

Does my project have any value? - wlievens

This is a post about a personal project, so if you lose interest halfway, I apologize. This is not a review-my-website post, I'm not looking for usability advice (yet).<p>Over the past few years I've worked on a browser game project. It's very niche and therefore very small, and thereby not financially interesting (current revenue is about $250 per year). It does however have a loyal following of a couple hundred people who use the game site on a daily basis. I've been wondering whether I should increase my dedication to this project (I've been slacking on it the past half year) or just let it be in its current state. Ideally I'd like to get some decent revenue out of this. It's probably not feasible to get a full-time income out of it, but I'd surely appreciate a nice extra on the side to justify the time I put in it.<p>The project is a political browser game. It simulates elections in which you control a party, and you vote on bills and such to establish yourself in the political landscape. I have a "Classic" version (up since '05) and an alpha of the new version (up since '08). The code base is huge so it's been a pretty large investment in terms of hours.<p>So I'll evaluate my project's pros and cons here:<p><i>Cons</i><p>* The website looks like crap. Even the new version looks unprofessional. I'm not a designer, but I do realize that its looks need a lot of work. I'm not really looking for usability advice here since that would take up a whole thread on itself.<p>* It's a niche subject, which means it can't scale indefinitely.<p>* Gameplay for a single game world actually depends on &#60;1000 player population, so it's really not scaling-friendly.<p>* I could be putting my time into something more dollar-efficient.<p>* Time-intensive: politics can be controversial and personal, so a lot of effort goes into moderation. This is mostly handled by the community though.<p>* Aside from google ads, the occasional donation and wacky one-time actions like selling a virtual island, there's no business model.<p><i>Pros</i><p>* Very dedicated player base (players typically hang out for years).<p>* One of a kind: it's the only political game that offers this kind of depth. Competing games in the same space are little more than glorified social networks and my players appreciate the difference.<p>* I get around 10,000 page views and 300 uniques per day. That's peanuts, but it's a lot more than zero.<p>* I like the project personally, but I often doubt whether the hours I invest are at all justified.<p>* As stated above, there is some revenue, though neglegible.<p>The game site is http://www.particracy.net/
Make sure to check out both the Classic and Alpha versions.<p>Thanks for the feedback.
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mahmud
It's a political game. You can already make inferences about the average age,
education and income of your players. Run various ads and do A/B tests, keep
what works.

You traffic is not as bad as you think. If you sold political satire books,
for example, at a $5 commission each and 1 sales a week, that's another $240
annually. If you target the ads geographically, you can catch both local and
federal election seasons.

Try to infer something about the political affiliation of your players and you
can hit them with even more targeted ads. Show leftists merchandise to the
progressives, and rightwing merchandise to the conservatives.

P.S. I am in the online advertising, yield optimization and targeting
industry. Please excuse me if I sound just a tad bit too creepy :-P

~~~
wlievens
You're right in that there's a wealth of data I can use. In fact, my game
already knows the political affiliation of the player (or rather: the
affiliation he's playing, which is often similar).

But how do you go about finding affiliates for advertising? I wouldn't even
know where to start. Do I find a publisher of political literature and
straight up email them? Or are there proper channels to go about this?

The google ads it shows are terribly irrelevant, so there's indeed a lot of
room for optimization here.

~~~
mahmud
Google is really dumb and we have beat them in the lab so bad, it's not even
funny.

If you want to sign up for our ad delivery platform, click on my profile and
find my email therein. But here is what you can do to get started: political
advertising is typically seasonal, it's not an election season (in the U.S.)
so you can weather the storm by signing up for an Amazon affiliate account and
selling political books. Your classifier function would be very simple, it's
basically a parity predicate; someone is either right wing or left wing.
Assign a probability that someone is, say, left wing, to a few conditions and
add them up then divide by their count (frequentist statistics, bayesian
system is even more powerful.) Once you determine what someone is, display a
few amazon book ads in rotation. After a month or so, remove the least
performing 1/2 of the books and ad new ones.

This is the dumbest and most straightforward ad delivery platform. Feel free
to talk to me in private for more sophisticated stuff :-)

~~~
wlievens
I'm definitely interested. I've contacted you by mail (let me know if the mail
didn't arrive).

------
andyn
You might want to have a look at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Loathing> \- this is another browser
based game that's quite successful despite using frames and XKCD-like
graphics. Plus they get by on donations as well as merchandise.

Also congrats on getting this far with your project, all I have to show for my
spare time for the past few years is a reddit account full of sarcastic
comments.

~~~
wlievens
I see your point. KoL is a complete different genre of game, but it's similar
in that it looks like it was designed more than a decade ago, just like my
game. For niche webgames that offer a little more depth, graphics seem to be
far less important. Still, I'd like to invest some time in making it look more
professional, if only to be able to show it to people without making excuses.

------
CatDancer
200 players at $5/month is $12,000 a year.

"it was always our intent to make an experience accessible to anyone
interested in politics and strategy gaming, the game is still free"

If there is anyone who, seriously, can't afford $5, nothing stops you from
offering the game to them for free.

But $5 for many people is nothing. People spend $5 a _day_ at Starbucks
without even thinking.

And it's not just about making money for you either. An income from the site
gives you time to make it better, add additional games worlds, etc. To provide
real service to your players.

~~~
wlievens
In theory, you are 100% right. In practice, if I do that, I'll scare 98% of my
player base away. Most of them are high scool or college students, and don't
even have a credit card. Maybe in a glorious future where micropayments are as
trivial as email.

~~~
CatDancer
Interestingly, IMVU had the same issue: many of their target customers didn't
have a credit card, and apparently they were able to get mobile phone payment
to work for them
[www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/handouts/IMVU_Case_Draft.pdf]

But you're right, you need _some_ way of differentiating among your players;
some have money and some don't. If you try to charge everyone you lose those
who don't want to pay, but if you charge no one then you lose the revenue (and
the benefits that would come to the site and for your players if you had
revenue) that you'd get from the players who could pay.

What about a premium service? Anything nifty you could offer to paying
customers, while the basic game remains free?

~~~
wlievens
Actually I'm planning a premium service on the new version of the game. There
are several small featurettes that, grouped together, could represent some
added value. I'd estimate a conversion value in the low single digits for that
(based on anecdotical questioning and prior donations), and obviously I can't
charge much more than, say, $3 per month. That's the standard going rate for
browser games' premium models.

It all boils down to scaling the game up though, as any form of revenue scales
along. But before I can do that, I have to put still a lot of work in the new
version, and sometimes I doubt whether it's all worth it.

~~~
CatDancer
What would make it worth it to you? I.e., is there some $/month revenue where
you'd say, "yup, I wouldn't mind putting in the work if I were getting that"?

~~~
wlievens
Excellent question. I've no idea how many hours I've put in it currently. If I
add up the codebase of the classic version plus the under-development new
version, I get to at least 150,000 lines of code (including comments and
whitespace). I know LOC is a crappy metric, but it does give a sense of scope.

I haven't tracked the amount of manhours at all. Ten hours a week gives me
2000 over four years, that seems realistic (although a little low considering
the amount of code). At market rate that would make the project cost about
$100k but of course something is only worth what a buyer would pay.

To answer your question: I'd be a happy camper for a couple hundred each
month. Enough to pay for expenses (hosting) and justify a day off from the day
job. To spend on projects like this of course.

~~~
CatDancer
Sounds like your catch-22 is that you'd be willing to put in the programming
if you knew it would pay off, but you're reluctant to put in the programming
if it's not going to pay off.

So how about doing an experiment. The purpose of the experiment is to gather
information, without doing any more programming. First explain to your players
that you're going to run an experiment: you're looking for ways for the site
to be self-supporting so it can continue to grow and meet the needs of its
players. The experiment isn't going to affect game play, and that it's just an
experiment: you'll take it down if it doesn't work out.

Every business faces the issue price differentiation between customers: some
customers have little money and some have a lot, so how do you get the
customers with money to pay more without turning away the customers who have
little (or, in your case, no money).

For the experiment add a tiered membership: free (what you have now) and
patron ($5/month). Both are identical in terms of gameplay (both for fairness
and so you don't have to do any programming). By becoming a patron a member
has their name listed on the homepage as a patron of Particracy (which is
literally true). During new user sign up prominently display the patron option
"you can become a patron for $5/month, or join for free". On the homepage
above the patron list have a button "Join the Patrons of Particracy".

If anyone signs up, that tells you that there are people eager enough the
support the game that they'll give you money even though they don't get any
tangible extra features.

Next you might try running a Google ads campaign, max $5 total and max $0.05
per click, using a keyword of "political simulation game". This will deliver
100 people to your landing page. Track how many of the 100 become users (if
any) and how many become patrons (if any). This will tell you how easy it will
be to draw in new users when you have a way to make money.

Now you look at your conversion rate (is it 0%? 5%? 1%?) and get a sense of
what it would take to get to $200/month (40 paying customers). For example, if
your conversion rate is 1% then you'd need 4,000 customers to get the 40
paying ones. Then you can look at a) if you want to go for that, or b) do you
think that doing things like more programming and adding the premium service
you're thinking about might get the conversion rate up.

The point of the experiment isn't for it to make money by itself (though of
course it will be nice if it did :), it is to gather information and to give
you encouragement.

