Game Expenses ??

I hate to bring this up but I'm a lil curious as to how all of this is being paid for. I know programmers and servers can be pricey and there isn't much of a pay to play scheme and no advertising at all. I only Found the game because I was curious about the movie series. I really like this game and of course I love the books as most people here do. And it seems Mr. Weber has thrown a lot of his own cash to get things rolling. Don't get me wrong I like clandestine gaming but how long will all this last without advertising and pay to play features?

Duhjoker wrote:I hate to bring this up but I'm a lil curious as to how all of this is being paid for. I know programmers and servers can be pricey and there isn't much of a pay to play scheme and no advertising at all. I only Found the game because I was curious about the movie series. I really like this game and of course I love the books as most people here do. And it seems Mr. Weber has thrown a lot of his own cash to get things rolling. Don't get me wrong I like clandestine gaming but how long will all this last without advertising and pay to play features?

Free to play games can make a lot of money. Candy crush, for example, made millions of dollars a month at its peek. Now, candy crush had a few more players than TSF does, but you don't need that many to make money. They probably could stand to have some more advertising, but I don't think its necessary.

The Marketplace sells Prestige as seen in this post. A single purchase can be from £0.69 to $69.99 depending on the amount of Prestige purchased.
Of course, the more Prestige you buy, the faster you tend to use it and thus you tend to find yourself wanting to buy more in order to keep upgrading faster etc.

Sneaky.

Candy Crush also advertises and you can buy and in certain cases have to buy special candies to pass certain levels. And I'm not saying the System now doesn't make money but if your gonna charge for prestige, make it more rare to earn or not offered at all as a reward so it has to be purchased. I earn a lot of prestige through Random battles and rarely use it anyway. I can wait on upgrades, it makes the game last longer. Or maybe you could buy daily bonuses and/or other things. I just wanna keep playing and I'm not sure it will be worth EGS or MR. Weber to keep going if it doesn't at least pay it's own bills.

Duhjoker wrote:I hate to bring this up but I'm a lil curious as to how all of this is being paid for. I know programmers and servers can be pricey and there isn't much of a pay to play scheme and no advertising at all. I only Found the game because I was curious about the movie series. I really like this game and of course I love the books as most people here do. And it seems Mr. Weber has thrown a lot of his own cash to get things rolling. Don't get me wrong I like clandestine gaming but how long will all this last without advertising and pay to play features?

Re: The bolded part. There's a new interview on YouTube with David, and he mentions that the movie, game, and whatever is *not* costing him a cent. He got paid by Evergreen for the rights for them to use the IP, but if all media other than the books tanks, he's not out anything.

The interview is here (2+ hours), and the part where he talks about it is towards the end, sometime in the last 30-45 minutes: http://youtu.be/jCueWzQCMHk

Cool beans thank you for the correction and the link. All right never mind.

Duhjoker wrote:Cool beans thank you for the correction and the link. All right never mind.

Something else to think about. Evergreen might consider the game as advertising for the movie.

KNick wrote:

Duhjoker wrote:Cool beans thank you for the correction and the link. All right never mind.

Something else to think about. Evergreen might consider the game as advertising for the movie.

That's *exactly* what it is according to the interview. So is the comic. The point of both is to get the word out about the Honorverse to the non-fans, and also to act a bit as a testbed for different design ideas and such, which is why I'm going to be interested in seeing the next "season" of the comic, as they will be implementing several changes in the looks of things, including Nimitz.

Duhjoker wrote:Candy Crush also advertises and you can buy and in certain cases have to buy special candies to pass certain levels. And I'm not saying the System now doesn't make money but if your gonna charge for prestige, make it more rare to earn or not offered at all as a reward so it has to be purchased. I earn a lot of prestige through Random battles and rarely use it anyway. I can wait on upgrades, it makes the game last longer. Or maybe you could buy daily bonuses and/or other things. I just wanna keep playing and I'm not sure it will be worth EGS or MR. Weber to keep going if it doesn't at least pay it's own bills.

I'm sorry, but not being able to win prestige is a horrible idea. The mark of a good free to play game is that you can win everything that you could buy if you put in enough time and effort. If done properly most people will eventually decide that the time they invest to win the thing is worth more than the money to purchase it. If there is something that you absolutely need to buy, especially if you can't get past a certain point without it, a large number of people will walk away.

What they need to do is not make prestige harder to get, but make prestige easier to spend. Rather than just speed upgrades and repairs and continue a fight, (and I have only used that once against Warnece,) they need more common things to spend small ammounts on.

Fifty or one hundred to reroll the prebattle buffs.

A separate button on the right side of the prebattle buff selection screen to upgrade a buff to the next level for twenty.

Two or three hundred to redraw the after battle loot.

Once a month, a level 11 on one of the live event loot that you can upgrade to for 4 million plasma or metal PLUS five hundred prestige.

Things like that. Get people used to spending small amounts, and the amount they use will get bigger and bigger, but never ever force them to spend money.