Regardless of what you like/don't like:
1) you end up cutting off the monetization of users who would pay more, and you prevent users who wouldn't pay from playing at all.
2) ads don't make very much money at all.
3) will probably get you the most money.
4) is sort of a nerfed version of 3 and doesn't generally do as well, but it still will generally monetize better than 1/2.

Also, don't discount webgames - you can make a ton.

You just have to think of it from the user's perspective.  The market for reflex/arcade type Flash games has become really saturated.  Deep, strategic flash games that are persistent and multiplayer are few and far between.  You are a LOT more likely to be able to draw users into this experience.  Unless you have a reasonably large art budget, you will find it very hard to create a compelling game that stands out to the player.  We have a top-performing MMO on Kongregate that has reached almost 2.5m plays in under two months, and our daily users is only growing.

A lot of developers here tend to be a little stubborn about their game design, which is of course fine if your goal is just to make the game you want to play.  If your goal is to make a game that reaches a lot of players, you have to take them into consideration as well.

Do you even need pathfinding?  Don't get caught up in the excitement of a new algorithm and try to shoehorn it into the game design before establishing that it's necessary

Think of it from a user's perspective.  It's a lot more compelling if it's variously-shaped territories rather than just tiles.  Just represent it in the back-end as a general graph.

I vote against Silverlight and Java and push towards Flash.  It's a got a lot more reach, and people hate installing new plugins.  If you are really forward thinking, you could also try HTML5.

Dayum, Triplefox - that was a great analysis.  Thanks

It all sounds good except the platform   Make it a web game and you'll probably get several orders of magnitude more users.  You might even make money from it

Very cool idea - both games are revolutionary and extremely fun.
3) What dictates the total number of units?
6) Can you get more specific?  Diplomacy's system was deep but not really that complex (especially for a computerized version).
7) Again, can you get more specific? Diplomacy had deep strategy but was very simple.  What is your reasoning for adding defense/attack?  What exactly separates attack vs. defense in a simultaneous-turn system?

Also:
What platform will the game be developed on?  This is a huge question that not that many devs seem to take into account early enough in the development process.

Well, my plan is to let players throw stuff on auctions at whatever sell price they want.  The problem isn't the micro-economics (which will no doubt settle on specific prices for individual goods) but the issues of the macro-economics, like managing inflation.  I probably didn't give near enough to go on, but really any ideas will move the discussion forward.

Economy management ends up being a balance between a couple key factors:
1) Resources in
Earning gold from killing monsters
Looting items from monsters

2) Resources out
Spending gold on repairs
Taxes
Giving items for quests/etc

3) Resource conversion
Crafting


Has anybody dealt with multiplayer/MMO economies and come up with some decent rules of thumbs for balancing the transactions?  It seems extraordinarily complex but I'm sure there's some good advice out there.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110331006835/en/GameStop-Announces-Acquisition-Spawn-Labs-Agreement-Acquire

Crazy development.  What's this mean for you guys?

I think Chromeleon just said what I've been trying to say in this thread, except he did it better.

@synapse: Why did you ignore my last paragraph when you quoted and responded to me?  I already said all that -- I don't have a problem with microtransactions in and of itself, and I think there are MT games out there that are well-designed and fun.  My problem isn't those games, nor do I think that good, well-designed games with microtransactions are evil.  My problem is what I talked about in the first two paragraphs (crappy games that were designed entirely around tricking the player out of their money at every opportunity by people who don't know the first thing about how to make a good game).  If you're going to quote and respond to me, please at least make sure you've got the context right.

I was agreeing with you - highlighting the specific part that I think explains why indie devs generally dislike it.

Updated to clarify

Playfish was just a group of like 5 guys a couple of years ago (though they did have some funding), and they were bought by EA for $400 million.  That's pretty successful, but possibly not in the way you mean.  5th Planet is completely indie and is doing extraordinarily well (they have a post on insidesocialgames describing their monetization) and they've received a bunch of recognition.  Our company is also totally indie, full-time and growing rapidly, but we haven't pushed any company PR because it wouldn't really help us.  We do have some big player fansites.

That's actually probably one reason you haven't heard of a lot of the successful webgame indie devs - they don't really get much from PR.  Marketing a webgame is largely a science that doesn't require a ton of company PR as opposed to straight advertising.  I don't know of any sites that really cover it well.  insidesocialgames.com covers some indie devs, but a lot of it is about Xville too.  There's probably a killer opportunity to cover indie webgames.  The sites you mention are all great, but they generally harbor the same anti-webgame/anti-virtual-goods sentiment you find here.

you're assuming here that 'virtual goods' are *inherently profitable* absent that other shallow addictive stuff. i don't believe that's the case. remove the addictive stuff and virtual goods would no longer be profitable.

can you name any indie game developer who became successful through the virtual goods model?

You're certainly right that virtual goods isn't an immediate hit no matter what (for example, just adding buyable hats probably won't do it) but you're wrong that its profitability requires leeching the player.  The top paying players in our game are some of the most active in our forums, organizing groups and coming up with suggestions for the game.  It's addicting, perhaps, but a positive experience for them rather than one in which they spend without realizing it.

What would your definition of success be?  (For the purpose of this question, should I assume that by indie you mean a person or small development team that hasn't taken any outside funding?)  I could absolutely name a handful if you give me your parameters, yeah.

it's also worth noting that pretty much every successful indie game developer became successful through direct sales of their games (e.g. super meat boy, minecraft), not through virtual goods.

That's definitely not true.  You just haven't heard of them because you hang with a different clique.  I'm just trying to show you guys profitable business models so I can play some better games while you guys get rich.

like I'm gonna come back in 5 hours for some virtual carrots.

I agree with you, and I think that's the biggest reason this business model gets a bad wrap from real developers - because the most popular games are crappy shallow clickfests.  But they aren't all, and you can make a game that is both balanced and uses virtual goods.  Isn't the added bonus of actually making a profitable game and going full-time indie worth the difficulty of figuring out that balance?

That doesn't even touch the ethics of deliberately designing something to be addictive and then charging for it, or a 'better' high experience. "The first hit is free!"

Again, it doesn't have to be this way.  Just because some games do this doesn't mean it's an inherent flaw of the business model.  In our freemium games, the vast majority of players don't pay, and they're still completely competitive with the paying players.  The premium players can buy additional choices of weapons, but they aren't strictly better.  In fact - the very best units are all in-game, but they're just hard to get.  The revenue we get from paying players turns into more development for the game (free expansions, new features, etc) which benefits EVERYONE, including the free players.  How is that model ethically wrong at all?

This is basically it, because games that use microtransactions are always purely about making money-
...
-it's still black-hat game design.

This seems insanely biased.  You really think EVERY virtual goods game is ONLY about making money?

Secondly, and more importantly, the model shifts games from a one-off release to a games-as-a-service model.  Because you make more money in the long term by developing the game and released constant content, the players end up getting a constantly-updated product and get a much longer game lifecycle (as in, several years).  Just because developers end up doing better doesn't make it 'black hat' - in many cases, the players end up benefiting as well.  Free players are getting a huge amount of content for free, and the players that choose to pay are getting a lot more mileage out of their money.

I'll never use a euphemism like virtual goods when what I'm really doing is selling air.

Oh, lawd.  You're not "selling air" - you're selling entertainment.  How is this different from selling a downloadable game for $10, or selling additional DLC packs?  The only difference is that the player can buy different in-game content rather than buying ALL the in-game content for a single price.

there's no spectrum where someone who is a little bit richer has a little bit more advantage, it's that everyone who did pay a set amount has no advantage or disadvantage over anyone else who is playing the game. i'm not sure you really had to ask that.

This seems to presume that the game is competitive and multiplayer.  What about collaborative games?  What about strictly single-player games?  I'm simply talking about the fact that in a strict pay-to-play model, you are preventing a huge chunk of players from playing your game at all.  Freemium games let you expand your game to a much larger playerbase while still making money to support longer-term development.

And what does everyone think about physical CCGs like Magic, where you have to pay to purchase packs/cards of a game to be competitive?  Doesn't that work in a very similar way where those who purchase more have access to more cards and more options to beat the competition?  Why isn't that seen as 'evil and soulless' like virtual goods games?

But doesn't a game that costs *anything* penalize poorer players too?  What about people who can't/won't pay anything for a game?  A freemium model allows everyone to play.  All the 'virtual goods' model does is allow players the choice to pay more for specific items (or whatever).  If you looked at conversion rates for pay-to-play games versus freemium models, you'd find that you actually end up allowing a lot more players to play in a modern virtual goods model.

I'm interested in what people think of the virtual goods business model here.  It seems to get a huge amount of shit, and I really don't understand why.  It's kind of an indie-developer witch hunt in a lot of ways.  Yes, Farmville sucks - but Driver3 sucked, and that doesn't make all console games the devil.

Also please note: I'm aware that virtual goods don't apply to every game genre.  That's fine - I'm not saying "it's always the best".  I'm saying "it's sometimes the best".  Regardless, it applies in a lot of situations, but it still seems to be much maligned.

So you tell me:
1) Why is the virtual goods model considered to be so evil?
2) If you knew that virtual goods would give you a sustainable full-time indie game business, would you still reject it out of principle?
  2a) Which principle(s)?
3) Which business model are you using for your game?
  3a) When has it been proven successful?

[hobbyist]

First this, in response to my reference to hobbyists here...

I'm not opposed to "virtual goods" (what a fucking euphemism) if they make sense in a game or if you're setting out from the start to build a game around microtransactions as a business move, but not everyone--especially on a mostly-hobbyist site like tigs--shares your priorities.

I understand that many people here are hobbyists, and that's fine - they don't have to listen to this.

I'm also in the camp of hating people calling me a hobbyist because I don't see game development entirely as money making exercise.

Second... I'm just bringing alternative business models to the table.  I don't see why an effective business model immediately invalidates my desire to make an actually fun game that is also financially viable.  I'm not saying it's "entirely a money-making excercise" - I'm only showing that a sustainable indie business is a serious possibility.  Yes, it's in a thread on advertising in Flash games.  However, it's related, because advertising on Flash is related to monetization.  It's also the frickin' business forum.  Several people have messaged me with questions regarding virtual goods and I've responded with (at least what I hope to be) relevant answers.  Regardless of whether you like it or not, people are learning useful information about virtual goods.

Dropping into an unrelated thread and laughing at how much more money you make through your chosen business model is probably not the best way to win people over.

At what point am I laughing?  At what point am I talking about how much money I make, as opposed to pointing out the opportunity available to other developers?  I just came on here to talk about the amazing opportunities that exist outside the normal business topics here.

Again - what's with all the hate?