Well, to make $3k a day, you just gotta do that stuffing envelopes thing you get email about all the time. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

But if you might be interested in making three BUCKS or three DOZEN bucks a day, this might be a way to do it...

While on vacation, one of the books I read was Scott McCloud's "Reinventing Comics", sequel to the now-required-classic, "Understanding Comics". Reinventing is about the history of comics over the past 15 years, which I fit perfectly: I started reading comics right before the brilliant explosion of Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" and "Watchmen", and Frank Miller's "Dark Knight Returns". I highly recommend any of these -- if you've never read comics and aren't sure they could ever be worthwhile, I especially recommend Swamp Thing.

After discussing recent history, Reinventing Comics moves on to the present and the future. Comics are moving online, of course. Either the comic itself or, probably even more common, the distribution of the comic. As part of this he talks about a subject that's been dead for a while: micro-payments. As BYONDers probably know, micro-payments are a long-touted scheme for letting people pay very small amounts for content on the web. Click on a page, pay five cents. That sort of thing.

It's been The Next Big Thing for a while, but finally it fell away. People didn't want to pay for individual pages, and were happy to pay by credit card for the more expensive items they DID want to buy.

However, micro-payments are making a comeback, for two reasons (some of this is my commentary and not from the book): One, teenagers who don't have credit cards want to buy stuff, and, surprise, retailers want to sell to them. It's such a huge market that retailers are killing themselves to find a way to let teenagers buy online (hey Spuzz!). A great way to do this is to have the parent use their credit card to pay a lump some into a micro-payment account for the teenager, who can then buy things by taking money from that account.

Another reason is the problem that many small online retailers face: When your product only sells for, say, $2, the credit card processing fees kill you. Processing fees essentially make it not worthwhile to charge less than $10 for anything. This impacts comics, of course, and it impacts us: those creating games they might want to charge small amounts for, and might not want the credit card company to get most of the money.

In my case, what I would like to do is develop a couple of email-based games that allow free single-player play, but charge small amounts for multi-player. So if you want to play with your friend, you have a choice: You can pay $1 for a single game, or $10 for unlimited games. If a game is at all popular or good, it's easy to imagine making from a few bucks to a few hundred bucks a month (I'll let my imagination stop there). At least enough to pay for server costs and such, one would hope.

However, given that micro-payments aren't really a reality at the moment (there is no system with market saturation), this is not very practical given what it costs to set up a credit card system.

HOWEVER, maybe we could resurrect those old Dung Dollars for this, and Dantom could have a way to get in on the action. What if Dantom allowed for people to pay larger amounts (say $10 or $20 typically) into a BYOND account, which we could use to charge users smaller amounts for playing our games.

This is very similar to the original Dantom idea, I think, but with a twist: instead of charging people to buy that Killer Sword, you are simply charging a very small amount to play a game. As in my model, I think you have to allow people to play for free in some manner so they can evaluate your game, but you can charge for some form of play.

Dantom would get a piece of this, and we'd be able to charge small amounts.

What do people think?

P.S. As long as I'm mentioning what I read on my vacation, it's also well worth checking out the excellent graphic novel by Jason Lutes, called "Jar of Fools". Given my history as a bad amateur magician, the subject matter was particularly appropriate. This is a very engaging story about people who's lives are falling apart -- the lousy amateur magician who is helping his senile mentor escape the old folks home that's after him, his ex-girlfriend, and a con man and his daughter.

I'm also finding very interesting "The Annotated 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", original work by Jules Verne. Turns out that the English translators for Verne REALLY screwed things up, leaving out a 1/4 of the novel and completely mis-translating much of the rest (saying "He pressed the clock three times" instead of "He pressed the BELL three times", or leaving out in-depth discussions between the characters because they implied you can't take the Bible literally). Also, this annotated version has lots of interesting margin notes and some great engravings from the original and from nature books of the time. I started reading it because it's major research for my next game...