PBM Pricing Policy From: thomson@netcom.com (Deb and Bob Thomson) Date: Sun, 06 Feb 1994 22:53:09 +0000 PBM Pricing Policy As mentioned in a previous post, You Rule! is a new play-by-mail game of strategy in a fantasy setting. What we want to know now is what our pricing policy should be. Because You Rule! is a war game, the number of players in a particular game will decrease as time goes by, and the number of orders per player will increase. The cost of running the game will remain about the same throughout. We have played games with various pricing plans, and we want to know what _you_ think. The plans we are considering are: 1. Increase the turn fees every five or ten turns. 2. Charge 1 or 2 cents per order for each order over 100. In our in-house tests, we have never had more than 80 or 90 orders, but all of our tests have been on a reduced map. Successful players will certainly exceed 100 orders later in the game. 3. Charge a slightly higher turn fee to everyone, and not bother with the complicated rules above. 4. Some other pricing scheme: based on the number of players left in the game? based on the number of provinces under each player's control? based on the phases of the moon? Our own personal choice would be number two. Data entry is certainly the most tedious part of running a PBM game, and will soon get expensive when we have to employ people to do it. A secondary advantage is that it would encourage people to write their orders efficiently, cutting down on the total amount of data entry. Our concern is that honesty in advertising would lead us to mention the possibility of increased costs, which might scare some prospective customers away. We have heard of game where the "hidden costs" can double the turn fees (or worse), and we don't want to give the impression that our game is like that. We just want to increase the fees a bit to cover the positions where two players are left, writing hundreds of orders each. Please let us know what pricing you like or don't like, and if anything would be totally unacceptable to you. -- Bob and/or Debbie Thomson thomson@netcom.com Llucky Llama Games The opinions above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my spouse. Referenced By Up