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Old 2015-03-09, 05:08 AM   [Ignore Me] #88
Figment
Lieutenant General
 
Re: Daybreak Games Hit With Layoffs, Matt Higby resigns


Originally Posted by Muldoon View Post
Point blank: how do we make money from this? Cause this would be a lot of work on our end for... what exactly?
That kinda depends. Personally I thought it a bad idea to make PS1 free to play. It just invited braindead hackers back in without any cost or risk to themselves. :/ Lowering the subcost would have been an option. Before PS1 was made F2P, I personally prefered the idea of over-time loyal subscriber rewarding, which has been implemented on PS2 I think. Or including it as a bonus to people who pay premium for PS2 (two games for the price of one). The ideal one would be a choice between one time purchase or purchase over time until the one-time-purchase cost (and a bit of interest) would be reached. People who have invested in a game play it differently than free account players.

Thing is, PS1 wasn't made to be F2P and is too vulnerable to third party cheating software, there should be at least account related costs to put up a threshold, even if it's no guarantee.

I think there's two scheme's I would consider at this point: a one time purchase for an account key would be the best scheme, since it would deter cheats the most (they'd risk more with a ban, so if they'd cheat they'd do it subtly, rather than gamebreaking: most blatant hackers used free accounts). The other the aforementioned PS2 premium inclusion. You won't see protests against this, since nobody really wants to play total F2P PS1 due to lack of (GM)-support from SOE anyway. SOE hasn't even bothered to ensure all content worked (Core Combat and Aftershock broke after the server transfer to the west coast) and when it turned out to be broken to at least make sure all empires have the same amount of locked caves.

Server running costs wouldn't be earth shattering (iirc PS1 could run on a Pentium II as server hardware) and you've got a Community Council thing running, so NDA contracts already exist and people drafting and determining contracts are already hired, contracts would just have to be expanded a bit. So administration is covered as well.

When you run the game mostly with volunteer enthusiasts, your development costs are non-existent.

Regarding the transfer and investment, theoretically it is possible to ask former PS1-devs if they would be interested in helping to run it as a hobby project for a few hours a week or month, with a share of any profits made. Whether they'd be interested, I don't know. IIRC a number of PS1-devs left SOE somewhat disheartened, but they might just love the game enough to be interested if they got carte blanche to do with it as they'd see fit.

If you could get those folks interested, the investment would be a lot lower. And of course, GMs could have a similar structure.


Currently though, PS1 makes no money at all. So all you stand in losing is a one time investment. :/ Me, I'd make some calls to devs. Hell, if you could just get me the contact details of former devs and a detailed "this is as far as you'd be allowed to go", I'd contact them for you.

Last edited by Figment; 2015-03-09 at 05:10 AM.
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