This is tough. I sympathize with the need to secure revenue. If there’s no money, then there’s no development, no servers, and ultimately no game. I think PrUn has great potential and it’s one-of-a kind in the unique niche it holds. I really look forward to the future and what this game might become.
That said, I have two concerns with the proposed monetization strategy.
The first is that PrUn, as it stands now, feels incomplete, pre-alpha. As a player, it’s hard (not impossible, just difficult) to justify a monthly subscription for an incomplete game. In its eventuality, the gameplay loop has no real payoff and a powerful expansion across the universe (one sort of idealized goal of this simulation) is throttled by one’s willingness to engage in rote requeuing (and, at the moment, limited shipping bandwidth). Exponential growth would ideally not require an exponential time commitment. There’s something desirable and addictive about it at first, but I think a lot of players reach a cap on how willing they are to invest more time in this gameplay loop and eventually either stop expanding, or actually just quit playing entirely.
I guess what I’m saying is that before I’d be comfortable with recurring payments, I need to be convinced that there are still interesting gameplay decisions to be had once you’ve got a dozen bases and a few million in the bank. Ship building is great. Wonderful! A whole suite of quality-of-life features are needed however to reduce some of the mechanical tedium and open up more interesting patterns. Third-party tools take a lot of weight off the development of these features and I think it’s fine to exploit that. But automating the interactive bits isn’t something third-party tools can do (without breaking ToS) so I think you really need to build a solution with some amount of urgency. And I’m not completely convinced the game doesn’t need some additional end-game goal (or multiple goals) on top of all that.
The second concern is simply that the price tag feels steep, even for what I imagine a “completed” version of the game to feature. This is of course a biased, personal perspective that is certainly shaded by my views I’ve outlined above. But it feels to me like you would capture a lot more total revenue (subscriptions * cost) by going with a lower subscription price. I also think highly of other revenue streams, such as:
player naming of planets, systems, ship designs, and so on
stylized player badges or ranks (swag) that appear throughout the UI
corporation creation (I think this itself could be a pay-for feature) or other corp-related enhancements
There’s a lot you can do here. And I really, really hope you all get to do it.
Anyway, that’s my 2 cents. Hope my perspective was useful.
I think game should have few kinds of subscriptions, because:
everyone had different wallet.
most of online games revenue is based on few % of players.
with one subscription 7 eur, maybe you can get 100 players paying monthly, so total only 700 eur, so I think not enough revenue., Even with 1000 players, 7000 eur in my opinion is not enough to keep few workers, servers, advertising etc.
from beginning I check connected users, and always same around 100, so I can believe that similar amount of players join and quit, and with one subscription I expect that more players will quit, than join
most important for me in game is demand and supply on CX and LM, which require more players, and I think one subscription can cause opposite
I think game should have 3 subscriptions plus extra things to buy like name your planet etc
I propose:
basic for 2-3 eur, which give you access to get company rating, and only accepting contracts on LM
pro 7 eur, same things as you proposed
pro plus 15-25 eur, which give sth extra, maybe boost to ships speed or more space cargo, more things with corporation management, more production queue slots etc.
Dear Dev Team, I do hope this will fit here. I have a FA Comet tier license and was contemplating to upgrade it to either Moon or Planet. What sets me back is that the website does not credit my existing commitment, instead offering a new purchase. Any chance to just pay the difference to support you?
Let me try to provide a bit of background on where our pricing decision came from.
We are in the tricky situation of having several contradicting requirements:
As you have already pointed out, we rely on a critical mass of players to keep in-game markets fluid and the economy stable. This makes a free-2-play tier almost mandatory, because getting players into a game that is free in principle is a lot easier than into one that’s pay-2-play from the get-go. At the same time, the share of players in F2P games that actually convert to payers is fairly low. We assume it will be a bit above average for PrUn, but still.
Since PrUn is a “realistic business sim”, we always have to walk a fine line between what is pay-2-win and what’s just premium/PRO. This rules out a majority of the common free-2-play monetisation models that rely on milking whales to finance the game. That in turn caps our “revenue potential” per player.
We have to be realistic about what kind of market PrUn appeals to. We are hoping that once the game becomes more polished and the obvious UI, UX and gameplay issues are ironed out we can reach an active player-base somewhere in the low 5-digit range. But more than that would be delusional with a niche title like ours.
So once you run the numbers within these given parameters, you somewhat automatically arrive at the price we’ve picked.
We have obviously looked into other options as well and that’s why we will continue to offer the Early Access supporter tiers. But we can’t rely on selling naming rights forever. We want a fair and transparent pricing model that is somewhat predictable. Basing our business on vanity features alone just feels a bit too risky.
Just to make sure, what will happen exactly on the reset/restart? Players lose everything (“coliq”?) and restart from the beginning, new planets, and/or what else?
On a reset everyone starts over in a new, fresh universe. There will be some planets that are familiar, but they might have changed resource concentrations. Usually we also release new features with a restart.
One factor you should consider is that the main reason most players want a Pro license at the moment is to access the local markets, and specifically shipping - for newer players to accept shipping contracts, and for older players to get extra shipping done. With the release of ignition, and the move to a subscription model, I worry that you might be sabotaging your own business model. You will likely face pressure on multiple fronts:
Selling newer players on paying a 7 euros per month subscription is going to be a lot harder than the current 10 euro one time fee for indefinite asteroid tier, or in many cases players who got access with free keys from backers. Newer players are the lifeblood of the shipping industry, and you will probably lose a lot of them who see an ongoing subscription commitment as too much to ask.
Ignition will allow larger players to build ships. This makes it less likely that larger players will want or need to rely on shipping from newer players. So even larger players may be able to get away without a PRO license, and without those lucrative shipping contracts posted newer players will have even less incentive to subscribe.
As I think was alluded to earlier, if there aren’t enough people using local markets, it will further reduce incentives for anyone to even subscribe for a PRO license.
I would also further suggest that if ship building is extremely expensive, as it is on the test server, you might find people effectively paying to win by subscribing multiple accounts or paying for PRO license for newer players in exchange for exclusive shipping. Personally, if it were allowed in the rules or if I had a little less integrity, I would already have several accounts so that I could contract shipping to my alts.
I think to make PRO license worth it you are going to need to come up with better reasons to go PRO. This means new game mechanics or new features that are locked behind the PRO license, and inevitably if you want to rely on this as your primary source of revenue it is going to have to be pay to access content in some way. I don’t know if you already have stuff planned, but if you don’t this needs to make it into your road map soon.
Finally, I would like to say that in the meantime you really should strongly consider selling of naming rights as a temporary means to raise additional revenue. Almost every single financially “successful” free to play game either uses the pay to win model, or the pay for cosmetics/QoL model. As you have already ruled out pay to win, so I think that leaves us with cosmetics and quality of life improvements. Unfortunately naming rights won’t cover the bills in the long term, as you will rapidly run out of things to name with the current scale of the galaxy. You will need a better long term plan if you want Prosperous Universe to be successful and bring in enough money to cover the cost of ongoing development.
Here are some monetization suggestions. I don’t suggest you implement all of this, it’s just some ideas that you might consider if you haven’t already.
One time purchases:
Naming Planets and Systems - this feature is already implemented, why not give players the option as there is clearly a demand for it
Custom Flag upload for company or corporation (pending admin review) - player flag would be displayed on local market listings, corporation flag would be displayed on governed planets.
Prospecting - add an appropriate randomly generated resource with randomly generated abundance to a planet that has less than 4 resources. Add “Discovered by” tag to resources
PRO License features:
Run for governor and vote in elections
Access to CM upgrades. Reduce size of starter base to 250 Area, and reduce CM to size 0. Allow increasingly costly upgrades to the CM to unlock 500, 750, and 1000 area
Access to shipyards (as I suggested in the ignition feedback, I also strongly suggest reducing the entry level cost of building ships as well so that this is meaningful to more than just the biggest players)
Longer Queues (for example increase from 5 queue per building to 10, or it could be tied to CM level)
Exploration (I really really hope this feature is planned in the roadmap at some point)
I would also recommend offering a one time introductory pro license, for example 6 months at 10 euro. This greatly lowers the barrier to entry for newer players and gives them the opportunity to play for a while with a PRO license before they decide if they want to subscribe. I don’t know if it would make up for lost revenue, but you would definitely see a lot more subscribers that way. I would also recommend selling discounted pro subscriptions for 6 months and/or a year.
I also think the 7 euro per month price point is poorly positioned. If you are going to charge 7 you might as well charge 8 because there isn’t much difference to our lizard brains and it keeps the USD price point below 10 as well. If you can knock it down to 4 I think you will see a lot more volume of subscribers, because the less than 5 price point is psychologically less intimidating. Obviously it’s impossible to predict if you would get double the PRO subscribers to justify the reduced price, but I don’t think that PrUn in it’s current state can really justify subscription fees on par with much more mature/developed games.
We’ve got a lot of very clever people in the community, should we start a thread where we can brainstorm monetization ideas?
Of course, it would likely require a fair bit more transparency from the dev team around where they want to take the game and the things they feel are appropriate within the setting.
Without their vision for the game being made available to us - and honestly discussed with us - we are just throwing sand in the dark.
Was going to do that later today, I think if we do it as very much a interested citizens trying to help spitball some ideas the devs might find it useful. Want to be careful that its not “we want stuff free, don’t feed your families”
I have thought a bit more about Early Access and the subscription model.
I like that you aim to still give everyone access to the game.
If I recall correctly your other game AirlineSim actually requires everyone to pay for game time, there is no f2p model, correct?
I also recall that you use AirlineSim Credits that players have to purchase to then buy game time with said Credits.
Recently a few people threw out the idea that name rights could be purchased seperatly.
How about, instead of monthly subscription, you go a similar route like AirlineSim?
PrUn Coins/Credits/Token (whatever the name).
Players can buy PrUn Coins at a certain rate, bigger packs give a better rate.
These coins can then be used to activate 30 days of Pro license.
The coins could be used to purchase the right to name a planet/system/asteroid/station that has no name yet.
The coins could maybe be traded on the FX? (You do have game time trading on the roadmap)
The coins could be used to puchase a CX base module (picking up on an idea from a different threat)
I am sure the community and dev team can come up with many more ideas.
Maybe its even possible to earn PrUn Coins in someway? (Watching ads?)
Please note that the AirlineSim credits cannot be used in-game. The reason there are credits in AS is because there are multiple game worlds where you can play and each costs x credits per holding per day (or so ;)). So having credits there is merely a convenience: you buy x credits and can use them to play in several worlds instead to have to buy access to each game world.
We do have plans to make game time tradable in the in-game markets and it is on our roadmap as APEX licence trading.
Right now it would add to much complexity and would need to much development time, so we postponed that to some time in the future.
