Merkin wrote:
So, what is our solution in the medium/long run? How does remote play make money for Buzztime? In Chicago, it seems only to aloow spoofing cheaters to become a nuisance to many locations. How can that be minimized and how can remote play be designed so it does not take customers away from the actual Buzztime subscribers, the restaurant/bars?
The problem isn't the existence of remote play; the problem is the non-existence of any way to make remote players pay.
From
http://www.scaratings.com/newScaratings/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=4109So What Can We Do Instead?
What Buzztime needs to do is set up their own hybrid situation: retain free play in bars/restaurants and create a new paying player category to create a second means of playing. Buzztime would charge a set monthly fee for access to some or all of the same games as the bars. This would work solely through the Buzztime app.
The use of locations would be expanded. Paying players could choose to join an existing location or create their own. Teams could be formed/disbanded by groups deciding to join or leave a “place.”
With the carrots come a necessary stick: devices using GPS spoofing must be automatically blocked from the Buzztime system. As I pointed out earlier, this can be done for most devices without blocking the use of phones, etc. in the bar; this is likely to be more difficult for iOS than Android phones, but spoofing Is more difficult with iOS, too.
So how would this change how my team plays? If a member of my team wanted to play, with our team or by himself, he would have to pay Buzztime a monthly fee, just like Netflix. He would have to do that because if he tried to use GPS spoofing to pretend to be in a bar, Buzztime wouldn’t let him in. When he signed in, he would no longer sign into some bar in New Jersey or Long Island; he would sign into “our” place, and that would be his (and our) location on leaderboards. Assuming Showdown was included in the games covered by the monthly fee, there would be no need to continue with the “Hybrid Showdown” play; we would just play Showdown remotely, and pay Buzztime directly to play that and all the other games.
Creating and maintaining a subscription system would be a significant cost, and one can reasonably doubt initial revenues would justify the outlay. If the only purpose of the exercise was to gather up the lost sheep of the tribe of Buzztime, I couldn’t justify it; this would need significant promotion and outreach.
But the same old, same-old didn’t really work in the good old days, and it’s a lot worse now. Buzztime has to decide whether or not it wants to keep living. It may think staying the same is the way to go, but there’s just no future in catering to a dwindling remnant of old fogies with a dwindling remnant of old locations, especially when there aren’t a stream of new fogies showing up as replacements.