Hey guys, I remember in Glitch that you could buy credits (Which you could use to buy furniture, clothes, ect), are you guys going to use that system as well?
This is really three questions-- whether to have premium content levels, how to manage access if we do, and how to bring in enough cash to keep the game afloat.
Glitch had items that were free for everyone, items that were free for subscribers, and items that everyone could pay for with credits. (Were there also subscriber-only paid items? I was never a subscriber.) And as a revenue stream, that didn't work very well.
My preference would be to have all the clothing and furniture items free, or to have some them paid for by credits that you could earn in-game (by being a greeter, reporting bugs, maybe when you reach certain levels), and to have a shop for real-world merch to support the game. But I can see that there are downsides to this, too.
I know the Eleven team has been saying they'll work out how to monetize the game when they start needing money. In the meantime-- how is content access going to work?
This has been discussed in a couple of places, though I can't recall exactly where, but as far as I can recall the issue of monetization is something that the devs are clearly aware of, but it's not really on their radar right now. They have more pressing issues since right now their costs aren't too high.
Or something along those lines.
That said I would gladly purchase a subscription to Eleven whether that got me access, additional gameplay, or simply cool new aesthetic features. Eleven is the kind of game that absolutely deserves our monetary support!
It's far too early to answer this type of question, I'm sorry. We will need to keep cash coming in to support the servers, so it's likely we'll have a similar system that TS did, but equally we could come up with something else entirely. We'd want to stick with a similar paradigm where you were not paying to "win" (inasmuch as one could "win" at Glitch), but paying would give you access to a few nicer things more easily than a free player might have access to. Supporting fully through real world merch doesn't seem logistically feasible to me at all.
@ Ellen Fremedon The income for Glitch was...well... first of all Glitch had about 40 employees to pay for, plus servers, but they also had venture capitolists who were backing the game and wanted a much higher return than was going to be possible. How much higher? no ones sure, but its clear they wanted a much higher return far faster than what they were getting. Also the servers had stability issues on top of that. This doenst mean the game wasnt bringing in money but only that it wasnt bringing in money fast enough to meet its backers demand. This time around the staff is volunteers, the server backends were built differently to avoid the stability issues, and no venture capitolists are saying we need X amount of profit by (date). So however the credits & money is set up the main thing to pay for this time around is the servers.
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This is really three questions-- whether to have premium content levels, how to manage access if we do, and how to bring in enough cash to keep the game afloat.
Glitch had items that were free for everyone, items that were free for subscribers, and items that everyone could pay for with credits. (Were there also subscriber-only paid items? I was never a subscriber.) And as a revenue stream, that didn't work very well.
My preference would be to have all the clothing and furniture items free, or to have some them paid for by credits that you could earn in-game (by being a greeter, reporting bugs, maybe when you reach certain levels), and to have a shop for real-world merch to support the game. But I can see that there are downsides to this, too.
I know the Eleven team has been saying they'll work out how to monetize the game when they start needing money. In the meantime-- how is content access going to work?
Or something along those lines.
That said I would gladly purchase a subscription to Eleven whether that got me access, additional gameplay, or simply cool new aesthetic features. Eleven is the kind of game that absolutely deserves our monetary support!