Free for now
For now, Sunderwild™ barely exists, so any prototypes I share will be totally free.
But when the time comes, Sunderwild™ will use an innovative style of monetization that I think many people will really appreciate.
No cash shop!
First and foremost, NO CASH SHOP! No microtransactions of any sort. Ever. I think that kind of garbage is the worst thing that ever happened to gaming, and I’d sooner shut the game down than do anything that vile. I have to sleep at night.
Post Paid, Days Played
Sunderwild™ will instead sustain itself through a model I’m calling “Post Paid, Days Played”. I think you’ll like it.
First, the “Post Paid” part. A traditional subscription model makes you pay up front before you’re allowed to play. Post-Paid turns that around. First you play through your billing period. Then at the end of the period, your payment is due. But here’s the real kicker. You don’t have to pay it. If you didn’t like the game, or you had a great time but are just taking a break, you can simply choose to not pay. No late charges, no credit strikes, no bill collectors. Your bill will quietly, patiently wait in anticipation that maybe someday you’d like to return to the game. So any payment you choose to make will only ever be for the time that you have already played.
Now, the “Days Played” part. Again, a traditional subscription only offers you a fixed period of consecutive calendar days to play the game. Your cost would be the same even if you didn’t play at all. Days Played also turns that around. Your billing period is only counted on the days that you actually play the game. After all, you’re not really incurring any cost to me if you’re not playing, so why should I charge you for it? Any day that you don’t play will extend your billing period by one day, no matter how long it is. If you only play two days a week, your billing period will only advance by two days a week. If you stop playing for a year and then come back, your billing period will stop and simply pick back up where you left off when you return.
Put together, Post Paid, Days Played means that anyone can stroll into the game and give it a try at their own pace without paying a penny. And if you like the game and want to keep going, you’ll only ever pay for the days you played and only ever after you played them.
I’m thinking we’ll start with a billing period around 30-60 days played and see how that works out for everyone.
Dynamic Pricing
Most online games (heck, most everything) wants you to pay as much as they think they can get away with. Sunderwild™ isn’t most games. I’m not looking to get rich. Mostly, I just want to make an amazing game that one small niche of MMORPG fans will really love. My second goal is to make a good living doing so. Give me a solidly middle-class lifestyle and I’ll be ecstatic. So the pricing of Sunderwild™ will directly reflect those two goals.
I’m committed to doing the initial work of making the bulk of the game on my own dime. After the basic game is done, so long as the server costs are cheap and it doesn’t take much of my time to maintain, I’ll happily keep it going on my own dime.
But of course, I’m hoping the game will become much more than that! I’m hoping it will attract players and inspire me to keep improving the game and adding new content. It’s my dream that someday Sunderwild™ could be my full-time job and we’ll all be having a great time together.
If the game does gain traction, at some point I’ll have to implement the Post Paid, Days Played model and start charging money. How much money? That will change over time, depending on the intersection of three things: how much my expenses are, how much time I’m putting into it, and how many players like the game well enough to pay anything at all for it. The first two factors will raise the price, and the last factor will lower the price.
That’s right, so long as I’m hitting my goal of middle-class bliss, more players would mean that the game would get cheaper! In an ideal world, the game would have thousands of active players who are all paying a pittance each because the costs are distributed over so many people. In the actual world, I would probably start somewhere around $3-$5 USD for 30 days played and see how it goes from there.