My. Gaming. Edge.

Grem

rEJ
TG

14 years ago

WAAA

Last edited by Grem, 14 years ago

purplefistmixer

rEJ
Karaoke*

14 years ago

Quoted from Skyride

[…]

~~No u!~~

Oh god you broke everything.

But I fixed it it’s okay don’t panic.

Last edited by purplefistmixer, 14 years ago

WildCard

14 years ago

Quoted from d2m

[…]

It’s often hard enough to get players in teams to stump up £1-2 towards a server, let alone a monthly subscription fee for “tips” on how to improve. I agree with you entirely mate :)

———-
The concept is not new and has been done to death in many industries, gaming being the delicious new target it seems. I’m not convinced that TF2 is ready for this or that it will even be successful in the long-term. The idea doesn’t really scream out to people “You need to be part of this for a long time”. And that right there, is where you will make your money – long-term subscriptions from loyal subscribers.

Anyway, I’m going to go with you for the moment and use an example that assumes this project will be a moderate success:

There are currently 16,000 ish people playing TF2 around the world. Let’s imagine that 3% (480 people) decide to join your website and pay you $4.99 per month – 480x$4.99 = $2395.20. I know some would pay for 6 months, but for this example it’s impossible to calculate that.

Purchasing content is always fun, I do it a lot in my business and I’m well aware that prices can fluctuate a little, so the following numbers might be a couple of dollars out at the time of reading. Let’s imagine that the typical article is around 1000 words, in the content-writing industry that would generally be $15-20 per article (if we’re paying nice Western first-world writers, maybe $5-8 if we get someone from the Philippines to ghost-write it).

Now obviously video is much better than text, so let’s get people to make us videos instead. Video creation, editing etc for a project like this could be reasonably charged out at $40 per hour, with multiple hours being $35 per hour. Most videos are more likely to be shorter than this, perhaps 15 minutes. So how about we just have a flat rate of $20 per video in our example.

OK so now we have some content prices and 480 hearts that need fulfilling, what will we provide them this month?

* 12 Articles – Let’s give them 12 tasty new articles from their favourite players, for which we’ll pay – $240

* 20 Videos – We’re going huge with the videos this month, let’s give them 5 videos every week! – $400

* Other Content – Let’s imagine we have some news/interviews/mp3s/casts/whatever and we need to pay some sort of fee for it. No idea why we would, but it’s good to budget right? :) – $250

Fixed Costs each month:
* Website Hosting – $15 (More than reasonable price for the above, especially if the videos are hosted externally like YouTube. If you decide to keep the videos hosted by yourselves, consider using Amazon AWS as they offer a pricing on demand service with phenomenal performance.)

* Website Maintenance – $100 (Let’s imagine you have a company to maintain your website and help you out for a couple of hours per month)

Yearly Costs:
* Domain Name – $10

Total Income in Example: $2395.20 (for 480 users)
Total Monthly Costs in Example: $1005
Monthly “Profit” in Example: $1390.20 (tax to be deducted)

Not a bad wage for a website where you outsource the content creation and have less to manage, right? The business model above is used by thousands of people across the world already. It’s easy, it makes money and it generates consistent revenue (as long as you provide good content).

I’m sure there are some things I’ve missed out in working out the TF2 content, or perhaps you want to pay your content creators double the industry standard or something, who knows? :p Would certainly be interested to hear your thoughts.

Finally, best of luck! It’ll be a very tough market to crack as TF2 is not a “buyer’s market”. Gamers are not people who are easily sold to and subscription sites tend to have a large turnover of people (i.e. they subscribe for a month or two and then vanish).

If you would like to talk further, you’re welcome to find me in #vertex or #etf2l on IRC (Quakenet). I run two UK businesses and I also run a number of smaller websites (in niches well away from gaming), using a similar model to the one I’ve described above. Thus I have full experience and knowledge in what I’m talking about!

Hope it helps :)

I disagree with the 480 mark ( yes im aware its only estimate :) I would be very surprised if you had more than 100 monthly subscribers, and with that said in the end if your doing this to try to “help” the community progress and spread the wealth of knowledge that is out there I fail to see how limiting it to 100 people will do much good for anyone within the community.

Assuming you did get more than that say 200 -250 mark with d2m above buisness plan which in principle is fine you would still be earning a rarther large sum. Which would make the ” im most likely going to lose money on this but as long as it isnt to much I dont mind as it helps the tf2 scene” statement seem for want of a better word bullshit :P.

Quite dissapointed you didnt respond to his, was interested in your reply :)

-CB

14 years ago

mygamingedge.com is now live!
However, we are still working out the kinks with the premium content and memberships.
For now, enjoy the free content the MGE has to offer and I will let everyone know when premium will be available.