The price model

English Boards Suggestions and Ideas
1

I really wish the game would be a one time payment or at least be reduced in price quite a bit. This credit system is to expensive in the long run and I think the player base would expand dramatically if you introduce a new payment system. I understand it takes a lot of effort to maintain and develop such an advanced business simulation but with a bigger player base it would still be achievable with lower prices I am sure! Do you agree or disagree in this? Is the pricing fair as it is? Please don’t fan boy butcher me now, be constructive in your answers please…

2

As is the case for most online games you’re not paying for the product, but for keeping the servers running. AS has no alternative revenue stream (ads, pay-to-win features etc), so the players must be the ones to keep the revenue stream alive.

5 Likes
3

My opinion I believe the pricing is fair. AS does give promotional discounts occasionally where you can buy more than you normally would in credits.

I.like this system because I can invest in credits now and not pay every week or month. I can run my credits down and take advantage of the occasional promotional pricing.

I also like AS because:

  1. You can learn and enter any one or many games worlds that exist.
  2. Start a new game when a new world opens up.
  3. The interface is professional looking and provides good tools for analysis.
  4. There are forums like this where you can post questions and get feedback.
4

AirlineSim is an expensive game. With one holding on a legacy world you will pay about 70 euros per year, that is really expensive for a game. I have no idea what AS costs to run and how much of AS revenue is used to fund other Simulogics ventures. Personally, I think AS is worth the high price but I am also very fortunate that I have the ability to have disposable income that I can spend on things I enjoy. That’s not the case for many.

I also understand that a large part of the world’s population can not afford to play AS. The yearly AS price is more than the average monthly income of half of the worlds countries. That is saddening that people who want to play AS cant do it due to the high cost.

5

I had never run that number. I don’t know why it surprises me, but it does.

I think the pricing is more fair than paying for money, or anything like that. Or having ads, god forbid. Who would even want to advertise to the group here?
It’s not perfect but nothing in this world is.
I don’t know what server costs look like, especially in the EU, but I assume there just has to be a margin of profit for the company. Because if not we wouldn’t have this running for 15 years+ and Martin would be on some tower office doing some tower office job. But it’s clearly not enough that the company relies a lot on contract work, at least as of the last time this was discussed.

6

Having had numerous years of enjoyment with this game, I feel the pricing is OK.

7

I do not understand the 70€. If I multiply 4 credits per day with 365 days, then it is 1460 credits you need. For this, it costs for the best model around 45€. So, if you now mutliply the number of players, who really pay, the AS Team not very well financed from my point of view. They don’t use advertisements (which I clearly prefer), and they also need to have the servers up and running 24/7. So, my conclusion is, that the prices are fair and I am greatful, that AS team is supporting this game!

8

I pay 6 credits per day for 1 holding. 2190 credits per year. That is about 70€ per year. Used to be 4 credits per day a long time ago. I don’t like temporary worlds.

9

Yes - not everyone has the willingness to pay 149 EUR upfront though, especially if the EUR wasn’t “somewhat weak” relative to some other currencies now, particularly USD.
But just over 45 for short term worlds, just under 70 for long term worlds

10

The price model of AS is a consequence of three driving factors:

  1. AirlineSim is a niche title: Even if we had massive resources to invest in marketing, the potential audience for a game like ours has a pretty hard upper limit. This in turn means that all the fixed cost associated with the game (namely staff) has to be paid for by a fairly small customer base.
  2. No predatory pricing methods: We made the conscious choice to shoot ourselves in the foot by offering a fair pricing model that boils down to “pay 2 play after trial”. You don’t get aircraft by paying real money. We don’t let you spend credits to let a flight arrive immediately. We don’t “hunt whales” by offering incredibly expensive in-game assets or whatever. There aren’t even premium features that are limited to a higher pricing tier or something. It’s the same price for anyone, putting a relatively hard cap on the maximum revenue per player.
  3. High operational costs: AirlineSim’s ORS does a lot of math in a given day. Essentially, distributing demand in AS is a massive optimisation problem that each server has to crunch thousands of times a day, requiring quite beefy and thereby costly hardware. The load also doesn’t scale with player numbers but with actual world size. Meaning a game world saturated with flights will create the same load on the server no matter whether there are 10, 100 or 500 players. This is part of the reason why long-time game worlds cost 6 credits instead of 4…they just tend to end up saturated but with few players.

I hope this answers your questions :slight_smile:

7 Likes
11

Thank you Martin, that sums it up nicely.