| Sounds like your catch-22 is that you'd be willing to put in the programming if you knew it would pay off, but you're reluctant to put in the programming if it's not going to pay off. So how about doing an experiment. The purpose of the experiment is to gather information, without doing any more programming. First explain to your players that you're going to run an experiment: you're looking for ways for the site to be self-supporting so it can continue to grow and meet the needs of its players. The experiment isn't going to affect game play, and that it's just an experiment: you'll take it down if it doesn't work out. Every business faces the issue price differentiation between customers: some customers have little money and some have a lot, so how do you get the customers with money to pay more without turning away the customers who have little (or, in your case, no money). For the experiment add a tiered membership: free (what you have now) and patron ($5/month). Both are identical in terms of gameplay (both for fairness and so you don't have to do any programming). By becoming a patron a member has their name listed on the homepage as a patron of Particracy (which is literally true). During new user sign up prominently display the patron option "you can become a patron for $5/month, or join for free". On the homepage above the patron list have a button "Join the Patrons of Particracy". If anyone signs up, that tells you that there are people eager enough the support the game that they'll give you money even though they don't get any tangible extra features. Next you might try running a Google ads campaign, max $5 total and max $0.05 per click, using a keyword of "political simulation game". This will deliver 100 people to your landing page. Track how many of the 100 become users (if any) and how many become patrons (if any). This will tell you how easy it will be to draw in new users when you have a way to make money. Now you look at your conversion rate (is it 0%? 5%? 1%?) and get a sense of what it would take to get to $200/month (40 paying customers). For example, if your conversion rate is 1% then you'd need 4,000 customers to get the 40 paying ones. Then you can look at a) if you want to go for that, or b) do you think that doing things like more programming and adding the premium service you're thinking about might get the conversion rate up. The point of the experiment isn't for it to make money by itself (though of course it will be nice if it did :), it is to gather information and to give you encouragement. |