So, something i've thought of for a while but never really was too sure how it would pan out was something in regards to platinum choices when it comes to donating. Last year in the summer the options to buy 6 months of platinum as well as a year of platinum were added, and it was a rather enjoyable option, however i feel like more can be done. My idea is fairly simple, add more options while also giving a potential way to price these options as well as the already existing 6 month and 1 year options. What i personally have in mind is 2 more options get added, 3 months and then 9 months so we would have 5 options of 1 month(30 days), 3 months, 6 months, 9 months as finally 1 year. While i do understand there may not be too many people who would get these (especially 9 months, since to be fair i do think it's a bit awkward) but i feel like having more available options that seem more realistic would be a good idea. Now, this part is mostly just going to be a personal opinion i guess, but i feel like the way the platinum prices for 6 months and 12 months were done was kind of a let down. I feel like what could be a good idea for this personally would be to sort of look towards something that seems to work well and that would be discord nitro. What i thought of was to simply use what they do but sort of expand upon it further, so what that would mean would be that at the moment discord nitro is $10/m or $100/y being that the yearly price is that you pay for 10 months of nitro as opposed to paying 120 for all 12 months. I believe using this kind of idea when it comes to platinum could be a good idea and might potentially have some people interested. Now, my idea to expand upon this is real simple, so buying 1 year would be paying 10 months discounting 2 months just as nitro however for the rest i think something good would potentially look something like this: 9 months for 1 1/2 month discount, 6 months for 1 month discount and finally 3 months for half a month discount. How this would translate in terms of prices would be as follows: $8/m, $20/3m($4 discount), $40/6m($8 discount), $60/9m($12 discount) and finally $80/y($16 discount). I don't personally know how well this would work, and honestly it's something that i've been thinking of for a long time, just never really wanted to try to suggest it until recently just cause i figured it would got shot down really quickly by our great overlord. Regardless, thoughts and opinions would be great!
Personally I like this suggestion, encourages more people to buy more time of platinum for that small discount. Teddi after implementing this:
So I think there's a few points, I think want to avoid providing too many different offerings - you generally see most services these days offer either monthly or yearly and leave it at that (think Prime etc). Agree somewhat that yearly could be more cost-saving, but it's mostly supposed to be a convenience thing rather than a cost saver, I think you save a few dollars. Ultimately it's a donation rather than a purchase like Nitro however, so having it cost less I don't think is as necessary. I think donations could be fleshed out more, whether unique models, items, unique unusuals etc, but think it's mostly time in vs benefit when money has never been the primary motive to BB, although donations are always appreciated. If we really wanted more money we'd flood the donate store with auras and flashy things or knives for $$$ to be honest and they'd no doubt sell.
The economy of Platinum has been a pretty interesting ride over the years with how we've changed Platinum and the pricing model around it has evolved. There's a few sides to this as to why we don't offer a multitude of offers and why the discount isn't as steep as say Discord. Much of this really boils down to it's not that I don't want to give a better deal (because $15 for life imo still is the best path forwards) but because financially speaking, we really can't. Kaiden already sums up the issue of choice straight off the bat - too much choice can lead to paralysis and so we simplify it to monthly / 6 months / 12 months. There was humming and harring over if we should have 3 or 6 months, but we settled on 6 as the discount we could offer was slightly more significant, which nicely segues in to: With services like Discord, MMOs and so on they can offer steeper discount % and often in fact the discounted price for say 12 months is actually the real price vs the month-to-month premium. A really stark example of this is how Nintendo charges for their online subscription for the Switch. Our problem is that the actual price of Platinum is $7.99 and as Kaiden suggests, the options to purchase months up front is because we don't offer an automated subscription model (more on this in a bit) so it's way more convenient. If we were to give a discount on Platinum for 12 months similar to Discord then we'd have to bump the price of the month-to-month to at least $9.99 which given that we're essentially a small community within the confines of GMod - I'm not sure if people would be willing to pay (also, economy in drain etc). Basically: we scale poorly in terms of economies of scale; albeit that's somewhat by design as we only particularly care that BB gets enough income to fund itself vs actually making a profit. In addition to all of this, Paypal takes a cut of every transaction we make of around 2.9% + $0.20. From a $7.99 donation we only see roughly $7.30 depending how charitable Paypal feels in a given month. On a 6 month donation ($46.99) we only see $44.39. In an almost backwards way, we also want to somewhat discourage people from buying the higher tiers - not because we want more $ per month but because of the risk of chargebacks. While [BB] hasn't had too many chargebacks across our history (especially since moving to monthly) they can be costly. Paypal are constantly changing their terms around chargebacks and it can even lead to accounts being closed especially with larger $ transactions in place. Again this is where offerings like Discord deal with economies of scale - they'll be able to factor in fraud, chargebacks and so on but to [BB] they can be a costly, timely endeavour. Lets not forget the wonderful world of under 18's trying to use Paypal. If someone underage is caught using Paypal then Paypal claw that money back no questions asked. So why don't we offer recurring subscriptions then, to help with people auto-renewing? The short answer is people forget, notice and then do chargebacks on everything. It would be genuinely easy to offer an automated subscription model (complete with cancellation via the dono system) but it becomes more trouble than it's worth. [BB] isn't a gym with the resources to wave contracts about that you signed up with, that's not to say we haven't won disputes before - but it becomes more than I can essentially (easily) manage. Again as Kaiden mentioned: if we became more money hungry and started going way overboard with soliciting money from potential users this would become far more worthwhile - but we don't run BB to make a profit. For myself and Killermon it's more an interesting developer sandbox where we can implement things and see how players respond, make tweaks and so on. Plus if we made more money it'd take me over personal allowance thresholds in the UK and I'd have to start paying tax on this stuff, which I really do not want to do (given that [BB] isn't incorporated as a company and as a result it falls back to me)! If people are willing to pay more for Platinum $(9.99 a month), I'm happy to offer better discounts for the upper tiers however given [BB] costs haven't really increased I don't feel great just going "hey guys, $2 increase just because we can! Finally: I do want to point out I'm always open to talking about this stuff and finding a way to help fund [BB] in ways that gives players the best possible value - but we walk a very fine line and unless we can stray further to the positive side of that line, this can be very tricky logistically.