Reia is currently looking at having four ways to be monetized:
- Subscription for more content such as zones, mini-games, quests, and trainable skills (only skills that are really specific)
- Cosmetics related to characters, weapons, furniture.
- User-created content such as lore, music, and more.
- Quality of Life features such as instead of cloud syncing 3 loadout, it syncs 4 or 6. You unlock sync slots. But locally, you can have infinite slots. So it's really just for people who play on multiple devices. Like mobile, desktop, and console.
Much like Runescape and Final Fantasy 14, Reia will also be free to play for the vast majority of content and activities. However, there will be a great amount of content to do when users subscribe for $4.99. This price is lower than Runescape's initial $6.99 back in ~2007 and Final Fantasy's current price of $12.99. This price is great for people both in and out of poor countries.
When it comes to cosmetics, this will utilize the premium currency. This is akin to Warframe. Warframe allows you to trade skills you've found, characters too, and just about everything. But that goes down the road of P2W. But also it's really easy to get their in-game currency so F2P players are even with P2W. They have a good balance. The difference is I don't want it to bleed into anything gameplay related. I know people will sell gold. But I don't want to endorse the P2W nature.
User-created content is something I spoke about before with a few people. I want people to self-moderate the community and create a lot of cool things. And sell it. Here's a theory that would require some testing. Each transaction costs a 1% fee based on what they sell it for. Whenever you trade premium currency with someone, you lose 1% of it with the transaction. I may add a cap on it. But 1%. On items that cost less than 100 premium currency, this fee would be 0. The person who pays the fee is the seller.
Quality of Life. Yet another topic I've spoken on with several people. This will just be things that enhance the user experience. I won't sabotage things for players. But if it costs us money, they can pay extra money to support the game and get more space.
Some examples of this would be extra loadouts for your skills and passives that we sync across devices for you. Guess what? You don't need it. Not only will we give you a decent amount of space, you can just export it and transfer it yourself.
Or maybe someone will make a mod that does this for you. It wouldn't even be a hard mod to create. It would just need a server to transfer the files automatically. This applies to other scenarios as well.
We want you to enjoy yourselves. We also want to have funds to keep making awesome things for you too.