switching Paywall for patreon
Hey there,
It is so sad you put the game behind a paywall.
Fans are running away..
I know it is because using Googles API is so expensive but you can instead open a patreon account and rely on donations or maximize the amounts of Adds between every game.
Please get back your community.
It is so sad you put the game behind a paywall.
Fans are running away..
I know it is because using Googles API is so expensive but you can instead open a patreon account and rely on donations or maximize the amounts of Adds between every game.
Please get back your community.
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Usually people suggestion Patreon or such is a synonym of "I don't want to pay, but I want other to pay so I can enjoy it free". But donations like Patreon, Tipeee, Utip etc can't work. The reason is simple: the monthly cost depends of how much people play during the month as the cost is generated when a game is started and the Streetview screen loaded. It is impossible to know when a month will be calm (and cheap) and another one busy (and expensive). A popular streamer or youtuber can suddenly multiply the player amount by 2, 5 or even 10 and multiply the costs the same way. This is what happened last summer for your information, which killed the last hope of a free Geoguessr.
Since they can't know how much money they will need for each month, they can't set a goal for Patreon. They can't know if the amount of money they get this month will be sufficient to pay the API fees. The only way to make it viable would be "we obtained X dollars this month, this unlock Y free games for the next month" and everyone will just rush the free games when the next month begins. They will deplete them in a matter of days, if not hours, making people missing them upset. And what about people that donated and missed the games? Not fair. If people want to donate, they can take pro directly.
Now about ads: the game already has them. They had to remove some categories (like lingerie, meeting websites etc) after teachers complained about them while using Geoguessr as an educative tool in classroom and this probably hurt the revenues a bit. And ads are not a magic money printer: the more you put, the less they make. Or you run out of ads quicker (ads are not infinite, they obey the market law). And the API is so expensive ads will now never be enough, except if you go the shady way (to understand what I mean, go on pron or warez websites without an adblocker) and I doubt anyone want to experience that... The only thing I can think it could work is using unskipable video ads that bring some cents when you watch it. Think like those mobile games that give you gems in exchange of an ad. But I have no idea how much such ads bring, neither if they can cover the fees for a single game.
They are other ways to get money obviously, I still hope they will implement a "game package" system where people can buy X games for Y dollars and play them when they want for example. Or a cheaper pro without map editor as not everyone want to use it etc. But donations and ads are not viable. Also for your information the estimated costs since the new API prices were about thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars per month. Good luck finding enough people to donate $10.000+ monthly.
Things seem to be more complicated than I thought.
But I am still wondering how your player stats show growth, as everyone I know stopped playing the game.
I think your Idea to pay for an X ammount of games without paying for map idea sounds fine to me. Maybe that is cheaper than paying every month. Especially for people who can barely afford their phone bills.
But many players are simply users that bought pro subscriptions after the paywall was in place. That's probably how they can afford free users playing the challenge links.