalued to the point of being worthless. That means that they would have lost real money as a result and they might well take legal action against the publisher to recover their loss.

Lastly all of the above would make data security 100% necessary. That means that the game servers would need to be of the security level of online banking systems and that would dramatically increase the cost of developing/running the game. Real world value sound great fun for the player (until they actually lose all their money by doing a stupid deal) but it is a legal nightmare for the publisher.

[Edited by - Obscure on July 15, 2004 11:24:32 AM]

A much better idea, and one that I'm certain has been implemented before, is to simply sell in-game items for real money. Don't offer to trade back the other way, just give the rich kids an advantage in exchange for having them finance your game. I'm sure there are games out there that do this in some form or another.

1. Sure, but it's better to be on the safe side. There are a lot of patents that shouldn't have been patented. Like "controlling view direction of a character with the mouse and movement with the keyboard". I don't know if such a patent exists. I made it up. But I know high score tables are patented.

2. I didn't know that. Anyway it's better to be on the safe side. I might have been the first to suggest it.

3. Err. True.. Well, it seeemed like a good idea, and it would be extremely cool both for the player and for the server. But you're probably right that the risks are too great.

But I'd have to disagree with some points: Players can demand their money back if they don't like an object they bought in the game. - Even if they could they wouldn't get their money back on the credit card. They'd get back game money. They exchange RW money to in-game money outside of the game. And if they decide to stop playing they'll get back their money. I'm not sure how international bank transactions work, but I'm sure there is a way. And the exchange rate is not fixed. $1 = 1000GC = $0.9 - This is the exact same way as it works in the real life. I lose a couple of NOK if I buy some Euros and sell them immediately afterwards. And some banks charge an extra €5 for the transaction itself in addition to the buying and selling prices.

Distance selling laws: This also applies to other MORPGS. I don't think I've seen a single one of them that doesn't sell time-cards on the net. And the possibility of buying game credits in RW stores is also possible.

The game servers obviously needs to be secure, so that noone can clone objects or in other way counterfit. I don't know exactly how this can be done since I've never looked into the problem, but in my opinion every server based game should be impossible to cheat.

Anyway, it wouldn't need the security level of online banking. It would need the security level of on line gambling sites, which I imagine is not as strict.

I think that paying a monthly subscription, but you can use all of it in the game may be the best option. The option of buying additional in-game credits can be compared to the buying and selling of MMORPG money on ebay.

With the original version of our online game, Paintball Net, back in 1996 or 1997, we pondered the idea of selling in-game objects for real world money. We decided it would be a bad idea, for many of the same reasons Obscure gave above. The liability was simply too great.

Here's how I summed it up at the time:

Can anyone tell me the going rate of exchange, converting real money into imaginary?

Selling access to a game is one thing. Selling imaginary items for real money is a completely different thing.

-David