Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hello Potential Investors and others,

Me and my small team of young entrepreneurs are looking for a small investment to help the development of a Multiplayer Browser Game (MMO) This is a very untapped market.

The few examples of companies setting up a multiplayer browser  game with the intent to make a profit (Important to note) have done very well. I suggest you look up a game called eRepublik (www.eRepublik.com) which at one point had well over half a million players globally and brought in 2.75 Million Euros between Febuary of 2007 and June of 2009 (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/erepublik)

There are a few other similar games such as Cyber Nations, and Nation States with large user bases. They are not run for profit. If they were, I am confident they would be racking up similar amounts in revenue.

Before I continue let me explain how a multiplayer browser based game would generate income:

1- Add Revenue
2- Subscription Fees (Monthly)
3- Paid Features (Example: Pay to unlock certain bonuses in game or get certain benefits in game)

Some games have some of these sources of income in place. Some have none. Some have a combination of the three.

Now the earlier I mentioned specifically three games (eRepublik, Nation States, Cybernations) The reason being is the game we are planning to develop falls into the same genre. That genre would be A Multiplayer Strategy Game.


We dont want to get into the details of our games concept here. We are willing to discuss it and explain it further with potential investors through email or other communication methods after a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) is signed.

What we can say openly here is that this game has a huge potential to make money.

What we are asking for is a small investment to develop the code for this game. This game will be written in PHP and blackened in Java. It is a text based game.

We have a programmer who will be contracted to do this work very cheap. $8.77 an hour. Obviously we will be paying him on an hourly basis. He understands and game and is enthusiastic to work on it.

For the full version of the game to go live we estimate it would take him 40 hours a week for 12 weeks. During this time though we would release an Alpha and Beta version to game testers (80 of whom have already signed up for our newsletter and chance to be a tester) and at the end of the 12 weeks our Version 1.0 would go live.

We have a detailed development plan/timeline with milestones and goals to be reached at certain intervals. We have also crafted a wire frame of the site to aid future graphic artists and web designers in helping us create a appealing and intuitive user interface for the players.

We already own a few associated domains for this project and have bought up hosting space on servers for the initial Alpha and Beta Release.

So as you can see a decent amount of money, time, and of course, thought has already been invested into this project.

We technically could finance the whole project. We could'nt afford to pay the programmer 40 hours a week. A lot less actually. Maybe 15 Hours a week. This would extend development time considerably.

What we would need to cover the coders expenses (which is the most important and expensive part, the web design and graphic artists expenses would be minimal) would be anywhere between $3157.20 for 12 weeks work at 30 hours a week to $4209.60 for 12 weeks work at 40 hours a week.

We wouldnt need this money upfront. We would need between $263.10 to $350.80 a week.

This is not a substantial amount of money, now when you consider our expectations for revenue for this project it decreases substantially.

First when the game goes live on v1 we already expect a large pool of players to be members. They would have been accumulated from the Closed and Open Alphas, and the Closed and open Beta testing sessions.

So by the time the completed project goes live we already have an established user base and a source of revenue.

Now this followed by some marketing and promotion in a variety of channels we expect to easily have a user base in the thousands.

Lets take a low end number of 2000 active players. Now the way we plan to make money is to incorporate all three revenue sources that I mentioned earlier (Adds, Subscriptions, and pay features)

The standard norm for many online games is to allow a free trial of sorts. We would allow people to play the game for free for 1 month. This gives the player enough time to be drawn into the game and its community so when the time comes they would be eager and willing to pay a subscription fee.

So just to show you on the lowest of low ends. If we charge each of the 2000 players a monthly subscription fee of 1$. That means we would be bringing in $2000 per month and $24,000 a year.

This is just with a 1 dollar subscription fee. Not counting add revenue or pay features. This is also looking at it as if we would maintain a static user base with no increases.

So you can imagine this yearly figure would increase substantially when you take into account a more plausible sized increasing user base, and the add revenue and pay features. Not to mention a higher subscription fee.

A friend of mine had a online game that he developed in his spare time for fun. It has less then a hundred active players. He made a something like $215 in add revenue a year. The cost to host the game was maybe $100 a year.

Now lets look at the big picture. The cost to run and maintain this game would be minimal. The only expenses would be the hosting servers. Which with several thousand players would only be a few hundred dollars. So the expenses and cost are minimal.

Im going to rap up this wall of text soon. From a business standpoint this is a great opportunity. High margins, minimal investment, and huge potential for profits.

I know this is a very informal way of pitching an investment idea (over the internet) but we believed this would be worth trying. We are happy to answer all questions and discuss this with you further (particularly the actual game concept) if you are interested.

We hope this will spark some interest and curiosity and even if you dont plan to invest maybe you might be a future player in this game ;)

-------------------------