Funding, Monetisation and Server Listing
I?ve some thoughts regarding funding and donations for a while, and Y_Less mentioned setting up a Patreon. I?m going to share some ideas I?ve had knocking around regarding this.
Disclaimer/Preface
Now first of all, I want to prefix this with the following disclaimer:
Money makes things complicated. Especially when it comes to multi-person teams on small open source projects. I?d much rather have a happy community and fund stuff out-of-pocket than have an angry community who are unhappy with the perceived fairness of things (we?ve all seen Kye been accused of being ?greedy? and ?money-grabbing? etc.) That being said, servers and domains and time all cost money, and I don?t really know what that looks like 1 year from now, or 5 years from now, so opening a discussion feels like the best thing to do right now.
I also feel like we shouldn?t go public with any form of monetisation/donation plan until some time after launch once people are settled and we?ve proven the real value of this project to a good amount of server owners.
Funding Models
With that out of the way, here goes with the interesting bits of this post!
So, the way I see it, we have two routes to go: pure donations and a business.
Donations
Donations would be a simple model where we publicise the operating costs of everything (servers, domains, etc) and allow donations via some gateway - now that can be Patreon or a more in-house solution like a Stripe-based service (it should be obvious which one I, a curious engineer who likes to build things, wants to use!). Publicising the opex means users can make a personal decision regarding whether they want to donate. If opex is met, they might wait until next month, or they might donate anyway because they love the project!
This model is open, fair and may or may not cover costs - which shouldn?t matter too much if our costs are low (I?ll detail the opex at the end of this post).
Monetisation (for-profit)
This is obviously the more complicated one and I would only go this route iff:
Everyone on the team was in agreement
We quantify contribution in a fair way that everyone agrees with (X gets 15%!,(MISSING) Y gets 20%!,(MISSING) etc)
We have a fair, automated and trusted way to distribute revenue
It?s covered legally
The Existing SA:MP Model
(Note: my price may be outdated, it?s been a while since I asked someone what the current listing price is!)
SA:MP is currently monetised by reserving a separate list in the client where customers may pay \$20 (USD) to list a single server on that list for 1 month. It?s a very simple system but I believe it has a few issues:
The barrier to entry is pretty high, \$20 is a lot of money per month, especially in developing markets where SA:MP is
more popular.
There?s an artificial limitation to the number of listings, yet the price is flat. This is a really odd business model
because artificially limiting the supply is usually done to drive prices up (See: the high-end watch industry,
Supreme, Yeezys, etc). This may be done to create a feeling of exclusivity to the listing.
It doesn?t give smaller servers that may have a great script with really new ideas a chance to rise to the top. This
results in this bubble where it?s basically LS:RP, RC:RP, Horizon and a handful of other servers that have been there
for a long LONG time. Which I personally feel hurts the ability to innovate and has contributed to this general
consensus that ?SA:MP Is Dying? because all the interesting ideas never get recognition.
But it?s not all bad, there are some good points to this model:
Due to the high barrier to entry, the servers on the list are probably going to be higher quality - or at least, you
have a higher chance of joining a quality server than if you randomly picked from the internet list.
The artificial limitation keeps the list relatively small, meaning less choices for users to sift through.
My Proposal
After some thinking, I came up with a rough plan for a listing model that I feel is fairer, lower cost and should cover opex while also giving a chance small servers that may not have much money but might have a really interesting script. The core idea behind this idea is that the large servers already have an established user-base and don?t necessarily need constant exposure, or, in other words: permanent presence.
There would be a single list, ordered by some arbitrary metric, lets call it ?Rank?. Users may sort the list how they want (name, players, etc) but the default sort would be by Rank descending.
This list has the following two rules:
So the reasoning for this is partly to provide server owners with some interesting ways to attempt to get in front of players. This system would introduce an interesting meta-game oriented around timing.
Let?s say ?BigRPServer? have just bought their tri-monthly Boost as normal and Codeah?s getting an average of 10 players at peak-time on his OpenCnR project and he wants to try and get it in front of prospective players. So he decides to Boost his server 3 days in a row so he maintains a top position for 3 days by trading off the ability to use his Boosts for the rest of the month.
Another aspect of this method means time-of-day becomes another meta-game strategy. So Codeah used his first Boost at mid-day and gets a few new regulars who really like his unique take on CnR projects. Then, he realises that mid-day was a terrible time do this because everyone is at work/school. Because of the ability to purchase three per month, he has two more chances to experiment with afternoon and evening Boosts to maximise exposure in European time-zones and as a result, gets a whole bunch of new players who never would have found his server otherwise!
Of course, if you throw 1000 servers into the mix, this gets very competitive and the rules of supply-and-demand mean that the price of these Boosts is absolutely critical. The value of a rank Boost is determined by how effective it is. It won?t be effective if the list is too volatile and receives new Boosts every few seconds. So tweaking this (and maybe some modelling simulations! Fun!) would be critical to its success.
Another thing that I am very aware of: this system is slightly more complicated to explain, I know, and getting that right is also going to be critical to the success of it.
This idea isn?t completely thought through and I am sure there are flaws in it so I am open to suggestions and criticism!
Where To Put This List?
I am planning to completely re-write samp-servers.net, first the frontend with Next.js so it?s search-engine and non-JS-user-friendly (Hi Y_less!) and then the backend, which obviously needs authentication and stuff so users can manage their listings.
Even if we don?t monetise, I still want to turn that site into a place to advertise. I?ve had a lot of people ask me about if there will be a ?Server Advertisements? board on the forum and I personally feel that?s just too much work to moderate/automate, the forum is not the right place for that. Instead, I can simply turn the server listing site into a place where owners can write their server descriptions and stuff.
This could be hosted on the domain servers.open.mp of course!
Now, back to monetisation (again, might not even do it, so this is just food-for-thought) if this site becomes the canonical ?Server Advertisements? replacement and players start going there as well as server owners, it then becomes a more attractive place for servers to try and gain popularity. So, if we decide to monetise using some form of business model then I think we should do it after this site becomes the go-to place for discovering new servers.
Closing
So, there are my ideas for funding and a little bit of the server listing page that will most likely exist anyway. I?d love some criticism, ideas, feedback etc. How do you all feel about taking donations/funding/monetising the project in future? Thanks for reading!