unforum

[Ruuku]

[vpisteve]

Finding a standalone revenue model for an ARG will continue to be the Big Question for quite a while, unfortunately, especially in light of today's Perplex City announcement.

Every new art form needs a patron to support it at first. Sad to say that, even after all these years, broadcast TV and radio still count on the same patrons they did at the very beginning: advertisers. It's only been very recently that the technology has gotten to a point where a move away from this is possible.

ARGs that live by promotional dollars will probably continue to be the rule for the foreseeable future, although I'd love to see this not be the case. Part of the reason for this is that it's a very cut-and-dried revenue scenario: Someone pays you, you provide the service. There can be a pretty big margin there, as well as a bargain for those spending the dough. Selling ads? T-Shirts? No way, unless you have a HUGE audience to offset the costs (or a very naive sponsor). Pay-to-play? Every time it's tried, it's seems to work out even worse than previous attempts.

In addition, the problem with Kona's analogy is that, while valid, it takes time; and time is something that a live ARG usually doesn't have a lot of, and if it does, it'll face pretty big momentum/pacing challenges.

So find a patron, whether it be someone with advertising dollars to spend or just someone with tons of money who wants to see innovative stuff done. And yeah, good art isn't mutually exclusive from this. Ask Beethoven.

[rose]

If I were in the business of making ARGs instead of the business of posting theoretical replies to questions, I would probably look everywhere I could to find stories or activities with passionate and organized fans. Then I would make sure I had the IP rights to create what I wanted. Then I would develop my ideas for how the ARG would work. Then I would pitch everyone who would listen to me about making my game.

So I suppose that is just a pro-active version of the sponsorship model.

Steve is the expert on this so the following is just speculation on my part. Two crucial questions about making money on ARGs (like anything else) is how much do you want to make and how much is the game going to cost to produce. If you can keep your costs low, I wonder if pay to play could work if you had enough players.

Pay to play might work if there was an easy system of getting the payment, if the game was low cost per player, if you could play with a potentially huge community so the game would be fun and the cost would stay low per player (something like xbox live or second life?), and, most importantly, if the quality was high and the story was compelling.

I've wondered if Project Mu might have made money had they charged a minimal amount per player. I'm not sure if they would have made a lot, but they might at least have raised enough to cover their costs. (not that they wanted to raise money- it was totally a grass-roots effort.)

We haven't seen a game that "re-imagined" an existing story, although the HP Lovecraft aspect of Eldritch Errors might prove to do that. I've always been impressed and surprised that movies like Titanic and Lord Of the Rings are so hugely successful, even though the story is known well in advance to the audience. Maybe we need to get the first Shakespeare ARG going, I hear he still has lots of fans.

[Rekidk]

[Sylocat]

Or, you could always just swallow your pride and just plain ask for donations. Put a little link on your game's site that says, "You don't need to pay to play, but a little donation so we can help keep it running would be very much appreciated."

I am not being sarcastic when I say that in ANY walk of life you must never be too proud to beg.

[AtionSong]

Just a quick question to throw out there - I'm doing a cost-analysis for the ARG I'm working on. The web hosting package I'm thinking of buying offer 1,200 GM monthy transfer. This would be for between five and seven sites. Does this seem sufficient to support a fairly large player base? If I go over my monthly transfer, how expensive is additional transfer?

[Caz]

[imbri]

Too many variables to answer, really. How intensive and interactive are the sites? Flash? Video? Audio? Forums? Are you going to have puzzles that will require repeated page loads or encourage things like brute forcing? How often will the pages be updating? Will the updates be regular or irregular? By "fairly large" are you talking hundreds? thousands? hundreds of thousands?

It really sounds like more than enough. However, it might not be if your sites are multimedia heavy, highly interactive, and/or encourage loads of page views.

You can do some estimating, though. For example:

Say your average page with an image or two is 200 kb.
Say you update 2 times a week or 8 times a month.
Say during each update, 100 players visit 10 pages.

You'd be looking at: 200x8x100x10 = 1,600,000 kb or 1.6 GB/month

Of course, that's not considering the possibility of self hosted multimedia, puzzles that require/encourage numerous page views, more interactive sites or forums that encourage more regular visits (such as community or collaboration sites ie forums and wikis). Just guesstimate at some of that stuff and plug in the numbers.

As for additional transfer costs, that will depend on your host and they should be able to tell you that.

[sixsidedsquare]

Just bringing this thread back up after an idea popped into my head this morning, sort of like a street performer model. It would be more fitting for small grassroots games and I can't imagine it exactly being profitable, but it could ease the cost a little. After the game has finished you pass around the hat, or paypal link in this case, saying something along the lines of "Don't feel obliged, but if you enjoyed the game feel free to send me a few bucks." I'm not really sure how players would take this, but if you had made a Really Good Game I'm sure you'll be able to recoup at least a few pennies.

[Sylocat]

[notgordian]

Step One: Steal underpants.
Step Two: ?????
Step Three: PROFIT!

[sixsidedsquare]

Oh whoops, sorry Sylocat. I meant to mention what you said in that post, but I have a chronic habit of writing, going back and rewriting, then looking at and editing my posts. It was in there originally, honest..

I was thinking something like what you said, but rather than having it as a "help keep it running" thing on a site during the game, I was meaning putting purely at the end, to keep it from breaking curtain during play. Sort of show them the performance and then ask for their charity if they enjoyed it (like a street performer).

[Caz]

market research

[rose]

For what it is worth:

I attended two lectures at the games for change conference here in NYC. As usual, I talked about ARGs to everyone I met. There is serious interest in ARGs as games for change, people knew about WWO, for example.

Of particular interest, the people behind MoveOn seemed interested in having an ARG for their group -they are looking for ways to use gaming as part of MoveOn. I didn't hear their talk, but a few people asked me about using ARGs in the MoveOn context. Of course, I'm not a game designer, but it sure appeared like there is opportunity - I felt the room was a place full of opportunity for ARG PMs.

Maybe if PMs want to get paid for making games, you might consider looking at any large, organized group on the internet. All types of people, with all types of interests, are looking at gaming now.