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Comment by Torn | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised to hear that most of the 40,000 users are happy to pay £3/month to the creator in exchange for small bonuses in what seems to be a very niche (and I say niche because it's text-only, online) game.

I wonder what the retention rate for new users is, and whether the experience will deteriorate as more people sign up to try it out and it moves from a friendly 'niche' community towards something more reflective of the wider internet (youtube comments anyone?)... or whether the fact that it is a text-only roleplaying game will pose a sufficient barrier to entry to those that wouldn't hesitate to act like trolls, and they'll rapidly lose interest, thereby preserving the atmosphere?

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It's especially interesting to me, because my online game is far less successful financially. (I make a living at it, but it's not a glamorous one.)

To be honest, my gut reaction was initially "there's no way this game has 40k active users", but then I clicked the online tab and sure enough there were that many people listed in the last 24 hours. Colour me impressed.

Just to give you one datapoint: I played forumwarz episodes 1 and 2 pretty much like an addicted fiend when they initially came out. But I am not sure if I have been to the site in between and since (if you made an episode 3 in the interim, I don't know about it). If your TOS allows it, perhaps you could notify your users when new episodes come out? I'd personally enjoy episodes with a much longer story arc--I think that would keep your users more active and for longer--but I realize that is easier said than done.

Finally, I just want to let you know that I have always been pretty impressed by the online chat functionality that you implemented for the INICIT game.

Isn't that sort of the premise of this site as well - there is sort of a filter/mechanic that preserves the site's culture/intent by dissuading trolls.

I think you're hitting on something pretty profound though - so much of what is out there says that casual/web games need to be inclusive to the point of genericism. This instead is pretty exclusive by today's standards in that you need to interact with the computer in a non-graphic interface. So maybe this shows that one can be successful even without catering to everyone (in online games).

If the numbers are right in the article, 40% of his "active monthly users" are making the micro-payment. That's an unbelievable conversion rate.

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