Hattrick - more than a product - more than a game

This article was published some days ago on the german "Hattrick Press"-site and was written in response to the recent announcement regarding the raise of supporter prices. It attempts to sum up both the official HT stance as well as the reactions from the community. The article focuses on Hattricks unique selling points and tries to determine the legitimacy of the protests that resulted from the announced price raise.

My pal leaves Hattrick.
He'll be gone in November when his supporter status runs out. He does so, even though he's a bigger fan of the game concept of Hattrick than ever before, but hates the price raise. I know, the community won't care one lick about this person leaving, and I have to admit, him and I were interacting less and less in HT over the last few years. But for me it's a turning point, a break, the end of a long era; a wonderful era.

When I first read about the price raise I was neither angry nor – considering my prior experience with the people with the „HT-“ prefix - really surprised; I was simply sad. I'm doing well enough financially to be able to afford the new price, and I'm too addicted to HT to make the same consequential move my friend did; I'd probably pay even more, especially to keep my second team. But I realized right away, that not everyone would make the same decision, that there would be people that financially couldn't make the same decision, as we're now talking about supporter prices that will even make people living in economically relatively stable parts of the world would think twice about before paying (and let's not even touch the topic of those countries receiving the „generous“ 25% discount). The last few weeks saw a rare upwards tendency in user numbers and you could clearly see hope blossoming in the community - dare I say euphoria? Managers all over the world did their best to support this trend, for instance by enrolling in the mentor program. This kind of price raise at this point was a kick in the guts for them.

What finally made me angry were the HT officials pathetic attempts at justifying the price raise, especially a sentence by HT-Matthias, explaining that they made a study that showed raising the price by 50% would only drive 10% of the supports away („We did a pilot study on a select group of Hattrick users. And it showed that a 50% price increase would lead to 10% fewer Supporters“). Let's ignore the somewhat stale feeling I'm left with, the realization that a user here seems to not be more than a source on income, required to put out as much money as possible. But this sentence makes it obvious that the officials couldn't care less if users leave the game and the community in frustration – as long as the financial bottom line show the maximum possible revenue.

I know I'm treading on thin ice here and I can't ignore those posts on the forums supporting the price raise. HT is not a charity, but a product, a business, thus consequently meant to achieve the best possible result, which means, making the most money. Running a business any other way might be a horrible mistake, resulting in Hattrick dying from pressure by the competition – not that I see a lot of competition in HTs special niche. More importantly, in a world where food is sold through stock markets and weapons are being delivered to countries with dubious moral values, all in the name of profit, it seems obscene and questionable to call the owners of a small browser game out for wanting to make a living by charging its player base of (in the grand scheme of things) probably mostly reasonably well-off folks a higher price.

It remains to be seen if this decision will ultimately pay off from a business perspective, or if the game that had just shown signs of halting its decline will be damaged by the higher prices.

The biggest issue is something else though, something I think is the reason for a lot of the understandably emotional feedback from users to the price raise: Hattrick is not just a Football Manager browser game, but a hybrid of a football simulation and a social media site. Hattrick might be an even better example for a social network than the grandfather of social networking, Facebook. Not in its size, certainly, but in quality.

It might sound pathetic, but for some of us HT is a virtual home, to a certain degree. The clinical and impersonal anonymity of the internet gets broken by HT-meetings and groups of local managers meeting regularly. I tried to explain to my former girlfriend (now wife, despite Hattrick) my fascination with Hattrick. I had to, after brooding over a loss in a cup semi-finale for a day (of course totally undeserved; ME hated me! ^^). I compared it to the passionate puppy love fans feel towards a real club, just with the bonus that you're not simply a passive fanboy, but actually get to manage the club yourself. This goes beyond just the mechanical managerial decisions and includes activities in the forum and federations.

„Managerial Decisions“? Here's another issue. Social Networks share a characteristic feature which is both the basis for their business and the biggest obscenity: where usually a customer pays for a product or service provided by the producer, Facebook & Co make him pay twice. Not only is the user a paying consumer (paying through advertisements even on free website) but also an unpaid producer himself. So he contributes to a product that he consumes at the same time – the perfect economical Perpetuum Mobile.
This is something that bothers me on pretty much all websites of this kind, enough that I am visiting them only as much as I really have to.
Most of those sites I can avoid easily enough, as they have very little to offer me – HT on the other side is a totally different ballgame. I've invested a lot of time over the last few years to add to the net of Hattrick sites and many thousands of other users have done a whole lot more than me. Helping in the aforementioned mentoring system, helping around National Teams, developing CHPP tools and much more. All of those contributions to me seem to be so much more valuable than the developing efforts officially done by the HTs, which is their justification for the latest price hike. A price raise which seems to completely ignore the value of the community contributions, or worse, being dismissive and spiting on them by intransparent decisions that appear fatal to the future of HT.

And so we're back to the old discussion: can a business be run economically while maintaining a maximum of transparency (potentially including revenue numbers and other business critical information) to honor the free work done by the community? Does the financial support by the users grant them a right to participate more, not only trying to improve the product itself and grow the sales and userbase, but possibly including a say in business decisions and potentially a right to veto?

That's asking a lot, but we're not talking about a shareholder driven global player like Facebook but a small, manageable game, supported by its users to a degree that seems to be completely unique, as far as I can see. It would be a pity if this wonderful project would be ruined by shortsighted decisions to make a quick buck.

In my opinion this unique setup and cooperation gives the community the right and opportunity to voice their needs and interests and request more transparency and better ways to participate, but also more leverage to refuse something, they don't want and make their voices heard.
I'm quite willing to invest more time and more money (in case of a crowd-funded project, a lot more money) into Hattrick, if the HT officials finally prove that they see Hattrick as more than just a product, and show that they don't just work like any other business out there by finally living up to the projects uniqueness and the community behind it.

(translation by thom_raindog)

Link directly to this article (HT-ML, for the forum): [ArticleID=18843]