If a board designer payment system were to be implemented, what do people think it should look like?

Well I'm glad you started a new thread because I was kind of intrigued by what Kjeld was suggesting and didn't want to hijack the "what should be next" thread.

So, if I understand correctly, we could do all sorts of things. I'd love to see Hex on here, so I could see myself putting up money to encourage that happening.

Another idea Kjeld mentioned was thematic - similar to the contests Ozyman runs. But I think this gives the customer more control.

 

I'm having trouble googling hex payment systems?  Could someone point me to a url that can explain it?

I think Hugh's referring to the board game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game)

Kjeld wrote:

I think Hugh's referring to the board game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game)

Oh.. I didn't know the game had already been invented!  I was working on a way to make almost the exact game and I gave up because the only way I could think to make it was to have the designer support combinations and even permutations.   It's all but impossible without them.  ..at least the way I wanted to do it. There are just too many ways to get across a board.

I couldn't find the thread where I asked, but I know I asked.

 

So Kjeld when you suggested users would "commission" boards what specifically were you thinking?

A "commission" approach is not far from the "competitions" we currently have.  I think what we have has been successful, but it only attracts a certain niche of designers.

My thoughts: If tom was to consider a system, the paradigm should be profit sharing, and I'll state the obvious just for the record.  The advantage for tom and WarGear is that it will attract high quality map-makers to submit the very best maps.

 

I would propose that every player excluding the designer who plays the board counts as one play.  It's okay if the designer creates the game. In fact, that's encouraged; it's a form of promotion, and the designer doesn't count anyways.  All public and tournament games count.  Private and Dev games do not count.

As for payment,

X dollars are allocated by tom on a monthly basis, with the most commonly played (I.e., popular) boards receiving the most compensation, though all boards are eligible for compensation.  The previous month's stats from the 1st to the last day of the month are used.

From there:

• All boards split the money, determined ..by percentage of plays.
• The top x% of boards split the money ..by percentage of plays (this works better if there is less money in the pot, and supports the premise that there may be boards that don't/shouldn't deserve any compensation).
• Others?

Where will the money be coming from?  I am guessing that there is not enogh money coming in now to maintain the site, let alone pay board designers.

 

That sounds like a fine business model but the main issue is where is the income coming from? Premium memberships?

The money comes out of tom's pocket. It's only a good business model if it makes the site better and as a result more people join and are willing to pay for premium memberships.

If tom were to try it out and revenues went up more than expected, he could from there increase or decrease the pot, watch revenues and find the sweet spot.

It may not be a feasible model, but he can be the judge of that and suspend the system if it's not working. 

There are a number of variations on the theme that I'm coming up with me even as I type this post, (and I'm even thinking of some kinks that would need to be ironed out of my proposed idea), so I'll bet others will have different ideas to share..

I like the idea, lets see if it is in the realm of feasability M.  Why don't we work out an estimate about how much per month would be paid out to designers for a start.  Throw out a cost estimate draft we can work through.

A maximum income for an individual board comes to mind.

As well, how do you stop the designer from being really annoying to the members of the site:  "Play my board!"  "Join one of the five thousand games I just stared with my board!"    As it is, I only have the one published board, and I really want people to play it all the time...  Just cause I put alot of effort into it, if I got payed per play, I might be less scrupulous about not being annoying.

Also, if you look at the way games are distributed and which boards they are played on, there are a billion on the basic board, followed by like 200 for the runner up (antastic I think) and then 20 then 2, or 4 or however many for number three. (Didn't look recently, but the curve is crazy) So under that model it's essentially a paycheck for one or two people (or one or two boards if you look at it that way, and I'm sure toaster would just fall on the floor and die when his first check came).

Also, how do you determine the x amount?  Get Tom to shuffle around in his pockets and say he comes up with $1000.00 he is cool with throwing at promotion. (I checked the http://www.wargear.net/charts and heres what it told me) 6778 games played this month so far and the month is only half over.  So let's say tom wants to throw the whole grand at it, that's about 7 cents per game played on the map.  That's $585.82 for the most played map, $59.36 for #2 and $1.33 for the 30th ranked map (lowest one on the chart).  

To summarize, in addition to giving an incetive to map makers, it means tom is giving toaster a $600 paycheck every month, and the best any other map maker could hope for is about $60.00.

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Plus, me and a handful of other people here do this kind of thing for free anyway... 

I understand the economics of a thing becoming higher quality once you incentivize (sp?) it, but how do you attract the novice board designer once they have the expectation of getting paid? Picture this: Noob comes to site and thinks, I should build a board - finds out he can get paid for it - looks at the board creation process and other boards around - pokes around in designer for a while - all the while playing a bunch of wargear games - realized his will be one of 100's of boards that don't get played because people love the original game and that's they come here to do - gives up. (due to incentive being unreachable)

So you might cheapen the experience by paying for it. 

I don't mean to be Mr. negative pants but you certainly change the whole dynamic when you add in the money in a pay per play system. 

The commission system (although this discourages the voluntary designer as well), or rewards for competitions, or even onetime rewards for contributions or something would be better.

 

I don't think a bounty system needs to be integrated into the site.  It just takes a forum post and paypal for two people to work it out between themselves.

If money is handed out based on game play percentages, will that lead to a deluge of simple world maps?  Is that a problem, and if so how would we counter it?

Personally I'd be happy with a system that just granted free membership to successful designers.  Say any quarterly period that you have a map in the top 25% popularity you get free membership for the next quarter. 

That would be really nice. I'd definately take free membership for a good map, that only seems fair.

Pulling from tom's pool of money kind of makes sense, although I'm not sure that's the best route to go and I'm not too big of a fan of taking from him since he's the reason we all play here and is actually active (*cough*unlike TOS*cough*). Also he may make some money from WG, but I would really be surprised if it's all that much (especially if you take into account the amount of time he puts into the site).  

That said, free membership for some Designers or Designers that hit a certain milestone wouldn't be too bad I wouldn't think and probably wouldn't mean a hit to tom's bottom line.

What I would probably prefer is something slightly similar as TOS had, which is giving the players the ability to give money directly to the Designers through the "purchasing" of a board.  I don't think TOS had it perfect or even good, but putting the transaction between the player and the designer makes sense.

I know there has been the thought of purchasing WarGear "Credits" or something like that which could play a role or be incorporated into some sort of payment system.  Probably want to avoid creating a gambling site or a nickel and dime site though.

I am completely against tom putting forth a dime for our map making!  Personally I have more fun making the maps than I do playing the maps.  This gives me an outlet for my creativity that I wouldn't otherwise have.  I know that's not really a good argument for anything, I just wanted to say it.

I think a milestone premium membership benefit would be good.  You get a month for getting a map to Go Live, a month for 100 games played, a month for good reviews over a certain amount of reviews given and that such thing.  This would encourage people to continue making maps to gain more months of membership and since we have the review board it should limit people making a ton of crap just for freebies (*cough ???????????*)

I think promotion of the site and map making should be the goal, not really rewarding the makers, but that should be in there too and I think this system does that.  It's a benefit to tom to give out the freebies because it is enhancing the quantity of the maps and also not really taking money away from him.

I think this is reasonable and should be implemented immediately and before my next map goes live. 

These are all great comments ..even Risky's (when it made sense ;-)

Ratsy's comment about the dominance of one, or just the top ten boards, is a problem.

But I'm not a fan of capping earnings.   If the point is to increase revenues by encouraging map makers to make more and even better maps, once a player's membership is paid (or whatever the cap is), there's no incentive to make more maps.

I'm not a fan of the idea, but I don't think anyone mentioned  a per-map cap -- maybe Risky alluded to it.   As jealous as I am of the Antastic map's popularity, I think Toaster deserves every penny he can squeeze out of it.  Heck, I'm a moderate liberal in real life, so it hurts me to admit this.

That said, I could see progressive payouts:

25-100 plays = $x per play

next 100 plays = an additional x/2 per play

next 100 plays = an additional x/3 per play

 

I can't speak for all map-makers, but I'd like to think that we are all thankful to Tom for his giving us the platform and opportunity to create and share our creations with others.  But Tom knows that there's a symbiotic relationship at play here, and his success running this site and keeping up with the times requires the continued support and creative juices of designers.  The gesture may be small, but it doesn't go unnoticed.

I love the idea that a map maker here would be able to say to themselves that their time spent making this a better site is not costing them anything in terms of fees.   And it's gravy from there if they can go out and buy the occasional libation courtesy of WarGear to celebrate a job well done.

Well, I guess I was being 'non-confrontationally obtuse' before, so I will be more blunt now.  I don't think this has a chance of being workable.  Whatever money the site generates now, I am guessing is not even close to compensating Tom.  Even if there were 2,000 premium members, the $60,000 per year it would generate is a pitance for what Tom invests in time and resource.  I am speculating, but it seems Tom does this as a passion, not for income.  There is no advertising on the site, no other strong attempt to generate revenue that I can see.

Because of this, dedicating a 1,000 per month is not a remote possibility, maybe $1,000 per year.  If that is the case, it will not be enough to give incentive for designers to create something that they would not already create, so it would not motivate new, better, boards.  The people making boards now do it because they love to, putting an extra 50 or 100 in their pockets is a nice gesture but wont result in many more boards IMO. 

RiskyBack wrote:

I am completely against tom putting forth a dime for our map making!  Personally I have more fun making the maps than I do playing the maps.  This gives me an outlet for my creativity that I wouldn't otherwise have.  I know that's not really a good argument for anything, I just wanted to say it.

I think a milestone premium membership benefit would be good.  You get a month for getting a map to Go Live, a month for 100 games played, a month for good reviews over a certain amount of reviews given and that such thing.  This would encourage people to continue making maps to gain more months of membership and since we have the review board it should limit people making a ton of crap just for freebies (*cough ???????????*)

I think promotion of the site and map making should be the goal, not really rewarding the makers, but that should be in there too and I think this system does that.  It's a benefit to tom to give out the freebies because it is enhancing the quantity of the maps and also not really taking money away from him.

I think this is reasonable and should be implemented immediately and before my next map goes live. 

I think this plus the current map making competition are the only incentives designers need. If you win a comp and make $60 it's probably a lot more than you'd make in the pay-per-play system

I forgot to mention that though I specified a monthly system, a quarterly or even semi-yearly system might be the better way to go.  I like quarterly -- the payouts would be larger than with the monthly system, and the compensation occurs often enough that the designer sees the fruits of his or her labor in a reasonably timely fashion.

One pro for the progressive system.. there's a built-in incentive for the designer to make more maps.  Once you hit the x/4 and beyond points, the payout is of less consequence.  I would structure it around the most played non-wargear type boards.  At this point, that would be Antastic and Colossal Crusade at 1400 games or over three months which I'd say yields an estimated 6000 plays.

Micro Mission at 800 games is notable, but the rest of the top 20 boards fall between 100 and 400 games. Let's say that's yields between 450-1800 plays.

Looking at the big picture, I would start with something like:

0 - 1000 plays = $x per play

1001 - 3000 = $x/2 for these plays

3001 - 5000 = $x/3 for these plays, etc..

Set x to $0.02 play (when you consider 4.5 players per game, this is not far from ratsy's $0.07 per game, and this would put the payout for the top boards at ~$56.00.   

The payout for the median top 20 boards would be ~$15.00, and most boards would yield a dollar or so every three months.

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Ratsy, I don't know how you arrived at ~$580.. Under a non-progressive system 1400 games at 7 cents per game yields $90.00, and the median top 20 board would make only $12, a 7.5 / 1 ratio. 

Compare to $56. / $15, a 3.7/1 ratio. 

BTW, Currently board #30 is Go-Geared, which, with only two players per game, would be lucky to net a buck every three month under this plan.  Hmm, considering that I play in a lot of those games ..even worse.  ;-/  I'm OK with that.