Introducing Basketball GM Gold (no, it's not evil)
I've talked to a lot of people about Basketball GM. One of the most common things people tell me is that I should be making a lot more money from it, since users tend to get pretty addicted to it (the average user plays 1 hour per day). Imagine things like this:
- Player X tore his meniscus. Do you want to pay $1 to send him to Germany for a new treatment that will cut his recovery time in half?
- For $5, you can buy Special Training Points and use them to improve the ratings of your players.
- Pay $2 to hire a local shaman to perform a human sacrifice and bring your team good luck.
The problem is, that's all fucking bullshit so I'm not doing it. I don't want a financial incentive to ruin gameplay for people who don't dump endless amounts of money into the game.
Instead, I'm trying an experiment. As of right now, you can sign up for Basketball GM Gold for just $5/month. What do you get? Basically nothing, actually. No new features. No new abilities. Just one tiny thing: no ads. And the ads are already quite unobtrusive even without Basketball GM Gold!
Why would anyone sign up for Basketball GM Gold? To support my mission of making a great basketball sim that anyone can play. To support a game that says "Fuck you!" to the lucrative "freemium" and "pay-to-win" trends. And most of all, because you think I'm a nice guy.
I understand that there's a good chance nobody signs up for this and I just wasted my time by creating it. So I'm looking at this as an experiment. Can a quality game with a loyal userbase make a little money without fucking over that userbase? Let's see.
And if this does turn into a success... well, it could mean great things for Basketball GM. Currently I work on the game as a part time hobby. What if it could be more than that? I have literally hundreds of things I want to improve in the game and time is the only limiting factor now. What if I could work on it full time, and maybe even hire someone else to work on it with me? If a relatively small fraction of users signed up for Basketball GM Gold, I'd have enough money to do that.
