Forum ‹ Feedback ‹ Future prices?

[Vania]

Hi guys,

I was wondering what your plans are for prices in the future,
I heard somewhere that you were thinking about changing the pricing scheme.

Any chance the rates for Pro and Enterprise will match the ones for Plus?
As it is now its kind of scary knowing you'll have to pay 20x more for 5x the traffic when upgrading from Plus to Pro.

Maybe you could measure the CPU usage of games and use cheaper servers for games that require very little processing?

[Oliver]

We don't have any fixed future plans for pricing, but we're of course always considering ways to improve our offering.

The 25$ Plan was originally 99$, but was discounted early on. That is, you're not supposed to think that Pro & enterprise is expensive, you're supposed to think that Plus is cheep. That was our thinking anyway, flawed as it might be,

Does that answer your question?

Best,
Oliver

[fox1980]

You're talking as if their expenses we're only bandwith and processing power, but to be able to provide this service they have to pay for fast hardware, maintenance, software licenses, electricity, fast network connections, datacenter space, salaries and whatnot. So in my opinion it's not quite fair to put matters like that. The plus account used to be ~99$ a month, and they reduced it to ~24$ when the service got out of beta, so when you see the steep upgrade from plus to pro don't look at it as pro being too expensive, but plus being way too cheap.

[Vania]

Ah, that explains it. Now everything makes sense!

I came up with a new business plan:
I add more singleplayer content to my game to attract players and charge 5$ to access the multiplayer features.
That way my game can become viral without me worrying about paying thousands of dollars every month (and if I'm paying thousands of dollars that would mean I'm making hundreds of thousands)

This scheme also makes it easier for me to license the game, since sponsors would be licensing the singleplayer content only and they dont have to worry about the server costs.


Does this make sense to you?

[fox1980]

There's many ways to monetize software and it's really up to you decide wich works best for your project. You can either do it like you said, making singleplayer free, and multiplayer paid, tough i would advise having some kind of multiplayer trial (7 days free or something like that) so people know what they're getting. You can also have the game completely free but the option to upgrade to a premium montlhy payment were they'll have access to exclusive content.
I suggest you do a google search for alternative revenue solutions since there's plenty around.