Buying a Travian franchise for South Africa

[w1z4rd]

Do you guys think it would work? I know how big local only traffic is... and I imagine this game could become pretty large in local only community..

Problem is, I think it costs around 16500 Euro to buy into the franchise...

[Vortex]

OMW - make it stop! lol

Evol evol evol!

/me vaguely remembers having a life before Travian..

[w1z4rd]

OMW - make it stop! lol

Evol evol evol!

* Vortex;108124 vaguely remembers having a life before Travian..

Thats propaganda spread by SWAT to get you to quit. Dont believe it!

[SosmanSA]

could work !!
I must look into it

[senorblinky]

Problem is, I think it costs around 16500 Euro to buy into the franchise...

I'm not completely sure how travian works, but if it's a free game, how do you make your money back? advertising?

[Vortex]

I'm not completely sure how travian works, but if it's a free game, how do you make your money back? advertising?

People buy gold in order to get an unfair advantage on other people, thereby pouring the money into your coffers

It's not totally necessary to use gold to get anywhere in the game, but you have things like +25% resource production, Instant build, +10% attack or defense power, instant resource adjustments (NPC merchant). These things give you a HUGE advantage over anyone who doesn't use gold. People who have lots of money have an extremely unfair advantage, because instead of waiting for 10 hours for a building they click the 'insta-build' link!

Once you've used gold you feel obliged to buy more too... Grrr..

[rainy]

And where would you like to find close to R200k?

[stoke]

How long will you own the license to use the software?
How many servers are you allowed to run on one license?

Assuming that this can be hosted like any PHP site :

Income = It was something like R120 for the gold, which you buy once a month.

Expendature =
Running costs: R100 a month for 25GB traffic local hosting
Running costs: R2500 a month for advertising every month
Running costs: R10179.16 a month to pay back the 200K loan over 2 years @ 20% interest ...
Running costs: R550 a month for the credit card payment services and silly fee's.

That's a monthly expenditure of R13329.16 without paying somebody to be the administrator of the system, this person is required to respond to "cheating" accusations and system bugs and failures.

So .. to cover the monthly expense excluding the Administrator, you'll need R13329 / R120 = 112 people buying gold every month to break even without tax, so 170 people with tax.

Hmmmm ... not too bad a proposition hey.

If you throw in a big prize at the end of the game, (something that I thought was missing from the game), I think you may be able to do this.

So ...

Next question is ... can we find a way of gauging local interest in the game before forking out the fee's for the franchise? Do like a pre-signup marketing campaign, and if you get 250 - 300 pre-signups then it's a go says I, but you'll have to pay for the marketing campaign first.

[Askari]

Is this game still as popular as it was when most of us were playing? Id be in for a bit of investment..

Using Stokkies figures even 170 players a month seems very small. Surely one could expect at least a few thousand in which case there would be some good profits to be made.

[rainy]

Where do you come up with the R100 for hosting?