WHICH ROAD TO TAKE ?

I had an interesting meeting today with my Chief of Games Operations and my game designer from UK on what's a good fair method to design our next game to be launched at the end of this year. We were presented with a competitors analysis of similar games and one of the key highlights was - what's bad about their game ? How unfair the game is designed as paying users can simply beat the hack up of non-paying users. This game happens to be from a friend studio whom is racking in above RMB 30 million + monthly revenues at the moment for the last 6 months ( *180 million ). I knew their logics behind the game play ...

My Chief of Ops and UK game designer wants a fair game for the 98% of players whom are non-paying as it is important to take care of the majority of the users. I cant say they are wrong but I knew many friends whom are doing web games from MMO RPG to RTS to SLG in China, many of them are on the edge of closing down their game simply because they are getting the revenues needed to survive. In one of the game studio that I had invested we had the best game designer and a huge team of experience game veterans but yet our 1st game failed to produce the needed "REVENUES" despite being a good game with lots of key features.

Then we meet another game investor whom had in his portfolio 3 studios and 2 games operation platform, I asked him to look at our game and tell me what he thinks ... "You guys have a good game play and mechanics but I'm sure you guys are not making money". I was shocked and asked him for his secret formula and he is nice enough to share the followings ...

1. Dont design your game to last forever for web games.
2. Design it to reap money from day one or basically grab as much money as possible.
3. Make sure the 2% of the paying are happy and let them kick the ass out of the 98% whom dont pay.

Does the above make a good game ?

Maybe not but it sure pays the bill as all 3 of his games are racking in millions while mine is only making users happy. So there is no right or wrong way of making a game. You can have a damn good game but if its FREE TO PLAY and you are not getting the revenues eventually you will need to close doors as someone needs to pay the bill.

My final advice to my team is that ... lets get a game or two that will pay the bills first then we move on towards creating a damn good game that maybe will get us an award in the future.