What about offloading some of the AI computation onto participant machines? I imagine a large number of participants would have access to a public IP for their own use. You could define a web service that participants could implement. When it’s their turn, you call their webservice by sending the game state, and they respond with their play.

This could also play into the segmented pricing model. Those who hosted their own AI code would consume less of your resources and would be elligible for reduced fees.

I have been toying with something similar but to get people to contribute navigation systems and compete against each other to reach destinations etc, and the main way I could see people paying for something like this would be to offer free general entrance to your system, but in order to enter their code into sponsored events (prize money etc), they have to be part of your subscription plan. This way you get the money from the coders and exposure for your advertisers / sponsors.

Other than that I like it, mainly because I *completely* agree with you re: comp sci -> software engineering mind numbing transition. I finished my comp sci degree and for some reason thought webdev would be a good direction to head in. I realised recently that that step was the first in slowly destroying the mind that was interested in computer science in the first place and now I’m trying hard to find computer related interests that engage me again – AI, GA, Computational Art etc. Time will tell! Maybe this could be the next big market – targetting frustrated compsci grads..

Good luck!

You’ll also have a problem with competition from academics. The IEEE digital library seems to be down right now so I can’t fact-check myself, but the June issue of Computer is about educating games programmers, and if I recall correctly there’s a two- or three-page discussion of an academic group that’s already in the late stages of putting together a system like you describe, has funding, and has run multiple successful competitions with their prototypes.

To me, it’s reminiscent of the whole Web 2.0 business model:

1) Build an online community with no conceivable source of revenue.

2) ???

3) Sell to Yahoo! for $20 million.

Sure, this is a little different, but I want my business plan to stand on its own, without assuming the appearance of some corporate deus ex machina to save me from my own lack of business planning.

Plus, I think the same chicken-vs-egg problem exists with the corporate sponsorship revenue model. Before I could get any significant sponsorships, I’d have to build a thriving community. And building a thriving community could cost a lot of money.

With the subscription model, at least I could scale the community up slowly, building the infrastructure using revenues collected from subscription fees. At some point, when the community reached a certain size and momentum, the inevitable corporate sponsorships would just add gravy to an already healthy stream of revenue.

Good luck!

But I don’t think 3000 paid subscribers sounds all that likely. Remember, it’s not a good idea to use “top-down” logic for your revenue projections. (”If we only service 5% of the people in China, we’ll earn a trillion dollars!”) How are you going to get your first paying client? And your 10th? And your 100th?

I think you could make a lot more money from strategic partnerships, like TopCoder does. For example, Sun sponsors TopCoder contests to get people to program in Java. Google sponsors contests to find new recruits for employment. My wild guess is that these sponsorships could net you $5000-10000 each. Probably more for a Google one, as it would be very high profile; less for some others. With this kind of approach, it seems like you could develop a sales and marketing strategy that’s more likely to succeed. It would also help grow your community for the unsponsored contests.

One benefit of the sponsorship approach is that there’s no network effect involved. You don’t have to have a big community to run a Sun contest, just the technical infrastructure to facilitate their contest.

Related to that: if possible, don’t tie your infrastructure to one programming language. You’ll never get a Microsoft sponsorship if your infrastructure requires agents to be developed in Java. And for an open contest, I bet a lot of developers would be more interested if they could do a language shootout (pissing contest), to do to show that their Lisp/Ruby/Python agents are better than my Java/VB/Fortran agents.

I would definitely run targeted ads, but I’d anticipate a few problems with relying on ads:

1) I don’t like being limited to a single revenue stream, especially if that revenue stream is so closely tied to my Google ranking (as is often the case with AdSense).

2) Tech-savvy people (and especially computer programmers) are probably the least-likely group of people in the entire world to click on ads. If I relied on ad revenue, I’d starve.

3) A closed community of users is unlikely to generate much in the way of click volume. Generally, the closed user community published content (in the AI-Coder forums, of course) and then all of the click volume is generated by a population of transient readers. I’d need to place a lot of focus on luring in the transient users. It’s possible, but I don’t know if I’d want it to be the focus of my attention.