New Publishing & Revenue Model

[guildofblades]

Hi Sébastien,

>>Well Ryan, I hope I'm not bothering you too much about this ... I'm not even quite sure if (at first) you wanted to talk about service, subscription, ads or building a community and licences. So, I've given (again) more thougths to this, but first, a general note.<<

I'm open to talking about any alternative model. Thats been the story of my company's existence. For our smaller lines, for the type of company the Guild has grown into, I've just been questioning if its even worthwhile to keep the bottom 2-4 product lines we have in print at all. I don't like having all my eggs in one basket, so thats driving me to find ways to make those lines either gross more money and be a path to growth or to make the same money while cutting our labor and time to support them down. In examining our options it came to me that advertising as the primary revenue model with free online content might be the way to go because its already working for other game formats. Add on services, subscriptions, licensing and other revenue generators for the game all fall under the scope of my exploration here.

>>And I must admit, I didn't study the viability of this model that much so far ... <<

Well, don't worry, we pretty much stumbled upon it by accident. We began with putting our board game, Europe 1483 online as a human moderated Play By E-mail game simply as a marketing tool to bring some more attention to the board game series. It was well received and in 200o it quickly expanded to include the whole series with unified games with up to 84 players each. By 2001 we were seeing 5-15 games running at a time, which seemed about the maximum thresh hold for finding volunteer moderators to run all those games. It was so much work the average moderator faced burn out after 10 or less total turns. So we began an exploration of what it would take to automate the game via computer.

7 contracts with programmers and 6 years later, we have those games. But along the way our understanding of the market and potential market and our game's position in it grew. When we first started it had little advertising and those were just banners that could be traded in banner exchanges for extra promotions. Later we began to get a clearer picture of the scope the game could expand into and came to understand attaining a large user base wouldn't be very hard. Examination of the advertising model began to show it held greater potential for that game than did selling subscription services for it. When we delved deeper into the advertising market and model we found it could be enhanced for higher returns than we first thought. That is when we shifted focus and went with an all free game that generates money via advertising and a bit of extra money via selling enhanced memberships. I've been so focused on getting these games going these past couple of years I never thought to examine if the same model could be applied to RPGs (since our first foray grew out of a board game design). Now I think it can.

>>Google and Yahoo are quite different from what we're aiming. Not only are they famous, but also, they are "generalist", being able to target specific users toward the kind of ads they will provide to them. Good for the users (or so to say) and good for the advertiser. As for rpg, we're far away from general content. This has been discussed before. That said, last time I've read about ads revenue from the internet, I thougth it was on a decline, not a growth, since return on investiment for the advertisser was not really there. Well, I need to check that out.<<

Google and Yahoo were mentioned because they are the giants of the online ad industry. But there are companies at all sizes making a go at it. The thing to remember about advertisers, I don't need to find advertisers who give two squats about role playing games. I only need to find advertisers who wish to target our users' by their demographic. For our MMO games we're running 95% male so far, so that in itself is very targeted and can be further targeted by age grouping. Most advertisers with rich media adverts can already self select by geographical targeting.

>>I'm not contractiding your number, but 100,000 users is A LOT !!! Honestly, the day you come to have those volumes of users, you'll be a breakthru in the rpg industry, given that you'll have almost no fees (you don't print cards, nor publish books). These line of product, I think, would generate more income than all your others.<<

In the world of MMO games, 100,000 isn't all that large. Remember, without even really trying we had previously given away more than 1.2 million copies of a RPG download. As these games exit beta testing we'll be putting them through free game download sites to get them even more downloads (and there are a LOT of download sites). As for user's, having spent no time and virtually no money (like $10) on marketing so far word of mouth has brought us more than 2,200 users. Now, they are not all "active" users, but its not a bad start. And our primary game is still very much in beta with a few quirks still. Thermopylae Online is closer to completion only because its a far more simple game and I am looking forward to seeing what the new Thermopylae movie hitting theaters next month is going to do.

Anyway, I have heard estimates that there are maybe as many as 2 million semi active able top roll players out there. Grant, 90% are just D&D players. And there are another 4 million lapsed players. Further, general statistical theory suggests that 3% of any given population will be predisposed to accept any idea or product. That of course will vary a great deal, but any product of any real worth, if marketing very aggressively ought to eventually be able to achieve at least a 3% acceptance. 3% of the US population alone is larger than the total player base who have EVER played D&D. So do I think a RPG marketing freely using a tool as powerful as the internet has the "potential" to get at least 100,000 active players? Oh yeah....

>>- In a MMO, each player is a user. In the case of rpg, you would have only a real user, the DM. So, for 100,000 users, you would have in fact, more or less, 20,000 real active users. That's why you need to attract players too to the website. I'll come to that later.<<

I agree. To be truly successful the content has to be able to appeal to both player and GM. While the content itself might draw in some players and the forums and community built around the game others, some tools and features will have to be built in to try and draw in more of the players into regular visit to the site.

>>- Since your users don't generate income per se, you depend on your advertisers. Would you be able to find advertisers for 3 millions ? Because, that's the stake. And still, it's rpg. There's a limit to advertise low cost vacations on a rpg site. Well, you're better placed than me to evaluate that.<<

Yeah, getting the advertisers isn't that challenging. You get the impressions and have some nicely focused demographics and you can assemble a team of professions to go get you those sales. And where they come up short there are dozens of ad agencies (some more reputable than others) that will let you publish your remnant, unsold, inventory for some value. As I said above, I don't need advertisers who care about RPGs. I only need advertisers generally interested in targeted mails ages 13-35.

>>For players, use the website to allow the DM to distribute xps and let the players manage their progress thru the site. Allow the players to "deposit" maps they have created during play (in a "cluster" way). As for illustrations, I don't think you should give them away : sell them as bundle instead. A group might be interested in "buying" 20 illustrations for their own purposes. That shouldn't be hard to sell ..<<

I like the idea of selling illustrations. And I am quite sure as I build this community more I can find illustrators that will be willing to participate in a revenue share for digital downloads of collections. I don't get what you mean about using the website to distribute XPs? I'm generally shooting to present a table top RPG here with the expectation that most players will still play in that manner. Though I could foresee working out a licensing arrangement with one of the preexisting online play supported clients to allow for online play too.

As for world creation stuff such as NPCs, buildings, guilds, businesses, maps, tribes, or whatever players want to submit, for now and the foreseeable future I see accepting such submissions manually, reviewing it manually and publishing only that which I think adds value and is reasonably balanced for the game world or setting. I might be able to make it so that players can "save" their own creations online and share it with others, but its not material that would instantly go live for everyone. The reason being is that we are not just building content, but also an IP with a mind towards licensing. And an IP that will be such to keep people coming back for the long haul.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

[Seth M. Drebitko]

One thing that may help lighten your work load is to turn these smaller projects into community projects. By creating an active community set up similar to sites like bloggerparty.com and the like you could allow users to write their own material for the games, supported by feedback from other like minded fans and still make money. The concept behind bloggerparty.com is that when some one creates a new post (or in your case page of content) it will automatically display ads on the page. The money is split down the middle because each time the ad is clicked it switches back and forth between the site owners ad id, and the users ad id. This would benefit you two fold, you still make money for doing next to no work, users are encouraged to be incredibly active in the community by getting to pick up some pocket change (or maybe more) which in many cases may simply end up back in your hands because to them its extra money that they could spend on your games.
I personally plan to use a model similar to this but on a much larger scale, and working with my own ad system, but I would say just like bloggerparty Adsense would work. I could probably search around the net and find you a script that would rotate the ads for you, if you are interested further.
Regards, Seth

[daMoose_Neo]

Ryan - I think he was saying something to the effect of allowing GMs to update & maintain character sheets online. So, we just had an awesome crawl, everyone goes home, GM logs in and gives everyone 1000 exp. Bob logs in little bit later and HEY! Cool, his character's been updated to show the new EQ and experiance.

[guildofblades]

>>Ryan - I think he was saying something to the effect of allowing GMs to update & maintain character sheets online. So, we just had an awesome crawl, everyone goes home, GM logs in and gives everyone 1000 exp. Bob logs in little bit later and HEY! Cool, his character's been updated to show the new EQ and experiance.<<

Hi Nate,

I get that. But what then happens with that character when the player takes it to go play in their other gaming group which is not played online and for which the Realm Master isn't participating in our online community? I think by giving players and RMs a variety of communication tools such as VOIP chat, regular text chat rooms/IRC, their own e-mail accounts through our on site e-mail system, private discussion lists, etc, the Realm Master can just as easily jot the player e-mails to tell them how many Experience Points were earned. And this doesn't tie the character or player into the online system in any sort of burdensome way. I want to offer content for the RPG online and I want to offer the ability for players to be able to play online with other players, but in no way do I want to restrict the ability to play the good old traditional way.

In fact, after reading some commentary about how recently there have been incidents of World of Warcraft MMO RPG players have been successfully introduced to traditional Role Playing, as we build this out I think I am very pointedly going to build game play examples, videos, etc, to show our role playing to these online MMO role players and bring the into the fold. WOW now has something like 8 million users. A successful campaign of reaching out to those players and introducing table top role playing games to them could easily be considered very successful if just a hundred thousand or two of them can be reached and converted.

I think it will be enough that if we can build a really great interactive character sheet that can export to PDF so as to be easily printed, I don't need to tie game play, items, experience or anything else into a limited computerized system. Players can input entries onto their character sheets the same way as they can use a pencil or pen to update their paper character sheets. The thing to remember about our old WHAT RPG system is spell creation and skill creation is something players do themselves and is somewhat free form, limited to a game mechanic for assigning "difficulties" to the spell or skill and, of course, approval by the player's Realm Master. So trying to tie experience to a computerized system that has lists of spells, skills, etc, for players to pick from a list and gain, upgrade, etc, would be quite impossible. The old practice of manual updating of character sheets has worked for more than 3 decades for table top RPGs...I see no reason to mess with what works. Just trying to bring the edge of technology to it. So a character sheet, instead of just being a single or double sided piece of paper, may now include space for unlimited pages for lists of items, spells, skills, riches. They could include campaign notes, player notes on NPCs and/or businesses encountered, notes on story elements and tid bits of information the player might want to follow up on later, pages dedicated to such information as the PC's relatives or leading henchmen and so on and so forth. We don't want to do anything to "force" players and Realm Masters to play online, but rather to keep all their data online and to make that easy. While there we'll make all the game rules, world setting content, etc, available to them as well and make money on advertising being on all of it.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com