[ReligFree]

The argument is as well if you did bump the price, you'd have to maintain that price for at least three rounds to see if there is actually any substantial change in turnover and subsequent profit. As has been stated above £7.50 is a pretty large amount and is a 50% increase on current prices of a single credit. Now if a new player comes in to "try" the game, the chances are they aren't going to want to pay that much first time around, especially as despite your advertising around the round start people may miss tick start/find it late and so essentially be paying and still have a disadvantage. They'd try the game for free and then if they do take a liking to it then maybe would purchase a credit for the next round, and so that's where you'd start to see sales increase I think. Maybe you want to look more at rates of new players purchasing free accounts and then in the future becoming paid players. Find out why they decided to pay and market it to unpaid accounts that they could have these benefits.

I think a more realistic price increase would be to £6, that gives you a 20% increase and then with an option to donate there could be more. If you made the jump to £7.50 and committed to the three round period you could actually move more players away. The way i've worked in the past is larger sales at a lower profit is better than fewer sales at a huge profit. Do you want a large slice of a very small pie or a little slice of a large one? When compared to the services sector for example you can look at it like a pub where if the pub is heaving and busy it has a great atmosphere, lots of people to talk to & genuinely a nice place to be. If there's 2 old men & a dog in the corner it's not going to encourage more people to come "join the party". By giving people MORE for their money I think you'd attract more players, not charging people more for the same service/product.

Finally it might look like i'm contradicting myself here, but if you look at sales for things such as Mars bars at the moment (in economic downturn) they've still maintained very solid, stable sales figures. It's because everyones got 50p spare for something they want. If you perhaps list the price as £6 - £0.50 a week for 8 weeks I think you may have more success.