Heh, this is my kind of thread...

First off, #1 is just because we don't earn any money. We spend advertising money just to keep the active player count on a square zero. We haven't got money to boost the user count before our premium packages have been launched and before we earn a steady revenue. Then we'll slowly start. It's not that we want to make big money on this - we just don't want to lose any more than we have already done. It will take some time before it's actually profitable to run this game, but it's fun so we'll keep on working even though it costs us a lot in server costs, marketing costs and time consumption. So we'll have to wait and see if people are willing to pay for the extra features and then we might boost marketing... You can read more about this and many more questions in the recent interview we made for Onrpg.com - one of the biggest online game sites in the world:

Path to Pelantas Interview

As for #2 we have many things coming up to help this. But we will be working on this continually and any kind of help is more than welcome. This issue has alo been discussed before in this thread:

About the game development...

Please let us know if you have any good ideas!

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Path to Pelantas - a fantasy browser-based game (PBBG)
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Yes, very nice indeed. I got pretty excited when I read the interview, as I feel the development was recently somewhat slower compared to the days I started playing. I'm hoping some nice stuff such as buildings and premium package are on the way.

i'm a firm believer that if you want to make money you have to invest money first. so waiting for people to buy premium before actually advertising the game might work but it will surely be a slow process that may even fail. as i said community is very important and a game with no community will make new players leave rapidly.
the ideal thing would be to do an aggressive ad campaign that brings a lot of people all of a sudden. this will probably create a decent community that will in exchange keep the players interested and prevent them from leaving. my biggest concern is that if you rely on money from premium in order to advertise you might be on to a nasty surprise as very few people actually buy such packages. maybe 10% ? or even less if the price is to steep. also you have to research what countries your people come from and see if they could afford premium or not, see if your methods of payment are easily available there or not.
of course it's your money and your business so it's entirely up to you to chose the strategy but keep in mind that with proper advertising even a shitty game can become an economic success. just look at the big companies that start advertising months or even years before the game is actually released :)

right now you have 500 active players. if you convince at least 50 of them to be constant writers on the forum then you can surely say the interest will rise for all 500 hundred.
reading/writing tutorials, faqs, strategy guides or simply chit chatting makes people much more comfortable than logging in assigning battle orders and logging out. a guy that spends 10 hours a week on this game is more likely to buy premium than a guy that spends 10 minutes and the forum is the only way to convince people to spend more time here.

maybe try putting in-game messages like "my lord, all the other knights and heroes have gathered in the forum to discuss kingdom matters and share a cup of wine. why not join them?"

or you could even organize quest/SE writing competitions. most people would love to see their work appear in the game and if at the end of the quest it also says it's been created by user XXX then they'll surely be happy.

even more competitions could be organized. like "best idea of the month" where people post game developing ideas and the best one gets implemented and also rewarded (premium package for some time.)

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Live for today because yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come.

I think you are both under-estimating the costs for expanding :) For fun, let me know how much you would think it would cost us to increase active user count from 500 to say 5000?

We need to get the game fully functional, we need to implement micro-payment, we need to implement an effective referral system, we need to optimise everything regarding gently letting newbies into the game and then we need to optimise all our conversions; front page signups -> login twice -> become active player -> become paying player. First when all these conversion percentages are adequate we can afford to boost user count. And this is not just a decision - it's a fact. Because we have tested all this during last three years and we know that marketing money would be seriously wasted at the moment.



Regarding Facebook, then it's of course on our to do list. But this will be a major major work load, which is not prioritised atm.

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Path to Pelantas - a fantasy browser-based game (PBBG)
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Ok, I understand that you need to optimize your conversions, but like Dimtopia said, you can really reduce such frictions by just improving the community aspect by boosting forum. When I started playing hattrick, there were more than abundant information, tutorials, faqs besides a huge and active forum to really get me started. Of course, HT had already enough users to contribute, but I still think that having a stronger community activity would yield better and faster "front page signups -> login twice -> become active player -> become paying player." conversion than waiting to complete all aspects regarding to it. I'm not saying you should not focus on optimizing the conversions, you should definitely do it, but even you do nothing about it, the game is playable and an active commuinty would greatly help in those conversions. Seriously again, it's probably the community aspect that keeps the players, as you already know that currently HT is almost all about it. Close the HT forum and see how many players will stay. I honestly don't think that Pelantas' conversion mechanics are worse (or grossly different) than that of HT. Micro-payment and supporter are somewhat irrelevant in terms of number of players in the game, and HT's in-game referral system is insignificant (though I have no clue upon how their inter-games referral system is).

About the cost for expending from 500 to 5000: From the interview, I learned that thousands of people signed up, but if you had ended up with stable 500, I think it's somewhat alarming and you probably didn't do your best to keep those users. Maybe you didn't want either. If I were you, I wouldn't blame solely the conversion mechanics here. It's not all about the money, but it's also about making correct decisions:

Ok, within my development studio, we created a world-cup match prediction game. We strictly believed that it should be on Facebook platform to cut advertising / marketing costs. The game was a PR project for my company, we didn't promise any awards, it was just for fun to play. All we care was to make people know that we can produce such thing. We actively posted on some of the biggest pages on facebook, asked our friends who control them to do the seeding. Producing the game was a last minute decision, so we opened it online just 3 days before the WC began. It spread like wildfire and there were 3000 people playing in 2nd week, we did some more seeding efforts and there were about 8000 people who registered on week 3. When the cup was over we had total about 12000 users registered the app, and about 5000 was still playing (not removed the app). All this happened in 30 day period. We had spent almost no money but a lot of voluntary work. It's still online if you want to check http://apps.facebook.com/cukkacukka/ unfortunately the game is in Turkish only.

Now, what I want to tell is basically this: If you prioritize the community aspect (hell, it's Facebook), you can create a more active community who are without receiving a dime can advertise for you. This is a very significant benefit. People will also stay like Dimtopia said. Of course, if you think the only way to advertise is to pay for the banners on those big-traffic web sites, than your costs might be higher. I am among a bunch of lords who came here from a HT forum, so my coming here has cost you $0. You also mention server costs, which I don't really see why. I pay about 30 Euros / month for a Munich based virtual dedicated server. My estimation is that something similar would be enough for about some 5-10k users. Am I missing here? I'd like to know what's so demanding and why this hosting issue is so significant.

Now about the facebook connection "major major work load". 1 month of active development, 1 month of testing. If you don't know about the platform, add 2 weeks to compansate research efforts. No?

Heh, I was actually talking about marketing costs for the rise from 500 to 5000. My best estimate is somewhere around 50-70.000$ We don't have this money at all and need to fund this by gradually having users pay for premium packages.

Regarding server and maintenance costs per active user - no, 30 Euros per month is nowhere near enough. Our estimate is approximately 0,30$ per month per active user, which means 1500$ per month with 5000 active users. I don't think any of you have an idea of what kind of database is really needed to run this game :)

Back when Hattrick started there were practically no competition. The game community could evolve easily by word of mouth. You don't have the same possibilities today since there are thousands of other games out there. So they had a steady rise of users with practically no marketing and - as you say - no referral system. And the last five years they haven't expanded...

Yeah, thousands of people have signed up but even those players who become active also stop playing again. We have been operating for three years now. If the same amount of users had signed up in a three month period instead, then our active user count would be at least 5-10 times as high. So you cant use our current conversion for anything. You can only use the month by month conversion, which is a slow process and it takes analytical skills to point out the main issues.

Of course Facebook is optimally suited for viral marketing and of course we should at some point exploit this. But when you say 1 month of active development and 1 month of testing, that would mean 1 year for us, since we are only developing the game in the late late hours when we really ought to sleep.

All these things are interwined - we need some cash flow to be able to make things progress and be able to free ourselves a little and then gradually work more -> earn more -> spend more. Then some day we will be able to work half time or even full time with the game and then we would be able to make all these things fast.

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Path to Pelantas - a fantasy browser-based game (PBBG)
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Heh, your estimates are indeed generous, but your math is competely wrong, since you are jumping to conclusions :) You cannot go from 500 to 5000 in 1 day and your math is based on an immediate change. This would take many months and during these months we would have had at least 25.000 active players (just an estimate) to reach a current number of 5.000. The reason is that active players come and go. so we get 10 but lose 8. But in the business case is included that some of these 8 actually did pay before they left.

Also, when expanding, the viral effect will be increasingly more decisive. So the cost per active player will at some point decrease. This will be helped further by search engine optimisation. The bigger we get the more "free" players we will also get. The initial boost is indeed the hardest and the most expensive and that is why it would be disastrous just to expand wildly now.

A for the servers - our current cost is around 250$ a month. And this is extremely cheap based on the resources needed. I have no technical insight but I do know that we only get this price as a friend's favour. Every other provider would have charged at least ther double amount for our current needs. If you are interested in knowing the current resources and work load, then send Mandragoran a mail and he can tell you...

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Path to Pelantas - a fantasy browser-based game (PBBG)
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I am a new player, still completing the Aspirant level, but I just wanted to let Aiken Firefall know that I chose him as the referral for bonus because of this quote.

I think I will like playing Path to Pelantas!

I will try to drop by the Forum every day. There is a LOT to read and to do to get started; I will definitely need to refer to the Forum to get my bearings as a noob. :P

Yeah, the dancing smiley doesn't work. You need to double the amount of "\'s" to make it work -->

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Death is the road to awe!

Just to get back on topic here, the forum / community has never been very active. Especially during the summer period as now the activity drops to close to zero. This is a real shame. Also because many of the people who joined and quit again would probably still be here if the forum was alive.

As for myself, I haven't been very active in the forum for the past 4-6 months for various reasons but I am still the player with most posts overall (no, Llorente does not count ) and that is a good example of how much there is actually going on in here.

As you can read in the interview that Goffdahl links to PtP is build with Hattrick as a model. Roughly 6 months before I joined PtP I joined Hattrick and I came to PtP through Hattrick. After a year or so I was getting bored with Hattrick but I stayed active for another 2 years because of the forum there. It was not until I was unable to stay active in the Hattrick forum that I quit the game and I know that many other active players in Hattrick are only active because of the forum. PtP is fun enough in itself for me to be active without the forum but that will not be the case for many players that join so it is of great importance that we get the forum up and running. And I would not mind an active forum here .

Many have tried to start different threads with different topics over the years but when there are only some 20-30 people who actually use the forum actively these threads die out rather quickly. Most of the threads that are posted are therefore game related and most of these are rantings about bad luck mixed with some ideas to future development. I mean no offence here but in the long run it gets boring to read new posts about things other people have complained about a month ago (and I am not trying to point fingers. I have started threads like that myself usually about hunting (when are you going to remove the ridiculous penalty in xp when hunting??? )).

I hope that we players can get the activity level up in here but it will take an effort from more than the usual visitors and we need to start topics that are about other things that the recent loss or failed hunt... For my part, I hope (and will try) to be more active in the future.

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Death is the road to awe!