I have seen merchandise being mentioned here as a possible way to fund the game. I wanted to suggest a Trading Card Game for thrive, as it could be relatively low-cost to produce and ship.
The game could feature community art.
But It would still need some interesting gameplay aspects.
Do you think this is a good way to get additional funds for thrive development?
Would the card game be something like the evolution board game? Note that it might take a while to get all the mechanics done.
I was personally thinking of something like Pokemon or Magic the Gathering. As card only would be cheaper to produce. But maybe the community would prefer something else like you suggest.
So weβd be controlling some βiconic organismsβ that have risen up over the course of Thrive history?
I donβt think this is true, unless you have some company / service in mind that would handle printing, packaging, and shipping of this kind of product.
Weβd also have to make sure such a company wouldnβt get strings to control the actions of Thriveβs devteam.
I based myself on this website: Personalized TCG Cards in Black
$3.10 per pack for a 36-card pack, when ordering 500 units. It seems to handle printing and packaging.
But you are right the development and shipping would not be easy or cheap to do
And even then we might need a larger playerbase before committing to such projects.
That doesnβt seem too bad if we can find 500 people willing to buy such a thing. And, this is the bigger problem, we would need to handle shipping to the end consumers, which means that we need to either hire a separate logistics company or someone needs to handle this themselves. I bet that the handling and shipping costs would double the cost to make the cards. Also for shipping stuff ourselves weβd need to handle all taxes which gets super complicated.
An actually doable merch thing would be a company that handles printing, shipping and taxes on our behalf and ships our designs to an end consumer directly. Something like:
And we have looked at that before, but the roadblock there is that we need the designs for the merch items. And that needs solving questions like how would the artists whose art we are using would be compensated.
While this is cool, hh is right. This would be quite expensive. A better option might be like posters or something.
They seem to do costumer shipping for an additional $1.00 per parcel: MPC Order Fulfillment Services
As for meeting the required amount of customers, a lot of people use Kickstarter.
But I think even in the absolute best-case scenario you would still only get like $5000 out of it, which is still not much.
And this also is probably not what the end result would bring back to the developers.
Ah, nice. So it would be doable if we got enough people willing to place an order and the art made for the cards.
Though I kind of suspect that weβd find at most like 100 people willing to pay for it. As I think while the cards would be like 4$ then the shipping would be like 12$ +1$ handling fee for each order. So to make any money weβd need to price the card packs at like 20$, which is probably the max people would want to pay for cool cards. And with that weβd be left with 500$ in profit assuming we got all of the art for the cards for freeβ¦
Seems much more worth it to setup a print-on-demand merch store with like a few t-shirts, hats, and mugs for people to buy over the years. Even there the roadblock is that do we try to pay artists upfront, do a revenue share (where an artist might receive like 50$ in a year) or dare to ask to use peopleβs art directly for money raising without compensating them in any way?
Maybe pay the artists a % of the money the product with their art generated?
Sadly, this means no Disturbance cardβ¦
I mean, Sciont could still be contacted pretty sure.
Oh. I thought the main reason for proposing new mascots in the Dev Forum was because of issues with using the Disturbance creature.
You know, itβd be pretty sad if by 8.0.0 Disturbance was completely forgottenβ¦
It would have been nice to have the Disturbance creature as an Easter Egg, assuming it is still possible for that to happen.
Romp could use such a reference tooβ¦