Let's Talk Monetization

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I have a few dollars in that hat. Less than two hundred though. An honest noob mistake :man_shrugging:

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I mean, what do you guys even do with those :crazy_face:

On a more serious note though, we seem to totally agree about the gleam club thing. Nobody needs to be chucking more into that basket.

I stopped paying because I wanted a bunch of my stuff to expire and to work with the beacon fuel system for a while.

Personally, I would have kept paying a reduced rate to still have emojis in chat. Maybe colored text on signs, too, though I have almost no signs in use right now. I type the emojis reflexively.

If it was separate from beacon fueling, I would still have that. This sort of a la carte breakdown, or even repackaging into some sub-groups would bring on some additional spending, as well as opening the door to allowing certain perks to be available for cubits.

Because right now if you’re not interested in building all the time, there’s a hard need for some cubit-sinks.

Also nothing against refining the current or main offering here, just not adding features to it, with intent to raise the price. It does seem almost obligatory, due to the fueling I think. I bought a chunk with my initial purchase because I knew that unless I hated the game, I wouldn’t want to deal with beacon fuel.

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So I don’t want to double post, but it’s been a couple hours and I’ve been thinking about this while doing things here. I want to clarify on this point especially:

@AlexxChristo is for sure correct stating that Gleam Club has been, for sure, the main (anything) of monetization here pretty much. And while some words like “mode” and “channel” may imply hierarchy to me probably not everyone will share those same presumptions.

There are definitely three distinct (what I would call) channels going, and presumably GC has been the most profitable in total, so far. Ignoring game sales as this channel is going to be minimized and maybe removed, I see basically gleam club, planet sales, and cubit sales. Pretty much in line with the OP, just noting the future of “Game Sales” is looking rocky.

Planet sales is, for now, probably not a good source of revenue. Just guessing obviously but they’re pretty cheap and they do come with costs, not just compute time but support hours and added maintenance as well. This is a numbers game, but it’s also direct revenue. Without numbers it’s hard to guess the balance right now vs. a breakeven or tipping point.

If there are enough planets for a full time support salary as well as all of the server costs, this will be good. From where I’m at I see it as providing the service but not really “monetization”. They could however monetize this service a little more, with good QOL and customer satisfaction.

With the sort of break down I’ve been describing to gleam club (or honestly, without it) some game features could be tokenized, and added at the planet level to sovereigns and perhaps later, privately hosted planets.

  • All beacons on this planet can use full sign features (emojis, colored text, etc…)

Just an example of an existing feature that could be turned into a token purchased like a planet fuel, and then applied to a planet for the specified period of time with presumably minor development to that mechanic. Besides certain current and future gleam-club enhancements there could be more planet-specific perks:

  • Ability to change colors on demand for (30/60/90) days.

Not exactly Gleam Club material but, IMO a great zero-cost monetization of the sovereign planet service.

Gleam Club itself - currently the big daddy, and really, the only (monetization) game currently in town. Cubits exist but, in a minute …

A practically obligatory subscription monthly cost to secure your stuff. For real, back in the early days. Now it just insures your space, and your work. Oh yeah, and also a few other perks that matter more to some people, and less to others, on an individual basis. Per individual perk i mean, not just per individual. Sorry.

So far the cosmetic perks tied into GC haven’t been that controversial. Not at all, compared to beacon fueling, definitely a separate issue, and one shared by every player, the same.

After thinking this through, I completely advocate for breaking GC up. Then expanding on a range of options. Make the beacon protection more widely available, not less. And as regards options, I detailed some of that above so I won’t re-iterate much here. I’m sure there are lots more ideas.

The point of this post is that to me, Gleam Club should be just the baseline income of the public universe. It’s likely to be super predictable, at least in terms of a stable population. Some people might buy a month of beacon fueling if their beacons are on different schedules and they go on a trip or something but mainly, your GC customers are going to be there, as long as the game keeps them engaged.

It’s also shared income, with regards to PSN and Steam. Heck in the sense of all the people behind the scenes, Gleam Club really is the main product/service of the public universe, right now.

But at the end of the day, the , channel, mode, whatever, with the most flex available to it, the channel that provides the most opportunity for spontaneous spending and honestly, even abusive-level exploitation, is “premium currency sales” as I basically referred to cubits above.

I’m just going to present some numbers here to further the conversation, please I don’t want to argue specific imaginary numbers :grin:

Let’s hypothesize we’re basically in the current boundless universe, but supporting 10k monthly active users.

Gleam Club income should be fairly stable. Without or without any changes. These would affect the total, but once the plans are clear the number of users paying for some or all of the perks would be somewhat stable, month to month. Increasing the percentage of players who want some part of this is good, but it’s not going to be a frequent thing. Relative to the size of the player base.

Sovereign/Creative and even private but attached worlds will bring in some level of income but again, in large part this will stabilize around some average and fluctuate more with the player base than one a random month-to-month. At 10k MAU I’m not sure if this will be profitable :man_shrugging:

A good move otherwise, like a solid article, press release, or something attention grabbing could definitely cause a big surge here. I don’t want to come off pessimistic I just have zero idea at what point the support costs are firmly outweighed by the margin.

With Cubit sales, at that time (grown to 10k MAU) it won’t just be a bunch of relatively old-timers sitting around talking about being bored. A new cosmetic every month or some (Time Limited!) Collectible mesh and the same people are spending again, on top of the baseline income and it’s nothing but a surge of income, above and beyond the parts that need to sustain for the game to persist. And they’re happy to do so. Not hovering around the forums posting things like “please give me a reason to send you more money” :smirk:

I don’t know it’s pretty underdeveloped in my opinion. For obvious reasons if you’ve been here a while. This is the fastest route to “Literally P2W” and it’s been thoroughly avoided. I’m not sure where the line between equality for all and “we have to eat” lies. In any case there are so many threads here, regarding things they could be selling, or just selling more of, in the exchange.

I just can’t help it, there’s a few hundred more words on the matter. But I think definitely - proportionate to population growth - direct cubit sales have far more room for growth than Gleam Club. Especially with the current, you will or you won’t, all or nothing model for the perks.

As long as Gleam Club is all wrapped around the beacon protection, it can’t afford to get much bigger (more expensive). Similar with sovereigns. If they were sold at twice the price, I don’t think we would have seen half as many. At all.

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I personally think that the game could make money off of:
Sov. Planets (with a larger player base)
Gleam Club (even if it is small)
A better Cosmetic Store

The key to a good cosmetic store is putting a mix of good things in the game, and on the store. I should be able to get things from the cosmetic store that are my style, but not the only items of a high quality to wear.

Single Use cosmetics - Reskin a chest to look like a pumpkin (10 uses) - There is no ‘need’ for this item, it is just something fun people may buy for their builds

Clothes - Some should be able to be made in game - other clothes should be available in the store.

Be very clear and transparent. Communities are fine with a cosmetic store if they know it goes to the development of the game! Have all funds from the store go directly to maintaining and supporting the game <3

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I don’t usually weigh in here and in fact haven’t been playing since my youngest came along about a year ago but I love this game and I often find myself checking the forum and dreaming of new builds. I really do want this game to do well.

Cosmetics is the obvious answer but in order to be successful we need a large enough player base. With Sony exiting as publisher on the PC, I’d hope whatever was holding them back from releasing this on other consoles would be removed. I release on Xbox and Switch would bring new players and breath some life into Ort. Half the work is done already really (controller scheme, interface etc.). If you need a little capital to get the ball rolling then open a kickstarter campaign like barony has. I’d kickstart a Switch release in a heartbeat. Also consider lowering the retail price. Like it or not, Minecraft is the main competition and it’s $20 cheaper in my market. I’m aware this is a far superior game with more content but it is what it is. Also free trails would be a good way to get some new blood in the game, especially paired with new releases on new consoles.

Cheers,

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You will only retain players for a little while longer with more end-game. The base game is still the same. This is 90% a creative building game and the players that have stayed through the past 2 years including myself I would be willing to bet most likely build (not everyone). Which is the main draw to this game even though it’s very niche.

Add Titans, there is still a player retention issue because in creative sandbox building games one can only do so much and that is mostly limited to imaginative building.

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And that is the whole point, it adds more time before the new player might start noticing or complaining about lack of content, and during that time, hopefully the player sees at least one update in his or her journey thru the game, this might cause the player to be retained when they see that the game is having more content added to it regularly, this is much less likely to happen when people run out of content to do quickly and then drop the game, never to return.

A very important aspect of any online game that wishes to remain healthy and grow for the long term, is regular content updates, and decorative blocks or cosmetics don’t count as meaningful content in my book.

But it doesn’t have to be, I have said more then a few times here on the forums, that I think boundless haves a lot of potential to become quite a nice game, but it requires an active dev team to add a good amount of various types of content at a modest pace.

A game can contain multiple genres at the same time.

There is a lot of room for content that is not just “creative sandbox building”, How about Functional Building? or PvE content with procedurally generated dungeons and mobs? Again there is a lot that could be added to the game to make it more attractive to a much wider set of players.

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Same here but it does feel kind of odd in a way that something like emoji are a premium chat feature when literally anything else has incorporated emoji fairly well at no real cost to the end-user, probably because they are a Unicode standardised thing.

Not to go too deep into this, only to acknowledge their existence, the so-called stickers are a different thing from emoji that, in some circles, do fit the purpose of a “premium” emoji in a sense; that kind of thing would make more sense as a GC feature than access to actual standard emoji, in my opinion.

The coloured text thing is fine as a selling point I think but like you I also feel that it would be nice if GC features like the colour/emoji/dances had been broken up into different modules/addons to pay for separately.

On the flip-side of this for me is that I would actually prefer to have only the beacon fuelling from GC if it were cheaper. I don’t mind fuelling beacons but I do like the peace of mind of not having to do it (bye-bye pyramid v2), especially when I have more than 1 beacon I want to be permanent or when I have some with alts. That’s usually when I’ve had GC, incidentally not the case just at the moment.

(Also, your following post after the one I’m replying to made a lot of sense too)

I think it was Square Enix Collective actually. :slight_smile:

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I haven’t really been in the mood to really go into deep discussions on the forums much.

Look at the forums and you can see a clear divide in the players and what they want. Some want more Creative Building, and some want more PVE.

You sacrifice things if you have multiple genres in a game because it does a few things, it becomes a niche game as it doesn’t fit into a genre, and you wind up separating players. Creative builders might care less about PVE content and vice versa. I know that because I have asked quite a few of them.

That said I hope they add whatever the community wants, but good luck in pleasing everyone as it just doesn’t happen.

Various content in various genres sounds like a real cluster… Boundless has and always will have an identity problem it’s a hard sell to my friends and I love the game… can’t imagine how it is to players that have no idea WTF it is.

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I see this in most games, but I feel the divide is more extreme and more polarized here, due to the fact this game has not been updated in 2 years now.

you can’t, it is impossible, The best you can do is try to please most people, some of the time.

Just because the hardcore sand-boxing players don’t like PvE content, isn’t a reason not to add it. Not all content needs to be suited for every single player.

I play a few games where some updates are meaningless to me, but are quite meaningful for other types of players and their play styles, and I am mature enough to look past that the update contained nothing for me and see the bigger picture that it makes the game better as a whole.

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Tell that to @Dhusk and @SWProzee1

Who always seem on the polar opposite side of the game. It’s quite like PVP vs PVE in an MMORPG…

You change the PVP to balance it, but PVE which didn’t need to be touched at all is affected.

Anyways, I’ll hush and go back into the shadows I have a color storage to finish. As always appreciate the quality discussion.

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So it was. Not sure why I associate the two.

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I would guess gleam club probably generates the most revenue for the game based off of the number of ghost towns I see in the game. People are willing to pay to keep builds alive in a game they don’t play for an absolutely stunning amount of time. I personally don’t understand the psychology of it, but it is a good revenue stream with long term profit potential.

I would not discount how much revenue sovereigns can generate, either, for similar reasons. People who build on their sovereigns are probably going to pay for them whether they play or not because they don’t want their builds to disappear.

Cosmetics are always a good option for FTP games. I think they would be particular popular in this game, since this game lacks…any and all clothing. My character looks very cold running around icy mountains, glaciers and through the snow in a bikini. She needs a coat. And shoes. And a shirt. And pants.

I doubt pulling all the additional gleam club items out of gleam club and charging for them separately would generate much revenue. I like the extra features, but I am not going to pay extra money for them.

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I like gleam club the way it is. I wouldn’t really mind splitting it up in to smaller pieces either, but buying full gleam club should be “cheaper” than buying all perks separately.

The only reason I currently have not yet bought back gleam club is because I am waiting for Monumental to provide more information on the game in general. Happy to support once news of longevity of game is out. :ok_hand:

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Absolutely, of course, buy everything get a deal!!