Hi everyone, The last couple of weeks of coding have been quite intense. The new marketing and “revenue features” are really complex and take up many more lines of code than what I’ve been working on over the last year. Hopefully it will all be worth it! :-) The devlog gives a sneak peek into what has been developed on the game over the past week. It is not a new release and is not available yet. New features are always released as official Beta releases.

Completion of the new marketing feature

I showed the “configuration” of new campaigns in last devlog. I put the final pieces together last week. The screenshot below shows the stats view for the campaign. You’re able to pause campaigns and change the daily budget on the fly. The “Create Report” button gives you insight into variables of the campaign so you can assess whether it is efficient, but not until you have reached 10% of the targeted audience.

New revenue-based features

This change is huge! Features are no longer just for increasing your “potential users”. They are now also for creating new revenue channels. You’ll be able to choose between Text Ads, Banner Ads, Video Ads and Subscriptions. Each one will take up one feature slot of your product.

Revenue from subscriptions

If you choose to add a “Subscriptions” feature to your product, you can offer specific features as a “premium” offering to your users. This means that your users will have to pay a monthly subscription in order to access the feature. The higher the monthly fee and the more features affected, the less happy your users will be. However, it will also increase your revenue. Balancing this out is hard. You generally need a very good product to get away with subscriptions.

Revenue from selling ads

Another way of generating revenue is adding banner/ad spaces to your product. Again, this is a feature you have to add that will take up one “feature slot”. Once added, your Sales Executives will be able to search for clients interested in running ads on your product. Once a deal is accepted, you’ll have to schedule when the ad should be run. All “ad contracts” have a specific pay per 1000 impressions. This allows you to run the highest paid contracts when you get the most traffic (primarily weekends but depends on product type). I have only just started working on this feature this week, so what you see is very much a work in progress and will probably change!

Next week

I hope you all can see how massive these updates are. Beta 17 won’t be the biggest update, but I think it will feel like it. Next week I’m going to continue working on the “Selling Ads” functionality. One thing that I’m very excited about is creating the new “negotiation mode” where you have to negotiate with clients about Ad Space pricing. It will be a bit like the current contract bidding, but much more advanced. Do you have suggestions or ideas for the game? Check out our Conflux board. I’m not 100% sure about next week’s devlog as these features take up a huge amount of time. I’ll let you know via Twitter and Discord if the devlog will be postponed. Thanks for reading! Best, Jonas

[ 2018-07-27 11:37:20 CET ] [ Original post ]