login servers
Hey guys. A friend and I have been working on a game for a while now. We got feedback from a few communities on our game. It's a retro styled RPG game and it's really fun. Unfortunately I have to pay the bills and our game takes up a lot of time. I am currently in university and all my free time, and somtimes more (lol), goes into this game. I would like to charge a small amount for it. Maybe 5 or 10 dollars. How would I set up a website which players can buy accounts (kind of like minecraft) and then use a launcher to launch it. It would display a news feed. It would require you to login to download the game and maybe every 5-10 times they have to login so that they can play while their internet is down. It would also check if it has the latest version and maybe also a clean install feature. Would I need a PHP programmer for this? We have saved some money for this. Does anyone have an estimate of how much this would cost?
Comments
I guess the first question would be: If your game is a single player game, why do you need online login functionality? Surely you could just manage license keys through something like Plimus or whatever and not worry about building a whole account system yourself.
My second question is: Is it worth spending the time to build all of this stuff in an attempt to monetize a player base? Do you have a player base to monetize? Do you know that people are going to want to pay you for the game and are we talking at least a couple of thousand accounts being set up in a month or two? Doing online signups and payment systems is really only worth it when your game has some sort of traction and visibility. If you don't have that, you might be better off doing a series of youtube videos with a request for donations to help make the game. That way you'd be growing visibility with a small chance to get some support-level cash out of the marketing exercise on the side.
But, if you do decide to go with online validation for your game, here are the things you need to do:
1. Make fucking sure that you can't just use an existing online validation system. Spend a good few weeks researching this stuff! Plimus could work, as could a few others out there. ONLY BUILD YOUR OWN THING IF YOU CAN'T FIND ANY OTHER SOLUTION!
2. Write a robust login management system into your game. Solve the password storage, reset and lost account problems early. For the love of imaginary personifications of random phenomena, don't store plaintext passwords. Build all the in-game hooks and make sure that you're not too easily hackable, but don't spend ages on this. People will crack your stuff if you store anything on their machines, get over it.
3. Set up an account with a payment processor and a company bank account to handle that income. Paypal is good, although I'm assuming you're in South Africa, which has its own hurdles in this regard. Write a site back-end to manage your orders and user accounts, don't get stuck with crap data on this sort of stuff... Make sure you have a backup system in place. Keep records. Don't rely on PHP sendmail, you will get nuked and blocked as a spammer. Find a good mail sending solution.
4. Upgrade your hosting system. VPSes tend to fall over when they're serving loads of requests like that. For reference we move over 300 gigs of data for Desktop Dungeons every month. We were on a VPS when TotalBiscuit linked us, it died in flames and we lost a ton of sales. That was still our busiest day by far though.
5. Keep making it worth people's money to buy the game. Figure out why they're buying it and give them discounts or special content to say thanks for trusting you :) Run a forum if you can, but try not to get too sucked into community building/management. That can take a ton of time.
So. Where's this game of yours then? Give us screenshots/video/anything! ;)