[MUD-Dev] Casual Crowd vs.Time Rich Crowd [was: Time Debt]

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 20:50:20 -0400 
William Leader <leader at k2wrpg.org> wrote:

>   Shard 1 Plan <5hrs / wk. $2.50 a mo.
>   Shard 2 Plan <10hrs / wk. $5.00 a mo.
>   Shard 3 Plan <15hrs / wk. $7.50 a mo.
>   Shard 4 Plan <20hrs / wk. $10.00 a mo.
>   Unlimited Shard >20 hrs / wk.$12.50 a mo.

Not to be dismissive, but I see a problem with this within the
commercial realm:

  You have just created a clearly signposted and marked path for people
  to not only incrementally spend less money on the game, but to
  ultimately encourage them to unsubscribe and thus spend nothing at
  all.

That's a problem and a rather large one.  From a marketing perspective
you never want to make it easy or attractive for a customer to decide to
leave your service -- that's effort spent on losing money.  The
marketing model is to make the games sticky, to not only get players
wanting to subscribe, but very specifically to want to pay their
subscription fees forever more.

Actually the cynical mould is a bit worse than that.  In the early days
of the product you want lots of players on the servers as that creates
an impression of crowd, business, popularity etc.  Later, once the
player base is well established and large what you actually want is for
almost all them to never play (thus saving bandwidth, hardware,
networking, presence costs etc), leaving a small enough percentage
playing to maintain the sense of vibrant activity for the new players to
replace your churn.

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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