Anyway, I was looking at the subscription model Jorb & Loftar and started to ask myself a question: is it possible to monetize a game with such a small, cult following?
Let's start with some quick but reasonable assumptions. While I haven't been here long, I've generally been told that that the amount of regular players classic H&H gets has been hovering at around 50-100.
Let's be very optimistic, and hypothesize that completely ignoring the P2P controversy, the Hafen launch has been successful in doubling these numbers by drawing additional attention to the game. We're now sitting at ~200 regulars who play the game on a daily basis.
Now let's look at our revenue. A quick Google search reveals that mobile apps have a roughly 2% free-to-paid user conversion. Subscribtion and microtransaction-based PC games, however, report anything from 10 to 25%. Let's again be optimistic, and assume that user conversion is very good - 20% of players become monthly paid subscribers to Hafen (or slightly less, with slightly more engaging in smaller transactions - any other setup works fine).
Assuming everyone buys their game time 6 months at a time (again, shooting in the middle here), we get a gross revenue of 200 x 0.20 x 66.00 / 6, which equals roughly $440 USD per month (before taxes, but I don't even know if such a small revenue would get taxed).
So, what do we do with this?
Well, the $440 a month can easily cover any reasonable hosting costs a game this size would be expected to encounter (at least I believe, let me know if I've been misled). However, we're not simply speaking of covering hosting costs here; both Jorb and Loftar have repeatedly hinted they aim to eventually sustain themselves from the project.
The average monthly income in Sweden is at around 25 000 SEK, which translates to approximately $3000 USD. Assuming Jorb and Loftar don't shack up together (they might, I don't know), you're splitting the income in half - the $220 they both get leaves them earning 7% of the average monthly Swedish salary Keep in mind programmers' salaries in Sweden can go up to 32 000 SEK-38 000 SEK/mo, and for the sake of this example we're assuming nothing is being spent to cover server costs.
Here is why I think this isn't really reasonable:
- Unless I've downplayed the population metrics (feel free to correct me), I've been excessively generous on numbers, and we're still left at a potential revenue averaging barely seven percent of the Swedish average income for two developers.
- Turning H&H in a self-sufficient, full-time job for Jorb and Loftar would involve increasing the playerbase by 1400% of what it currently is.
- Jorb & Loftar stated that they wished to increase development time on H&H, which would imply them working on the project fulltime - subscriptions are implied to mean "better updates".
- A large part of the game's playerbase lives in countries which a much lower average income, such as Russia, Poland and Brazil, and will not be able to afford subscriptions.
- The game has already been available for the public for several years, and we've already seen the population metrics of the Hafen update (along with the angry mob P2P brought along). It's highly unlikely for the game to gain significant additional traction at this point.
Finally, you can change the model all you wish, but keep in mind a price drop from 15$/mo to 5$/mo would require the number of paid users to triple just to keep the same 7% income.
