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0 pointsdevishard9y ago0 comments

> However, as a game developer with Free-To-Play development PTSD, I think this rule rests on an implied-but-important condition: People are already using and loving the service.

No, that's exactly not what I'm saying. Uber did just fine starting as a pay service as do a great many games, Netflix, HBO, Amazon, etc.

> Imagine that some shiny new app called Spark launches tomorrow and vaguely promises to be Twitter 2.0, well no one would be willing to jump on unless it was free.

Right--that's because Twitter 2.0 is also fucked from the beginning: they don't have something users would pay for any more than Twitter 1.0 did.

> Even $1 a month is too much for us short-attention-spanned smartphone users, as the total shift to F2P games on mobile has shown us. Nothing outside of Minecraft is in the top 100 grossing apps on Android nor iOS.

F2P is basically just an advertising strategy; I'd count that as having something people are willing to pay for, because they're willing to pay for in-game purchases or premium experience subscriptions.

> Perhaps the answer lies in starting free, getting people hooked, and then easing in a subscription fee? This would also come across as a bait-and-switch, as you said, and some users would inevitably flock to the next free clone.

I guess I wasn't clear about this, but I think a bait-and-switch business strategy will work fine if you have something people value enough to pay for. It's kind of pointless, though, IMHO, because it doesn't fail fast: if it turns out you aren't providing people anything they value, then you won't find that out until you get to the "switch" part.

Ultimately, I think the bait-and-switch strategy is just a way to extract money from VCs and offload risk onto them without having to prove your value proposition, but that comes at some significant cost. If I were a VC I'd probably want to invest to build something and then release it for pay up front--that saves the cost of implementing the bait-and-switch strategy.

> Ultimately, and unfortunately, I don't think there's an easy answer to monetization anywhere...

The answer is "provide value that people are willing to pay for", but I agree that's not an easy answer. :)

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abeppu9y ago

> Uber did just fine starting as a pay service as do a great many games, Netflix, HBO, Amazon, etc.

I think that's an unfair comparison for two reasons: (1) People were already comfortable with the idea of paying for cabs, cable, games, books/electronics in the old world. Whereas the current norm is _not_ to pay for social media services.

(2) A transportation service, game, streaming video service, e-retailer can deliver value to their first customer. A social network is only valuable if others are using it. If Spark / Twitter 2.0 launches tomorrow, even if they can provide a bunch of product improvements over Twitter 1.0, the first users have no reason to pay b/c they're joining an empty / worthless conversation, so at launch it's almost necessary to allow people to join for free. And this creates the norms described in (1).

devishardOP9y ago

> I think that's an unfair comparison for two reasons: (1) People were already comfortable with the idea of paying for cabs, cable, games, books/electronics in the old world. Whereas the current norm is _not_ to pay for social media services.

Of course; this is because cabs, cable, games, books/electronics all provide value. Most social media services don't, at least not enough value for people to pull out their credit cards.

> (2) A transportation service, game, streaming video service, e-retailer can deliver value to their first customer. A social network is only valuable if others are using it. If Spark / Twitter 2.0 launches tomorrow, even if they can provide a bunch of product improvements over Twitter 1.0, the first users have no reason to pay b/c they're joining an empty / worthless conversation, so at launch it's almost necessary to allow people to join for free. And this creates the norms described in (1).

I disagree, I think the norms described in (1) exist because Twitter/Spark provide very little value to their users.

You're describing a first-to-market advantage, but that's not really relevant. If that were a signifiant deciding factor, Twitter could simply institute a subscription fee and be profitable by tomorrow. But they can't: if they did that, they'd lose all their users overnight.

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