First, something resembling a cautionary tale. I've mentioned off and on that I've done professional marketing. I've done a whole lot of jobs, quite frankly, and family members and friends have taken to placing bets on what job I'll do next.
My sister might have won some money at one point, she bet on me being a marketing flunkie. But I still love her. Anyway, I did web marketing. A very close friend that went all the way back to high school and I started a company doing web marketing, and they're still going. But as happens with many people, once money appeared, it didn't take long in the grand scheme of things for our friendship to deteriorate. With each of my own successes, his desire to rule the company kicked in and caused him to do some nasty things, and I can't say I was completely nice to him. In the end, we parted ways and we don't speak to each other any more. This is my former partner that I've mentioned off and on. I'm still feeling very bitter about it. It doesn't help that the company was founded on marketing techniques that I pioneered (amongst ourselves, the industry itself had already discovered them) and that he explicitly opposed when I first started exploring.So here we are talking about making money off the game and quite frankly I'm not in a hurry to repeat that particular experience. So let's take it slowly, keep ourselves calm and open, and stay focused on two very important things that come up, one of which came up in irc a little while ago:
1. Personally, I'm looking into the future and seeing growth. I'm seeing growth that is going to either cost us money, or increase our dependency on certain free services. I'm a pretty independent kind of person, therefore increasing dependency isn't an option as far as I'm concerned. So I want to start raising money now, when our costs aren't terribly high, and get folks into the habit of thinking that while the game is Free and downloadable for no money, there are costs associated. With that in mind, Tank, can we get a report on paypal donations? Also, any expenses you've got? Far as I know, you're the one taking the brunt of whatever we've got, and collecting whatever revenue we've got.
2. The issue comes up, and just came up, about Free as in Freedom. Do we lock up a special distribution in an attempt to make money off it and delay the free release? What do we do? To answer that, I direct each and every one of you to the thread where we declared the Evil Triumvirate. There you will find three oaths that include "keeping armagetron Free" in some sense or other. As far as I'm concerned, the option to lock up any source code in any form or release any special editions that have artwork that bars redistribution isn't even on the table. When we talk about raising money, we're not talking about closing any part of the project. If anything, we need to be extra meticulous in ensuring our own procedures and policies are completely transparent and that everybody can come along and give us their two cents ( #google 0.02 USd in NOK ). And most importantly, that the source is always available and nobody's rights are ever taken away, contributions are always welcome with the good ones always being accepted, and so forth.
I know these two things are pretty obvious to many of you, but every time we talk about this, both of those things come up, so I figured we'll throw it on the table now and make sure we're all on the same page.
Now we get to how to make money off the game. This is where my marketing flunkie persona kicks in, I apologize in advance for any corporate speak that might appear in this post.
You can't market anything without knowing your audience. I've been around here for nearly 2 years, and my presence has been continuous. A little thin at times, but no periods where I was completely absent. I think I feel pretty qualified to give the following breakdown. I've broken it down in terms of contributions to the project. That's the only breakdown I see that makes sense. Otherwise, all of our other traits transcend these boundaries. I.e. there are fathers and mothers and grandfathers (one, at least, that I know of), college kids, kids that aren't in college, etc, and they all cross these lines.
1. Players. These are the folks that always run the stable version, sometimes they run older versions because they lack faith in the new version. They will never run a beta version (unless a new game mode is invented and they need the beta to keep playing), They will upgrade slowly, and will occasionally need to be forced to upgrade when we manage to fail to catch certain vulnerabilities before the code is released
. They don't contribute to the project in any material way, other than just playing the game and enriching the community with their presence. Some have money, some don't. These are also the casual players that play for a month, leave, maybe come back, maybe don't.2. Players that play the latest version. These are the guys that jump on the betas when released, and I guarantee you they'll jump on the development series when it's started. They won't run cvs, probably can't build a program anyway, but they want to play the bleeding edge code. They usually give bug reports, make feature requests, and contribute to the project by being part of our informal extended group of testers.
3. Players that play from cvs (soon to be svn). This group has some overlap with the previous group: there are players that would play from cvs snapshot builds but otherwise can't build software, so they usually wind up in the previous group. Otherwise, these guys are both programmers and not, but they can build software and use SCM software. They contribute to the project in the form of testing, rigorous testing at times, and this is also the group from which we draw our development team. Every developer here, afaik, was in this group immediately before being brought into the team. This is also the group we're looking at to draw the QA team from, and hopefully we'll get some guys for the QA team from the previous group.
4. Players that don't fit neatly into one of those categories and don't contribute materially to the project. Cristi, 'nuff said.
5. Players that don't fit neatly into one of those categories and contribute the things to the project they can, usually artwork, maps, and so forth. This is one of the groups we're targeting with all the fancy cockpit and moviepack stuff. They will be our core group of third party extenders.
Now, when we go to collect money from people, what are we looking to do? As stated before, we're looking to cover costs, both present and future by raising money now. We're already raising money, that's what the paypal stuff is all about! But people are only going to give us money under one of two conditions:
A. They fit into the first group mentioned, players the run the stable version and only contribute to the project their glowing presence. Players that feel like they've contributed are far less likely to give us money than anybody else, and let's face it, that's most of the rest of the breakdown I just gave.
B. Folks that want to support the project monetarily, explicitly. This would be people who already contribute in other ways, or don't, but explicitly want to give us money.
For the most part, both of these groups want value for their money. They don't want just throw their money into a black hole from whence nothing ever returns, especially if we're making decisions they're not terribly thrilled about. Why would silly give us money that he knows is going to provide lasers, ramps, and jumping? He hates that stuff! You see what I'm saying? I'm not trying to single him out, just give an example of someone who wants to contribute monetarily and support the project but doesn't have any reason to see value from a donation. He is clearly in one of the 2 groups I just mentioned of people that are willing to give us money.
So what do we have to sell? We already have donations setup. We can do one of those "For xxx donation we give you yyy service". Personally, I don't like that stuff. But we can do it.
We also have software to sell. We've beat around the idea a bit of offering limited edition CDs of the game, special artwork being the value offered here, possibly a live CD to carry it on. There's real value in this! Obviously it appeals to the group 1 folks that don't contribute materially to the project. To really appeal to them, you guess it, the CD has to have the stable release on it. Why? Because they won't run a development release.
There are others who would pay for such a thing in the other groups, but you'll see their numbers drop quite dramatically going to group 2, then slower as you go up in number, and the limit of this function is 0.
We've talked about merchandise. Merchandise isn't attached to version, and might well appeal to people who aren't willing to buy the stable release wrapped on a CD because they're already running out of svn or are running the development release.
Now as you guys go and brainstorm some more, keep in mind these groups that I've outlined. Flesh them out, go and talk to people that are in them and find out what they want. This is called market research, and any efforts we make to build and sell a product will be much more likely to succeed the more market research we've done. These are people you all know and love (or hate, or not) and you may think you know them, but start thinking about them in these terms and ask some questions. You *will* be surprised at the answers you get, I guarantee that.
