Fancy Hat Studios (LLC)
Interactive Webfiction Roleplaying Games
John A. Tate~ President of FHS and Producer of ME:R
10/15/12
johntate@bowlerboy.com
337-356-8024
The Game Plan
-We're here to change things
-We're here to grow communities
-And we're here to make money doing it.
Fancy Hat Studios
Founded in February 2012
Location: Officially Lafayette Louisiana, but membership is spread gobally.
Employees: 9 Total. 3 man comic team, 6 man game dev team.
Product: A nation-building roleplaying game built into the narrative and mechanical structure of a webcomic and social game.
Primary Customer: The Webcomic reader looking for something more interactive to invest their time into, and the social gamer looking for a game with more narative structure and personal impact.
Secondary Customer: Anyone else even marginally interested in online massive multiplayer games.
Founding Members:
-John A. Tate (President and Lead Producer)
-Cambel Montgomery (Lead Writer and Game Master): Writer and game master of dozens of online run Forum and IM roleplays.
-Sam Kester (Lead Designer): USC IMD Student.
-"Justin" Zijing Jia (Lead Programmer): USC CS Games Student
-Maddy Wahl (Lead Artist): SCAD Sequential Art Student
-Alex Nobles (Lead Webdesigner): USC CS Games Student
Our Window of Opportunity
Opportunity: We're here to tap the market of social games in a new way, a way that is becoming more and more important.
Mission: We're going to be producing a group of linked comics set inside of the licensed universe of Mystic Empyrean (A Level 99 Games PnP RPG) updating biweekly.
Vision: We hope to do what no one else in this business has done before. Take Comics out of the stagnant, consumer based format they're in now, and transform them into an interactive medium.
The Size of the Market
What's the current market: For Webcomics? It's huge, but no one has done any numbers on it really. Why? No one is really trying to capitalize on it amazingly. Webcomics are by and large free with people selling supplementals.
-Top 100 Webcomics (Each Vote = 1 Person that Month)
-Top Ten Comics: About 70,000 votes.
-Takes 1101 comics to drop from an average of 1000 votes to 14.
-Easily as high as 200k, even assuming redundant votes.
-Project Wonderful: Over 500,000 votes weekly.
-Homestuck Kickstarter:24,346 backers, nearly $2.5mil over one month
Customers
-Used to "Free"
-Used to "Buy stuff I like"�-Used to interconnectivity
-Close knit communities
-Used to improv-roleplay
-Forums = primary method of communication
Trends
Social Games are getting more and more interactive. Goblinkeeper is a fantastic example, a place where the placement of items, not just the existence of them, is important in a social game. We intend to take it a step further. With giants such as Zynga dying and other social games on the rise, now is the time to do as the movie industry did before it's major boom in the classic period. Where movies had gimicky, 'technology is cool' appeal, people became jaded, and thus, story and narrative took up the reins when 'moving pictures' grew and drew people back to them. If social games are to survive, they must do the same.
Needs?
-Roleplay: People like to get involved
-Interactivity: See above.
-Tapping into New Markets: Webcomics are only just starting to be capitalized on.
Competition:
Homestuck
First and largest threat: Homestuck
-Massively famous and popular thanks to the success of Homestuck
-Audience in the hundreds of thousands, possibly in the millions.
-Possibly no longer a threat due to the lack of interactive, "choose your own adventure" comics and webmedia produced anymore..
Competition:
Drowtales
Lesser, but closer, Threat: Drowtales
-Path to Power: Original inspiration, failed to complete anything approaching a game
-Relic Hunter: Single Characters, limited spaces, irregular updates.
-Daydream: Semi-regular updates (Unpredictable), expensive, no personal characters but has adult content
Competition:
What We got that they do not.
What we have that they don't?
-Homestuck
--No player control
--Regular Updates
--Social Game Attachment
-Drowtales
--Social Game Attachment
--Customer service isn't absolute shit. (More important than you think)
Product and Services
-Interactive, Nation-Building, Webcomic MMO
-Incredibly Low Tech.
-Art Software
-Website: Wordpress/Comicpress + phpp
-Customer/Community Support is King!
MMOs and Social Games
Combine the outlined portions of MMOs and Social Games for a New Experience.
How We Fuse It
Use a pair of comics, and a social game interface, to simulate a nation.
-Many players collaborate on actions in the social game.
-Many players vote upon actions in the comic.
-Together, these create the story, and the achievements, of the players both personally and communally.
Development Plan
Alpha in Progress Currently
Goals:
-Get a kickstarter up and running by end of Q1 2013
-50-150 Paying users by the end of Q2 2014
-200-500 Paying users by end of Q2 2015
This sounds like a very small target, but the key to understand is that the entire point of this project was to create a subscription/paymium model that was dirt cheap to run.
Risk Management: The primary point of this is that it is inexpensive to run. Primary risk is in keeping consistent, quality artists. Mitigated by keeping up backup lines of artists combined with managing work schedules so no one burns out.
Revenue Drivers
-Subscriptions: $5 and $10 Levels
-Microtransactions: Pay a few cents to a few dollars, get bonuses for your characters.
-Side Comics: Allow other artists to sell through our website and expand the franchise that way. Take a cut.
-Advertising: Sell advertising space on our website.
Marketing Plan
-Incentivised Links: By having players tweet, make facebook posts, and voting for us on websites such as Top Webcomics, we end up having our players work for us. See Echo Bazaar's old model of advertising by replenishing actions once every 24 hours for posting on facebook about them.
-Advertising Space: Buy advertising space through networks such as Project Wonderful (letting us hit hundreds of websites for only a few cents every day). Or buy it directly on websites like Top Webcomics. Target specific markets.
-Kickstarter. Even if we do not make bank on it, word will be spread about it through the Kickstarter.
2013Q3-2014Q2
2013 Q3: Release full game. Basic user base and starting subscriptions
2013 Q4: Ramp up marketing campaign once a decent sized archive has been made.
2014 Q1: Continue to ramp up marketing.
2014 Q2: See previous 2 quarters? Same thing here.
Business Dev. Pipeline
We have only one partner. Level99 Games. That's it. We pay them a 5% royalty from the Gross and trade art between ourselves. Book deal in the works already for a rule expansion to the game itself.
Use of Funds
How much? 8-15,000
-First thing that happens is that Level99 Games gets the royalty cut, giving them more confidence in their partnership with us.
-Next, team members get paid. Everyone gets their cut. No one involved right now has a salary, instead they get a 10% cut of the net. This gets them something out of it when they've been working for free since day one already.
-What remains (10% of what is given) is sunk into the targeted marketing, paying for the yearly subscription to Godaddy, and basically up keep.
P&L: Executive Summary
This is where we win. Even if we have a ludicrously low number of subscribing players, we are still in the green here. More than if we take into consideration that the "10%" mark we have is 90% split between myself and the 8 other team members, and a few of them, myself included, will be pouring our parts back into the business until we start making serious money.
The only losing situation is one where we simply are unable to update or keep the site maintained, and this is proof that this is not the case.
Appendix
Additional Pages to Explain Mechanics
Front Page
Main Page
Comic Pages
Game Map
Node Popups
Player Stats Page
Inventory Screen
Character Portrait Creation
Player "Houses" (Guilds)
Idea Workshop (Inspired by Steam)