[MUD-Dev] Criminalize Community Volunteers?

[David Frank]

Raph Koster said:
> Assuming a $10 fee a month, times 200,000 subscribers, you get that $2
> million a month. But you can immediately throw away around 50% of that
> (there's scaling benefits in the numbers, actually, and also good design can
> lower your fixed and variable costs per month, but that's a good ballpark
> figure). The costs there include cost of customer service (800 lines, phone
> bills, cost of GMs, cost of email support, cost of phone support),
> infrastructure costs (depreciation of initial hardware, rack space,
> bandwidth--this latter cost is huge btw), ongoing support (dev teams & their
> salaries, community relations, tape backups, new hardware, etc), and last
> but not least marketing and PR costs. So now you have $1 million in profit a
> month.
<snip>
> Basically, my fear would be that if the entire MMORPG industry suddenly has
> to cut their profits in half, that you're going to see a lot less players.
> As it is, the players have to have deep pockets. (cf some of Jessica
> Mulligan's articles on Biting the Hand about that).
>
> -Raph

I'd like to take a small tangent with this for a moment.

Raph talked alot about the costs of doing business and how small the actual
profit was from a successful MMORPG.  If they had to hire support staff instead
of relying on volunteers, you could kiss most of that profit goodbye.  But what
if they simply raised the fee to $20 a month to play the game? (Yeah I
know...*simply*)

When it comes down to it, this really isn't that much money to spend on
something that occupies so much of your time. Compare the cost to buying a new
game each month as many gamers would do anyway.  They are now only spending $20
instead of $50.  Ease people into it and they will never notice that you raised
the price on them nor will they care if you can offer more bang for their buck.

I hate to advocate raising prices, but it only makes sense in the light of slack
revenues and the need to hire significant support staffs to run the games.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled debate on volunteers...

David Frank - "Valen"
Associate Editor, IGN Vault
http://www.nwvault.com - http://www.aovault.com - http://www.dsvault.com







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