Self Publish with Fraxion Payments
Danny2050:
Hi folks. I've been roleplaying since shortly after the first D&D brown box was published. I have played a number of indie games and I am a big fan of Universalis. I want to see more indie games and more experimentation.
A few years ago my friend Chris and I started an internet game company called TowerGames, which features pay for play wargames. It hasn't changed the world yet but it was a nice hobby that pulls in more than it costs to run. A year ago Chris suggested taking the Tower Games technology for payment and applying it to online journalism. The result of that suggestion is Fraxion Payments.
Fraxion Payments works at the moment as a plugin to WordPress. With it you can place a marker within the content of a page or post and readers cannot see past that marker until they pay. Payment is in "fraxions" which are worth approximately one cent US each and the readers buy them in blocks of 100 or more using PayPal. Once unlocked for a user that page is permanently unlocked for that user.
Fraxion Payments also has a central catalogue of web sites, to give users with a few fraxions to spare places to go and spend them. We are going to be expanding on this catalogue over 2011 to make it automatic and to provide meaningful search capabilities and a recommendation system (like you see at Amazon for example).
Anyway I can see uses for Fraxion Payments in self publishing of RPGs. Have a look at these sites for some ideas:
KwikReads A site that sells short stories by multiple authors. The site owner collects royalties and distributes them to authors proportionate to their sales, after taking a cut.
BattleAxe Books has a whole novel online with Fraxion Payments locks on each chapter, bringing the cost to unlock the whole novel to about $2.80.
Some discussion about pricing is probably a good idea. Do you match the shelf price of equivalent books? Do you work out the margin you would get on a physical book then add back the Fraxion costs to arrive at a far cheaper price? If sales are slow do you bring the price down or does that damage the perceived value of your game?
Let the discussions begin.
Mathew E. Reuther:
There are also access-level permissions that can be configured in Wordpress allowing users to unlock sections. Essentially allowing you to offer subscriptions to sites. This is also something worthwhile to consider if you're thinking of doing some kind of online publishing.
As for discussion of payments, what precisely do you mean? Standardizing what x pages of x type of product should cost?
Seth M. Drebitko:
This seems very interesting, especially from a freemium style web comic model. First thoughts are that your fee structure seems far to high; a 40% cut is huge when your talking micro payments! lets say I set an adventure up and let people pick what parts of it they want to use. Say they only want the monsters I created for it and drop 50 cents in. Under your fee schedule I would need to sell well above 650 copies just to meet pay out.
Is it possible to get the source for this whole thing as a white label set up so gamers could avoid such huge fees on their micro payments. I am not trying to put your system down as it is something I would be very interested in being able to use where in I could control my own network and avoid costs that make it non functional.
Mathew E. Reuther:
The biggest issue with micropayments is the fact that merchant fees are large. Any of you who handle Paypal already know that you're losing a lot of income per transaction to them. Micropayments ARE supported by Paypal now, but to be honest they are NOT exceptionally good, and are really only perhaps beneficial for $5-$10 payments. I suspect part of the reason the cut is high is because Fraxxion is absorbing that merchant fee. So Fraxxion is maybe cutting 10% . . . doesn't seem all that off to me if that's the case.
I didn't read deeply, so I may be talking out my ass. :) (I'm not that interested in charging per page for anything.)
Seth M. Drebitko:
True, but I think there is less room to charge large fees on a service where many free, or cheap one time payment, options exist. I just think it should be very carefully considered by interested folks if they are able to meet the high payout requirements and things.
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