Rocketry wrote:serious question, forgive me for being somewhat ignorant when it comes to running websites.
other than getting paid for the time lack puts into this site, what does he actualy spend the money on? a server or something?
Rocketry
bandwidth, servers, upgrades, electricity, taxes, salary for his employees (if he has), rent, and all sorts of minor things that add up.
depending on the scale of the game you could spend somewhere from thousands of dollars to millions of dollars.
and money come from 3 things, play tax (or premium type packages if the game has no monthly tax), banners, and merchandise.
big bucks can be made if you know how to run your business but at the same time all can be lost in an instant if you make mistakes. i've been around the internet long enough to see games rise and fall. only the strong survive and actually make profit. and i'm telling you it's pretty scary how easy everything can go to waste. poor cheating prevention methods are a sure way of destroying a game. greed is also a major factor. increasing taxes or putting too much banners and pop-ups and pop-unders will also make many people leave. but one of the most stupid things is offering real game advantages for real money. that's a sure way to lose lots of players. yes in the short term you'll get quick cash because some people will pay but many many more will leave.
i used to play travian. i was in a romanian alliance and we won the server after a year of hard fought battles. it was great. but after the server was reset they introduced the possibility to pay real money to get more resources or to make your troops stronger. that day. all the people in my alliance and almost all in 3 other alliances left. that was over 2500 players. and those are the ones i know of. who knows how many others have left.
and from those 2500 players nearly 2000 had a premium like package bought. and it was like 25 dollars per year. that's 50 thousand dollars lost in an instant. back then the servers were hosting around 160 thousand active players. i'm looking now and they have only 98 thousand. huge drop 62 thousand players lost. if only 15% had premium (it was actually called plus) that's still a loss of over a quarter of a million us dollars.
