Furry Moon Creations

This is a question that keeps coming up, repeatedly. The obvious answer is all of them, the real question is how. Free players (F2P) use bandwidth, and that costs money. Pay as you go (PAG) only pay when they want something but still use bandwidth when not paying. Pay to Play (P2P) pay for the bandwidth they use and the services they get.

The perfect plan. The perfect plan is to make a game so great everyone wants to pay to play ... but that is not real.

The next best thing. F2P players should provide content for P2P and PAG players. What this means is their existence and involvement in the game should prove an asset to those paying for the game. Therefore, a F2P player must be able to access most of the content of the paid player, though the path should be less gainful, meaning they must play more to gain the same equivalency. There must be enough items of value to a PAG player to keep them covering their cost while still providing them with more than the F2P but not less than a P2P. P2P should be the most desirable of the choices.

One might ask why and the answer is simple from a business point of view but not always from the user. There is X cost to maintain any online product. If it cost $10,000 to run a company per month and they have 10,000 users then the following cases should give you a rough idea of what it takes to make it all work.

Case 1: One size fits all, Pay to Play or quit, (the World of Warcraft way)
If each user pays $1.00 per month the company breaks even, anything else helps the company grow.

Case 2: Free to Play limited, Pay to Play everything (This is the standard for most online games)
The 80 / 20 rule applies here. 80% of the users are free and 20% pay. This means to break even each user must pay $5 per month for the company to break even.

Case 3: Free, Pay to Play, or Pay as you Go. (The way we plan to do it; the Dungeons and Dragon Online way)
75/10/15 Free/PAG/P2P split here. This gets complicated, as you could place the entire weight of the cost on your 15% Pay to play charging $6.67 per month and making profit off the PAG users this won't work. Why? Because that 15% will play something cheaper.

So lets assume we have to base our cost on Case 2. This means we fall short $2,500 per month that our Pay as you Go users must cover. This gets unreliable, however. The obvious thing is if each PAG  put in $2.50 per month, the company breaks even. The problem is, Pay as you go won't spend much money during tax season or major traveling holidays because money is tight. It's amazing how someone won't spend $2.50 on a game they play 20 hours a week because they have to buy gas and bottle water for a car trip for three days. The water ends up costing them more in three days then they would have spent on something that would have provided more value to them pound for pound.

So the real hope for a company using this method is the 80/20 from Case 2 applying to the 10% of PAG users, so 2% spending $12.50 per month, two and a half times as much as the Pay to Play. It will cycle through them, so each one ends up spending less each over the course of a year, but they cover shortfalls of each other in some of the slow months.

If you're thinking, "Whoa, these companies are making a killing charging $15 a month", please keep in mind these were simple round numbers for an easy example. Every company has its own cost to run and maintain. Each has a different number of users. There are many factors I'm glossing over to get as the heart of the issue companies face when picking a pricing.

So the next time you buy a drink for a $0.99 plus sales tax and state bottling tax, think about how much your preferred entertainment costs you and how many hours you spend on it. Then do like every other gamer, sit down and start playing, drinking the contents, and quickly forget as you get argo from something that wants to kill your character.