yes it is free to play on phone but not to pc and that made me sad it is a fun game but not so fun to pay a subscription for so make it free to play on pc and i play on pc thank you

and make a tetorial that is easy like one whole totrial it takes longer yes but more easy

Your suggestions seem to be:

1) Make the game free on the PC.

I would disagree with this. The game is still in development and does not generate money with ads or in-game purchases (using real money). Without subscriptions there would be no development and no game.

2) Make one large tutorial instead of several shorter ones.

That may be easier for you, but I think most users would not bother with a single long tutorial. They certainly wouldn't want to refer back to it. I like the idea that the tutorials are available when the user is ready.

You can get a month's Lite subscription for $1. How hard is it to go without french fries one day at school so you can play VO on PC for a month at least?

I still have that friend key Phaser

The game doesn't need to be free to play on PC, it would be a good idea but in all honestly I would be more involved if there were more bulk time deals.

Hell, if they sold a bundle deal of a new skin or ship or something with bulk subscription time i'd buy that.

Now THOSE are suggestions.

but in all honestly I would be more involved if there were more bulk time deals.

What do you mean by that, exactly? We did try our first "sale" thing earlier this year, on keys for specific blocks of time. Is that what you mean? More steam-sale-esque stuff popping up?

Hell, if they sold a bundle deal of a new skin or ship or something with bulk subscription time i'd buy that.

Interesting. That was a goal of the new discount-code stuff we added, so I think we can do that sort of thing.

I think the 2 yr block works out to $6.67/month - it's pretty hard to beat that. I can't even get a decent pint of stout for less than $7 here.

The people worried about monthly price are not persuaded by the incredible savings of long term purchases. If $10/month is a problem for them, $100 is a catastrophe.

Promotion purchases that involve time may generate conversions but the mobile player mindset is fundamentally incompatible with monthly subscriptions.

What do you mean by that, exactly?

I actually mean bundle deals by that, Savet is right that the mobile player mindset is incompatible with monthly subscriptions, so stop selling them.

Sell the time bundled with something else. As in, promote the skin or purchase as the actual main purchase and then include time. Figure out what the value of the time included is , but don't sell time as the value proposition; it doesn't work.

A brief example on a good sample study:

Look at your average retention time for an android player from new player to inactive account (Average Lifespan) Take the Average Lifespan and figure out how much it's going to cost if they bought a sub for that amount of time (Price).

Sell a ship upgrade/unique ship/livery for the Price and include double the Average Lifespan as included time but emphasize that it's an upgrade package of x/y/z that includes premium time. Most of the subs are not going to use the additional time anyway as they will drop off within the Average Lifespan but you'll sell more of those than subscriptions and the players who stick around will get better value.

Sell another package while the time is still valid including time if they don't have it and that way you can set the pace of purchases in terms of content you release rather than just on monthly cycles, and you can release packages more than monthly.

Eventually you'll find that you don't need to bundle time in at all and you can survive making time free then credit everyone who has remaining time with additional goodies.

It's not newsflash or anything, but if you're not going to innovate with the model you might as well follow the successful Star Citizen/elite/other mmoesque models to the extent it works for you, and this is an excellent start for a transitional plan.

+1 TRS

What? We don't push subs to mobile players at all. We're evolving the F2P model there. That's what's proven in the mobile space.

I was asking what you personally wanted, as a previously-subbed PC player (which is about as demographically alien from the average Android player as one can be).

The same thing, as a PC player would work.

I don't want to pay for something on a monthly basis that I don't or won't ever use on a monthly basis. I'm not going to buy something that's usually purchased on a by-the-month basis.

Permanent additions to an account because you are building the account into something is more appealing than time, so bundle it with the time.

I'd buy time bundled with permanent upgrades.

Simple solution:

Create two purchasable packages.

One causes /vote mute to apply to guild and group chat.
The other omits guild and group chat.
Each package lasts 1 day.

Players can fight over whether /vote mute applies to guild and group chat with their dollars and it will escalate into a bidding war to maximize time as I drive interest through crickets and Greenwall argues with me.

Maybe there can be a number of crystal to pay to have the privilege of playing on PC for a period of time, as well as an amount of crystal to temporarily raise the level cap.

10 crystals an hour for level raising? Rar

I'll add my f2p observations here. All of what was said may sound smart, but all of you are ignoring an important fact: The average type of f2per VO gets and his unwillingness to be anything else.

The average f2per is 12-14 (and has NO job) and will find VO on the Android store when he is looking for "games like GoF" or something similar. He will download the game and login and if we get lucky, he makes it through the tutorial. I will BET that atleast 40% of the kids won't even make it through the tutorial cause "its so boring to read duuude".

After he made it through the tutorial, he will get bored with levelling cause the mobile players are not used to oldschool gaming&grinding. - So he is gonna fly to grey space. In grey space, he will eventually meet a pirate or an outlaw who will eventually catch and destroy his EC/Revenant/Vulture. Now we have 2 options:

1. The ordinary type of f2per will start to throw real life threats and insults at the guy who scored the PK. If he is told that this game IS ABOUT shooting other spaceships, he will just throw more insults.
2. The more smarter type will only drop few insults and will ask how to get better. At this point, he is usually adviced to increase levels and to practise on bots. AND that the more advanced ships are only available to subscribers. At this point, another tree of options forms:

1. The new player will say "no lol i'm not gonna pay for a phone game man are u dumb?". He will continue trying to beat the veteran player from his vulture mk1, get frustrated and quit. (optionally, he will also give VO a 1 star rating)
2. The new player somehow hears of friend keys, gets one, levels his licenses in those two weeks and buys subscriber ships. Then he goes back to f2p. Just yesterday I destroyed some low level dude's Behemoth and I was really wondering HOW he got this ship. I found out when he said something like "U **** THIS WAS MY LAST BEHEMOTH CUZ IM F2P NOW". Very telling...
3. The new player does not quit, but he just stays f2p forever and when asked when he will buy himself a full sub he will say he is not gonna.
4. The player actually switches to PC and buys a full subscription. (Very seldom)
5. The new player buys a lite/full sub on mobile and sticks around. (Rare)

That's the current f2per situation from my view. In only two of the aforementioned five scenarios there is a small chance for GS to make some money. And that's really what GS needs.

The main problem summarized: The free to play-people are youngsters with no cash. They have no PC; no job and their parents will NOT allow them to spend any sort of money on Vendetta Online. We atrract the wrong sort of people.

So if someone has a solution to fix this issue, he will get my respect and an extra high five.

TheRedSpy's solution WOULD work if the average player that VO attrracts is a completist type of guy who has cash to spend on ship paintings. But that's simply not the case...

Okay, for fuck sake. I said take the average lifespan of an android player. I didn't say apply the business model to android only. I just think that the double the average lifespan of an android player is a good measure of how much time you should be charging for.

Fuck android players, fuck the mobile port and fuck the idea of having a different business model for each. It's moronic. Why on the one hand would you want to support platform agnosticism by offering your game on almost all popular and even the unpopular platforms, and then screw that over by offering different business models to each one?

It makes it look like you can't come up with a business model flexible enough to suit. How can you be capable of writing a complex simulated economy but incapable of coming up with a simple model to sell your game to multiple platforms.

First of all, TRS: Find a way to alleviate your tone and language, or you won't be welcome to post here anymore.

Secondly..

It makes it look like you can't come up with a business model flexible enough to suit. How can you be capable of writing a complex simulated economy but incapable of coming up with a simple model to sell your game to multiple platforms.

It is very time consuming and data driven to optimize a secondary-currency monetization model to a point where it becomes truly useful. Secondary currencies are almost always better than paid-item models, but they require a lot of data metrics, and analysis, before it becomes clear what changes should be made, and exactly how. Places like TenCent and Zynga (who, for all their other problems, are extremely good at this specific topic) usually have teams of 30+ people they apply to a given game, just to do monetization analysis. They also have a lot of other strategies that we simply can't employ, for a variety of logistical and financial reasons. Zynga, for instance, will A/B test a single item in 1000 different configurations, concurrently, to find optimal monetization. If we A/B tested any small item change, in two configurations, people would immediately know and tell one another, and it would explode dramatically in our face.. so one of the most commonly used rapid-optimization methodologies is out the window.

Secondly, to make our currently mediocre F2P currency model the "unified" model across all platforms would basically mandate a significant amount of capital, because our burn rate would increase, as we would lose a lot of subscribers (who no longer needed to subscribe). We do not have capital, so for us to do that would likely kill the company.

Thirdly, we just implemented the new metrics/analytics system over the summer, during the whole server-migration thing. We're still adding new metrics on a regular basis, but it takes awhile to generate enough historical data to have a reasonable baseline, and then you have to make changes and draw some kind of conclusion from the result. It's a process. If you read any of the (many) articles on this subject, or GDC talks, or papers, you'll see that each game often discovers fascinating (and unexpected) ways to monetize their specific behaviour and player base.

Fourth, implementing a hybridized system (or even just changing to F2P entirely), requires a lot of game changes, and as you guys are probably aware, we don't have many people to do it, and we've been delayed by a lot of other critical work on the server and elsewhere.

Fifth, there is no "Simple" business model that matches our particular type of game. "Simple" is: premium, subscribership, or pay-per-item. The former is a non-starter, the second is also a non-starter, and the third one we tried and it resulted in a lot of review-bashing because pay-per-item basically becomes "pay to win", since there's a specific pay-wall on capabilities, instead of having a true secondary-currency option of "mining" in a Time-vs-Money tradeoff. The latter is what people want, and what they expect (demand?) these days. And that's what we're implementing, but it's also the hardest, and most complex model to undertake, as it requires a lot of psychology and game balance.

On the upside, a secondary currency also allows better long-term monetization of players, and lower cost-per-item; where pay-per-item is locked at $1-minimum, and becomes problematic unless everything is consumable, which then introduces another set of problems.

If you'd like to read more, a good place to start might be the Dungeons and Dragons relatively-early process of MMO hybridization from GDC 2011 or 2012, which is when I started thinking about and working on this. Unfortunately, it's just the slide deck and not the talk, which has more data (I was there in person), but it gives some ideas of how well this kind of transition can work from a business standpoint: Huge spike in players creates a better environment for your users (in theory), and the relative spike in revenue is excellent. But, it changes one's entire thinking on game development, and monitoring, and focus on monetization, etc. And it is NOT trivial to implement, especially when retrofitting an existing game, with few development resources and almost no capital.

There are a lot more articles out there, that are a lot more recent. People like Supercell have really cornered the whole time-vs-money argument, and there are many papers and studies and things that show how all of this works.

You can find articles on the GDC vault (unfortunately, most aren't public), Gamasutra, and blogs, on subjects like the ethics of targeting whales in F2P, the very simplest of F2P metrics (our requirements, unfortunately, are 100x more complex), or the sheer amount of BS needed to implement F2P successfully now (particularly in a complex game), or what this is doing to game development as a whole.

Similarly, there's a lot to know about the industry, and how that has evolved. Early articles like this one lay out a lot of basic tenets of F2P, and at different points people in the industry have waved some of those tenets as "LAW!"; but time has proven some points to be more nuanced and others just.. wrong. There are incredibly hard-core, difficult games, that are hard to get into, with poor interface mechanics, that have monetized insanely well on iOS.. usually because of an underlying mechanic (and I don't even mean weird Flappy-Bird-esque lightning-strike cases, I mean complex titles). So overall, F2P has some guidelines, but it's not about "absolutes".. "all users want X" or "all players will monetize better with Y". There are some likely generalities of product quality and UX, but what's actually become most evident is that you really need your own data to understand your own population, and how they work, and what they will respond to. Which, again, is why we've put so much time into metrics/analytics.

What was I asking for in the first place, here?

All I asked for was what you guys, personally were interested in buying. What would make you, our PC-driven veteran players who have stuck around a subcriber driven game, more interested in purchasing and participating. Call it a study, or a survey.

All I wanted was your opinion of yourself. What you wanted. I figured that was a no-brainer.

Instead, I'm mostly getting a lot of opinions about a lot of stuff that.. no offence, you guys just don't understand at all. Sieger lists a ton of little numbered stats with statements about frequency that he isn't actually privy to at all, has no concept of conversion rate expectations, or what that even means in the F2P world (also listing many false conclusions and problems that are-not-problems). TRS is just ranting about what he wants (sorta helpful, at first?), but framing it as what everyone-else wants (gets muddled and unhelpful), and then basically telling me I'm an idiot (which, honestly, is often what he does).

Overall, this is not helpful. There were a few glimmers of interesting information earlier, that kinda responded to my question, if only from one or two people.

Don't get me wrong, I actually welcome people weighing in, in some useful way, on a F2P discussion, but this is just noise. You guys need to go read a few dozen studies and articles, and maybe play half the top-10 f2p games on a given app store, before you can really weigh in with cogent commentary.

Otherwise, you're basically wasting time and energy. So.. I'm all for someone starting a serious F2P-feedback thread, or business-model thread, but spare me the self-righteous hand-waving BS. The best you guys can deliver is input based on gameplay, but without any real statistical data to back it up.. so educated guesses. And I can tell you from long experience, that the player base often makes hugely wrong "educated guesses" about what is going on, or how many people are playing, or who is doing what to whom. So, just dial it back to "stuff I think might help?" and present a coherent reason why, and I'd be interested to read about it.