Project Beerstar?

So we came across Project Rockstar today (http://www.projectrockstar.com/). From all accounts it's a successful browser based multi-player game - not too dissimilar to Beermogul! Looks like it was developed around the same time (2000/2001) and has the same basic elements - you sign up and receive money with which you have to establish a property (a band). You can then trade with that property to receive money.

I like the fact that players can choose to be record companies or venues (mutually exclusive) in order to trade off the good fortunes of others (by recording their material or charging punters admission). Also interesting is the fact that they have to restart the game occasionally when it becomes too lopsided (detailed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rockstar) - this is a problem that we always encountered in BeerMogul - we never did find a solution.

The daily email is a little bland for my liking - wouldn't take much to spruce it up and use it to really attract players back into the game.

A site that looks after their advertising placement said that they receive 20M page impressions a month - looks like a great way to pay for the game. At 140,000 subscribers (only 10-15K active) that means the pages per registered user rate is around 143 per month (that's 20,000,000 divided by 140,000)! That sounds very high (I wish we still had the web stats from our original proof of concept), but very encouraging. Makes me think that if we bank on about 25 per month for Beermogul that we'll be very conservative and have an achievable target!

Have a look at the site and let us know what you think.