CC is declining again!

[Pedronicus]

I'm not in a game, But I've written a post in this thread. Do I count as an active player?

[notyou2]

I'm not in a game, But I've written a post in this thread. Do I count as an active player?

Was your post multi-coloured and applied from a can?

[Army of GOD]

hey look it's Pedronicus

[ConfederateSS]

I see Serbia,you are a fan of PUBLIC SCHOOL HOUSE ROCK..I love it also...40 + 70 = Eleventy..I love it..ConfederateSS...out!!.....

[Dukasaur]

I'm not in a game, But I've written a post in this thread. Do I count as an active player?

Hey Pedro! Welcome back! Start a game, fool!

[Metsfanmax]

I doubt CC's really that profitable now really. Might get enough to stay perhaps partially comfortable but maybe feeling it. Be my guess there.

With 4500 paying members, that amounts to just over $100,000 per year in income. There's not much cost for staffing, but I don't know what the hardware and bandwidth costs are. Still, it's a reasonable income -- for now.

[Dukasaur]

I doubt CC's really that profitable now really. Might get enough to stay perhaps partially comfortable but maybe feeling it. Be my guess there.

With 4500 paying members, that amounts to just over $100,000 per year in income. There's not much cost for staffing, but I don't know what the hardware and bandwidth costs are. Still, it's a reasonable income -- for now.

Not really. First, take off the top probably something like 6 to 8% for the bankers' rake-off. The smaller the business, the higher the percentage the banks demand for processing credit-card payments, and for microbusiness (under $100K, which CC is now flirting with) 6 to 8% is not unusual. Okay, so you're down to 92K.

Next, there's other transactional fees. CC accepts Paypal, and Paypal will refund a purchasers money with no questions asked. They don't even consider any evidence that the purchaser got his product already. I've never heard any numbers on CC, but the last internet game I got heavily involved with lost about 20% of Paypal receipts to dishonest people who would buy game credits, use them up, and then file a Paypal complaint and get their money back. If CC has similar problems, with lets say 25% of memberships being Paypal-based and 20% of those being chargebacks, that's another 5K down the toilet. 87K now.

Allow at least 5K for registrations, licenses, mandatory audits, and other government scams. 82K. (That's if you manage to jiggle it so you don't pay any corporate income tax, which can be done but not forever. You can play games with carrying income forward into losing years, but there's limits to how far that will take you.)

Bandwidth and servers. Lackattack was paying something like $3000/month for servers and bandwidth? I think that's the figure I heard tossed around. Now, BW has reduced the cost by using his own servers. Still, the equipment has to be amortized and the bandwidth cost can't be reduced by much, so maybe he got it down to $1500/month. Very unlikely, but let's be optimistic. There's 18K, so you're down to 64K.

64K for two full-time and one part-time admin? Gimme a break. 64K isn't a very good salary for one person, much less two-and-a-half. (Gotta consider salary at true cost, including payroll taxes, liability insurance, and the like. Low for an internet business, but not free.)

Make no mistake. BW is carrying this albatross on his own internal reserves, and he won't carry it forever. I have no idea how long, but I suspect if it doesn't start making money before spring, it's done.

[iAmCaffeine]

Given that the average wage in the UK is 18k, that doesn't sound so bad.

[betiko]

Bw probably has a few businesses, i don t know how much he has paid for cc but he will want to sell it back with some sort of profit. This business isn t doing as much money as he expected probably, but it s still making money. It s definitely not a full time job to have cc to look after, he probably has 2-3 websites and cc is probably more for fun than for making real hard core profits. He was a cc enthousiast and just bought it to make it his way.

[iAmCaffeine]

Betty, the website business management expert.

[betiko]

well it is kind of my field, yes. El jefe had a few websites he was managing from indonesia for cheaper labour cost and lifestyle I guess, and I think he had a more profit oriented approach. He probably didn't analyse the product well enough and soon saw that he wasn't going to meet his initial objectives. I imagine that big wham was the one approaching him. big wham probably being a CC user and an online entrepreneur, he wanted to give it a go because he thought he could do better and ally work and pleasure. Of course he wanted it to be a profitable investment, but I think it's more like a hobby. Lack launched CC when he was a college student and it was his first business. He earned his first dollars with this, and once it was profitable he kind of let it go to concentrate on other projects and sell it.

[clangfield]

Given that the average wage in the UK is 18k, that doesn't sound so bad.

No, the average salary in the UK is around 26500 GB Pounds (per working person - rather daft to do it per capita), which equates to around 42k in US $. So it's about a person and a half on average income.

[iAmCaffeine]

Given that the average wage in the UK is 18k, that doesn't sound so bad.

No, the average salary in the UK is around 26500 GB Pounds (per working person - rather daft to do it per capita), which equates to around 42k in US $. So it's about a person and a half on average income.

You're an idiot.

[Dukasaur]

Bw probably has a few businesses, i don t know how much he has paid for cc but he will want to sell it back with some sort of profit. This business isn t doing as much money as he expected probably, but it s still making money. It s definitely not a full time job to have cc to look after, he probably has 2-3 websites and cc is probably more for fun than for making real hard core profits. He was a cc enthousiast and just bought it to make it his way.

well it is kind of my field, yes. El jefe had a few websites he was managing from indonesia for cheaper labour cost and lifestyle I guess, and I think he had a more profit oriented approach. He probably didn't analyse the product well enough and soon saw that he wasn't going to meet his initial objectives. I imagine that big wham was the one approaching him. big wham probably being a CC user and an online entrepreneur, he wanted to give it a go because he thought he could do better and ally work and pleasure. Of course he wanted it to be a profitable investment, but I think it's more like a hobby. Lack launched CC when he was a college student and it was his first business. He earned his first dollars with this, and once it was profitable he kind of let it go to concentrate on other projects and sell it.

You're partially right, but ultimately your conclusions are wrong. El Jefe did have quite a few websites on the go, but he wasn't actually a computer guy. As far as I can tell, he's an oilfield roughneck who takes his oil patch money and invests it in internet startups. He was totally dependent on what his programmers would tell him, and what his programmers told him was mostly self-serving bullshit. So we had a year of one broken promise after another, one missed deadline after another, while the his programmers struggled to understand lackattack's code and ultimately had to admit that they bit off more than they could chew and didn't have clue #1 about where to start making changes.

BW is a horse of a different colour. He's an actual IT professional who does most of his own coding. Yes, he's a CC enthusiast, but no, it's not just a hobby for him. I gather that his other businesses pretty much ride on autopilot while CC is his primary focus, and often he's working 14 hour days on coding CC. 80 to 90% of the changes you see since he came on board are done personally by him.

If I sound like a big fan, it's because I am. Lackattack had the luxury of running this site while it was making $250K a year. It had the profits to work with; he could have hired an apprentice to learn his code and take over once he himself had lost interest in the site. Instead he kept all the cookies to himself and once it started going downhill he dumped it. El Jefe's heart was in the right place, but he just didn't have the technical expertise to pull it off. He lost his shirt on CC, but he has a few spare shirts and won't be at the food bank any time soon. I have sympathy for him but not Othello-level sympathy. BW has hitched his wagon to CC. Either he can turn it around and make it profitable again or he's wasted two years of his life. As an IT professional he could easily expect a six-digit salary if he was working for somebody else. I have no idea what portion of the 64K he pays himself, given the fact that there are two other paid staff, but whatever it is it represents a big opportunity cost.

Given that the average wage in the UK is 18k, that doesn't sound so bad.

No, the average salary in the UK is around 26500 GB Pounds (per working person - rather daft to do it per capita), which equates to around 42k in US $. So it's about a person and a half on average income.

Yeah, that's what I would say. The OECD number is $44,222 for the UK, pretty similar to what it is here in Canada.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage

[owenshooter]

I'm not in a game, But I've written a post in this thread. Do I count as an active player?

i don't think so, tried to invite you to a match, got this:

Invite Failure: Pedronicus hasn't played a game in over 30 days

you are pretty much in the same purgatory as Wicked, Insomnia, Hyrasi, AndyD, etc...
wish you weren't dead!!!-Jésus noir

[Army of GOD]

9549

[Metsfanmax]

64K for two full-time and one part-time admin? Gimme a break. 64K isn't a very good salary for one person, much less two-and-a-half. (Gotta consider salary at true cost, including payroll taxes, liability insurance, and the like. Low for an internet business, but not free.)

I can't say too much without violating the confidence of certain people, but I'll just say that you likely vastly overestimate the amount that is being paid to staff.

BW is ... an actual IT professional

No, he's not.

If I sound like a big fan, it's because I am.

Well yeah, if your standard of comparison is Lackattack and El Jefe, then BW is amazing (but only because he actually does things). But I question the reasonability of such a standard.

[shickingbrits]

Duk,

You probably grossly underestimated the cost of operation; i.e. BW aint pocketing nearly as much as you think. Second, you mention that Lack had the luxury of operating the site at 250k, dude, he got the site to 250k, and then bailed.

BW has a sinking ship. If he got it for scrap, then good on him...if...he can do something with it.

[PurpleChest]

As a very casual player, I have stopped paying as the site is just top open to abuse and cheating. While the morons get caught, anyone with half a brain could easily cheat, and i have met and faced plenty that do.

Several friends of mine quit even playing for free as it got more complex. It used to be a simple site, now you have to check, and understand, 35 factors just to choose a game, on any of 3000 maps. And constantly feeling that you are playing someone who knows THAT exact map like their mothers face is dispiriting. Add in the team games massive abuse of newer players, and the fact that a lot of more experienced coaches use greasemonkey scripts to gain advantages in play and timing and its a VERY uphill battle for the new player to enjoy themselves, and not just be abused.

But yeah, add more features, make it more complex but with a prettier face and address none of the real issues and im sure users will flood back.

[WILLIAMS5232]

9580

[e_i_pi]

Next, there's other transactional fees. CC accepts Paypal, and Paypal will refund a purchasers money with no questions asked. They don't even consider any evidence that the purchaser got his product already. I've never heard any numbers on CC, but the last internet game I got heavily involved with lost about 20% of Paypal receipts to dishonest people who would buy game credits, use them up, and then file a Paypal complaint and get their money back.

I would be very surprised if the game in question didn't record PayPal transactions against user accounts, the SDK and sandbox allow for you to do this quite easily. You would be surprised how much information is provided to the seller upon a sale being recorded at PayPal. It's the obligation of the site to record this information - if you don't, and something goes awry with the transaction, then you have bigger problems than refunds, you potentially have people paying for goods they never receive. So, if that internet game wasn't recording this information (which would give them a pathway to cancel stolen premium accounts) then they probably lost money due to stupidity/laziness/lack of professionalism rather than by being conned. [/2c]

[Serbia]

Several friends of mine quit even playing for free as it got more complex. It used to be a simple site, now you have to check, and understand, 35 factors just to choose a game, on any of 3000 maps. And constantly feeling that you are playing someone who knows THAT exact map like their mothers face is dispiriting. Add in the team games massive abuse of newer players, and the fact that a lot of more experienced coaches use greasemonkey scripts to gain advantages in play and timing and its a VERY uphill battle for the new player to enjoy themselves, and not just be abused.

But yeah, add more features, make it more complex but with a prettier face and address none of the real issues and im sure users will flood back.

In my opinion, this is one of the biggest problems on this site. There are too many maps, too many options, and no good sorting mechanism. When I first joined this site back in 2007, there were relatively few maps, simple options, and many players. 1v1 wasn't even an option back then. Now you have a dwindling user base, and far too many options. Recipe for disaster.

Bollocks.

[Army of GOD]

I still think the biggest problem is the UI. Site looks like it did in 2006. Looks older than saxi.

[iAmCaffeine]

Several friends of mine quit even playing for free as it got more complex. It used to be a simple site, now you have to check, and understand, 35 factors just to choose a game, on any of 3000 maps. And constantly feeling that you are playing someone who knows THAT exact map like their mothers face is dispiriting. Add in the team games massive abuse of newer players, and the fact that a lot of more experienced coaches use greasemonkey scripts to gain advantages in play and timing and its a VERY uphill battle for the new player to enjoy themselves, and not just be abused.

But yeah, add more features, make it more complex but with a prettier face and address none of the real issues and im sure users will flood back.

In my opinion, this is one of the biggest problems on this site. There are too many maps, too many options, and no good sorting mechanism. When I first joined this site back in 2007, there were relatively few maps, simple options, and many players. 1v1 wasn't even an option back then. Now you have a dwindling user base, and far too many options. Recipe for disaster.

Bollocks.

A fair few of us have tried to make solutions but those who love their options just shoot it down.