Funding a Board Games Website
I’ve been thinking about how to fund a board games site like FastMovingGames. Unfortunately, I’m just a hobby coder, so I don’t have a budget to help market the website and pay the various costs associated with the site so I have to be a little more inventive!
(For New Visitors, FastMovingGames is a new online service for board gamers that I’m developing - Read more about the vision here)
Why Fund a Board Games Website?
So what costs are we talking about?
Well by far the biggest ‘cost’ at the moment is the development effort needed to build the site. As I’m doing this all in my spare time, progress is a lot slower than I’d like, and there’s no money to pay for it - would be nice to get a more commercial rate of $120 per hour for the development work, but no such luck! I’m doing this for sheer love of board games, and for the love of the web. I imagine by the time the first version is released, there’ll have been six month’s of solid development time put in which at that rate equates to about $100K+ of development effort!
Building the site as a hobby like this is great for keeping the costs down, but it does have the side-effect of taking longer to build and always takes a back-seat to other work and personal priorities.
Ongoing Costs
So apart from the lack of social life and not playing many board games at the moment, there’s a few ongoing costs with running an online service for board gamers like this. Probably the biggest is paying for web hosting. For those not in the working world of the web, every website needs to run on a computer that you normally ‘rent’ from a hosting provider. The cost of this hosting changes depending upon how much data you want to store, and how much web traffic you are using.
So, initially when I launch the first release, web traffic should be fairly low, but will hopefully grow quickly. This means that initially I can get away with a cheaper hosting package that is shared between a few websites to help reduce my cost.
Over time as more people start using the service, the amount of data being stored and web traffic will increase as more people sign up and more web pages are served. This means that there’s an increasing real cost to myself in keeping the service alive and well.
In my experience, as things get real busy, I’ll have to move to a few dedicated servers (seprate web and database servers) and unfortunately these aren’t cheap (at least $400-500/month plus excess bandwidth and data usage fees). If I don’t do this, then the servers will be so slow, that the service will be almost unusable and board gamers will get seriously annoyed. I could host in the US, where things are a little cheaper - I imagine many of the site’s users will be located here anyway, but even doing this there’s still an increasing associated cost over time.
Funding Options
Funding is a real problem for a hobby coder, and I’ve seen a few sites manage this same problem in different ways.
The first is by asking people to donate cash to help pay for hosting fees - difficult to control and plan forward, especaially since if it’s optional, most people just won’t do it!
The second is to find someone already in the gaming- or related worlds who already own’s a web server and can sponsor you or help out by hosting your server and traffic for free - ideal if you can find it, but very difficult to find this kind of benefactor.
The third is to provide a nominal subscription (say $25-$50 USD a year) to help pay for your usage - not a bad option and won’t break the bank if it happens every year. Although people need to use the site in a free form first to ensure their payment is going to bring them enough value.
I do like the third option and I’ve seen it done really well on other sites (my mate Russ uses this on his chess website www.redhotpawn.com for example.)
I can’t find the other great link I once had, but the way another site handled it during the inital release was to provide everything for free, but when you reach a preset level where you ought to take out an annual subscription, the site sent you to a survey and asked what you thought you should get for free, and what should be paid for and how much you’d be willing to pay. When I filled this out, I found myself suggesting that I’d pay probably more than I’d expected given the way they asked, and the whole reasonability and up-frontedness about the request.
A FREE service for board gamers
Regardless to building the site as a subscription-based service, I’m not out to make money from it like a commercial service (not at the moment anyway 
). I always want to keep the site free for minimal use so people can still use it for what it was intended and give it a test drive.
I can already see some tiering in the system to support some notion of a subscription-based usage, but it is not my intention to make lots of money - rather that I want to provide a useful service that board gamers will want to use over and over again.
I guess time will tell!
Thanks,
-Dan
P.S.: If you do have a massive web server with a big fat pipe sitting around doing not much, please get in touch
Comments (3)
April 16th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I’m curious to note that you didn’t mention advertising as option 4. After all, most sites do that to help relieve the cost of hosting (and make money!). Certainly, there are a large number of board game retailers (like me) who, if the system works well, would be interested in something like that on a well visited site.
The other area as well, again depending on how the site works out is, is an affiliate program (i.e. you get paid if someone clicks on a link and buys the board game from that site).
Feel free to contact me directly if you’d like to discuss. Sadly, I don’t have a server yet.
April 16th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Hi Tao,
Good idea and this method had slipped my mind. Advertising is another good way to fund the site’s usage. When thinking of a subscripton-based model I had in mind something more automated that could happen behind the scenes as people sign-up or upgrade, they are automatically redirected to payment gateway, so forgot the more manual element of placing and managing ads.
In fact, depending how much usage the site gets, advertising or some form of on-site sponsorship could be a good benefit to both gamers and games supplier alike!
Although for those thinking that you wouldn’t be able to see- or use- the site for all of the adverts getting in the way, rest assured - if I do go down the advertising route, I’d make them sensibly positioned to not get too much in the way of the main site’s function, but still enough for advertisers to get their message across.
-Dan
November 15th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
As someone who’s love of boardgames has been restrained over time by the commitments of family and travel, I’d just like to offer a few words of support for your efforts. I sooo miss the likes of Escape from Colditz, Diplomacy, Quebec 1759 and various Avalon Hill games.
Unfortunately nowadays, I know too few people that would consider a few hours playing boardgames an interesting and fun way to pass an evening.
I’d happily pay $25-$30 a year subscription whilst tolerating adverts to a degree. I rarely use the links pages of PBEM’s or MMORPG’s, but Tao makes a good point regarding affiliates.
What levels of games are you thinking about? Draughts to Wooden Ships, Iron Men?! Monopoly, Risk and Stratego are favourites with this Brit, as they all encouraged occasional players.
Thanks again for your efforts, keep it up…….
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