Re: Survey of PBM games: email, snail mail, and prices

From: rpeiper@moreinfo.com (Richard Peiper)

Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1998 00:00:00 +0000

Very interesting data Greg.

As someone who is currently Alpha testing a fully automated,
Play by email game. I am curious as to the "average" cost of a turn
for PBEM vs PBM? From my experience PBM games tend to run in the 5-10
US Dollar range, while PBEM runs about 2-5.

Richard
				Dark towers GM/Coder

On 26 Sep 1998 19:57:49 GMT, lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl) wrote:

>Of the 167 commercial games on the PBM List:
>
>123 offer email turns; of these 42 offer no snail mail option.
>
>121 offer snail mail turns; of these 40 offer no email option.
>
>81 games offer both. Of these, quite a few insist on snail-mailing you
>the game results, whether you submit turns via email or snail mail.
>
>[ These numbers don't add up because there are a few games which only take
>faxed turns... ]
>
>Thus, only a fraction of 81 games might have a policy of offering
>cheaper turns for email, due to lower costs. A quick look through the
>list found 4 games which have this policy, for at least some of the
>comanies when there multiple licenses:
>
>Quest, Island Takeover, Odyssey, and Iron and Steam.
>
>So, as you can see, the ideas I talked about earlier (email games
>being able to offer lower prices) was being used by other companies
>long before I recently posted about it. It also seems that 42
>commercial games have found that their customers don't mind not being
>able to get snail-mail results.
>
>-- greg

References

Survey of PBM games: email, snail mail, and prices
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Sat, 26 Sep 1998 00:00:00 +0000

Referenced By

Survey of PBM games: email, snail mail, and prices
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Sat, 26 Sep 1998 00:00:00 +0000