Opening the floodgates of play by mail

[Davin]

For commercial PBM companies, how do you make play by mail gaming more profitable? For prospective PBM players, how do you make PBM gaming more attractive? Furthermore, how do you accomplish both, simultaneously?

Well, my current attempt here at Talisman Games, although not too financially successful at this point, is to keep the cost of play down.  I feel like players will be more willing to play a low-cost game, providing that game-interest factors were similar.  If I can get enough people playing, then a small income can become significant in larger numbers.  Therefore, I designed our current efforts to be at a very low cost to operate, mostly just overhead costs, so that's all I've got to make up to be "profitable".  Hopefully this will eventually be accomplishing both goals simultaneously.

The current concept is to pay a small, flat monthly fee (nominally $5) to play anything we offer.  At present we have only Galac-Tac running, but another game is slowing being redeveloped and a third is waiting in the wings.  So theoretically you could play in all of our games at once for the same monthly cost.  In addition, you can play in multiple simultaneous positions in each of the games.  For instance, in Galac-Tac you might want to play in three weekly production games, doing a turn every couple of days, as well as having a solo (computer-opponent) game open in which to try out different strategies before using them in the production games.  If you were ambitious (and unrestrained by time commitments), you could end up playing dozens of positions a week for that same $5/month.  I would like to call something like that a value for your gaming dollar.

A question for the players out there...  Assuming we offered game(s) that you found interesting, wouldn't this pricing structure attract you?  If not, what would be better?