Best Income Source?, Business plan to return large % of income as award to users Options

[kPodo]

Hello, everyone!

I'm new at this place, but I love the level of discussions that take place here!

I have a game idea that would award winning players, but the players need to pay a certain participation fee ($2-$5 per play approximately). I can obviously sell the play credits to players (by credit cards) but I would also like to offer indirect ways, possibly one where no purchase is necessary, to cover all types of potential users.

I know there are things like payable surveys, click-throughs, video-ad clicks and then there's affiliate offers, Amazon etc. Do you guys have any ideas where it would be fairly simple to generate that money per user each time. Let's presume for now that the user has the motivation to choose one of the available options. Obviously, it's also important how long it takes for us to receive the money, I'd appreciate some insight on that too.

Thanks a lot,

kPodo

[EGOL]

The only thing that I can think of is a program that interfaces with the user, collects some basic data, then passes that to a gateway such as verisign for credit card processing. Upon successful processing the thank you page of the credit card process is the start page of the game with some script control so that the URL is permitted only one time.

I am betting that you will need a programmer for this who knows how to pass data to the credit card gateway and recover on the other side of the transaction. I wrote a program like this in Perl several years ago but then got a real shopping cart and abandoned it. I have not touched Perl since then.

For the free transaction, the player would receive a "one time" code that can be entered into a form on the start page. This would be awarded at the end of a successful game or you could distribute them by email or however you want.

This post has been edited by EGOL: Apr 23 2008, 01:05 AM

[Autocrat]

Hmmm - could do it with 'Credits'.
You buy credits via online transaction... and the site keeps a record of the number of credits on your acocunt.
Each time you go to play a game, it deducts a credit.

The hard part is finding companies/sites that do the surveys etc.
Once the survey is completye, the person would need to select there chosen reward and if credits for your site, it could load a page with a remote script to award a user account (probably have to create the account first! so the user can enter their username/email/id whatever).

Alternatively.... you 'host' the surveys on your own site?

Or do it by email... and manually award credits?

Obviously, it's also important how long it takes for us to receive the money

That part is going to be a problem - alot of the survey schemes etc. don't really handle money... they have 'chances to win', or fun rewards like playing games (you would have tocontact similar businesses to talk about how they do it - you could be a uni student wanting info on such a business structure?).

[kPodo]

Ok, I understand the Credits system and of course the buying would take place through a merchant account. I thought I was pretty clear on that, and if it was still confusing, sorry

It's about the "free" loading of credits, though. I need a transaction (sale, survey, etc) to happen outside of my website, that awards our website with cash directly sooner or later. And the required money is only $2-$5. Tracking of that is a secondary problem and can be handled by scripts, I am only curious at this stage of the actual type of the transaction itself and am looking for ideas.

I'm thinking, how much in % do you get for Amazon sales you generate, how much for e-Bay sales? Maybe that's a feasible thing, e.g. they have to pick a $10-$15 product they need anyway and get to play for free...

Thanks for your responses!