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‫راجناروكـ أونالينـ‬

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Business Plan

Contributors

Arabic Ragnarok Online Team

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I. Table of Contents

II.
I. Table of Contents

II. Executive Summary

III. General Company Description

IV. Products and Services

V. Marketing Plan

VI. Operational Plan

VII. Management and Organization

VIII. Personal Financial Statement

IX. Startup Expenses and Capitalization

X. Financial Plan

XI. Appendices

XII. Refining the Plan

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III. Executive Summary

Server information Table:

Server Name: aRO ( Arabic Ragnarok Online ).
Server Rates: x2/x2/x1 ( MVP/Mini-Boss x1/x1/x1 and Exp affected by events, however Drop never
change for MVP/Mini-Boss ).
Server Episode : 14.1 (There will an upgrade to 14.2 soon after finishing the translation for 13.3 &
14.1, and 14.2 )

Server Overview:
The server will be designed for hardcore playing, with Low Rate settings. And it will deliver the fun by
giving the feeling of progress and achievement to the player, along with good story telling, and the
challenge to compete for being the best of the best in PvP and WoE. There will be lots of promotions
and events, and that is to drive hype and to create a sense of e-sports.

Because this is a private server, some stuff will be made easier and available for VIP players, like:
● Job change service NPC, which will enable the players to change job without quests, and that
is to save the players’ time and it will be available on the special VIP club house. We will not
remove the original job change quests, and let the normal none VIP players go though it.
● For Ash Vacuum release, we are going to provide the NPC “Go Go Ash event” which will
enable you to skip the whole new world quest. However; to reach El Dicastes or Mora or
even Eclage later, you will need to do the quests for them.

Deal with the cheaters will be treated hardly and swiftly:

● Using bots will get cash fine and 14 days ban with a chance for release with bail.
● Abusing in-game bugs will get cash fine and 1 month ban with a chance for release with bail.
● Hard cheats will get a cash fine and 3 months ban and there is no bail.

Monetizing the game, we are going to provide Cash Shop and Subscription services:
● The Cash Shop will be balanced, and make the player feel like SUPER VIP.
● The Cash Shop will consist mainly of consumable items, and some headgears that will be
changed every period to give those headgears high value.
● Rare items and hats will be available only in gacha boxes, which will make those items highly
valuable and will generate very high income.
● Premium (VIP) subscription will give the player the following bonus: +%50 on EXP/JEXP and
-50% Death Penalty, also there will be a special VIP service room, which will provide warper
service to all game's cities and famous dungeons, and will provide Buff service, this will also
works for free members but with less features, and free players can access this VIP service
room with a special quest. Premium (VIP) players can also use “Gold Coins” to buy special
items from the VIP merchant, those coins can be retrieved by all players by exchanging
normal drops of “Elunium”, “Oridecon”, “Bradium”, and “Cardium”.

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IV. General Description of aRO

Arabic Ragnarok Online is a niche online game, which has its own unique active players, those
players find the graphics of the game to be familiar, and they like the game play mechanics, and they
like to form an active competitive community.

Goals and Objectives after 6 months of operation:

● 1,500 Average Concurrent Online Players.
● 40,000 Active Players who play for at least 1 hour per week.
● $25,000 USD monthly income.
● Full Arabic + English Translation
● Answer time to support tickets within 5 minutes, and resolving problems within 2 hours.

Mission Statement:
Level up!

Business Philosophy:
Our success is based on how much fun our players have.

To whom we will market the game?

The market is growing toward tablet and smart phone and wearable devices, while the home PC and
laptop markets are stable and heading downward, so we should not try and target new players
rather than the old veteran players, and we can use the growth of smart devices to our advantage by
adding new features and information channels for those new devices so the new players are more
encouraged to buy a PC or a laptop to play RO.

Ragnarok Online had around 50 Million players globally who played the game excessively during
their youth on the past 12 years of game operations. We will target those players who live in Europe
and on Middle East, and try to provide a unique gameplay experience with lots of nostalgia.

Expected age of target market is 22 to 35 years old, and there is a chance of getting younger players
to join after seeing their family members playing the game.

Game Managers (Game Masters)

The game should be operated by highly skilled staffs who know the game and what the players want
very well, and they should be tested for: Communication skills, Delivery reliability, and Honesty. This
staff should be trained for: Game knowledge, Game operations, and Customer Service.
For an ideal situation there should be a staff of 12 (GM) in game, and they all should be in the GM
Guild for better communication in game.

Legal form of ownership:

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Publishing rights for the game on the Middle East doesn’t exist since the end of the publishing
contract rights given in 2012. It is expected however; if the project succeeds with more than
$500,000 USD Income, we will have to offer a royalty settlement with our limited liability publishing
company (LLC) to Gravity Co., Ltd in Korea to avoid any future legal issues with the game designers if
it arises.

All shareholders for the project (aRO) don’t own any of the game contents, and they act as
consultants with a lifetime publishing contract that expires by the closure of this project.

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V. Products and Services

Downloading and playing the game is free, some features and services are paid, a list of those items
can be found on the (marketing plan/product) section of this document, and they are as the
following:

1. Consumable Items:
Which are items that disappear from the inventory as soon as their benefits are initiated,
and the player have to purchase this item again. This category of items includes:
● Potions.
● Special Quest keys.
● Special Event tickets.
● Skill Scrolls.
● Surprise Eggs. (Gacha Scrolls/Lucky Scrolls)
2. Equipment:
Items that the character can wear, hats in particular add a unique look to the character once
wore. And this category includes:
● Rental Equipment, which disappear after the renting time expires.
● Style Hats, which only gives the player the look of the hat without its benefits.
● Normal ownership equipment, which works as per item descriptions, and the player
is free to do with it what s/he likes (trade, vend, drop, store)
3. Equipment Upgrade Stones:
The normal upgrade stones (Elunium, Oridecon, Bradium, Canrium) will not work anymore,
and the player have to use the premium stones only. This list includes the following:
● Enriched Elunium: Used to upgrade Armors safely from level 1~4, after that there
will be a logarithmic chance of failing from level 5~10, and when that happen the
armor level will downgrade by one level.
● Enriched Carnium: Used to upgrade Armors from level 10~20, if the upgrade fails the
armor level will go down by one level. However; the armor level will never go below
level 10.
● Enriched Oridecon: Used to upgrade weapons safely from level 1~4, after that there
will be a logarithmic chance of failing from level 5~10, when that happen the
weapon level will downgrade by one level.
● Enriched Bradium: Used to upgrade Weapons from level 10~20, if the upgrade fails
the weapon level will go down by one level. However; the weapon level will never
go below level 10.
4. Premium (VIP) Subscription:
This is a monthly payment subscription which gives the following benefits:
● +%50 on EXP/JEXP and -50% Death Penalty
● More EXP/JEXP from quests.
● Special VIP only quests.
● Special VIP room which has the following services (more later):
o VIP merchant, which sells the following items for “Gold Coins” (can be
retrieved by exchanging normal drops of “Elunium”, “Oridecon”, “Bradium”,
and “Carnium”):
▪ Special premium rare hats released monthly.
▪ Pet taming items, and Pet food.
▪ Cooking tools and ingredients.

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▪ Forging tools and materials.

▪ Poison ingredients.
▪ Acid bomb ingredients.
▪ Rune Stone materials.
▪ Hiring mercenaries.
o Buff NPC which gives 1 hour Blessing and increase AGI, it will also heal HP
and SP.
o Wrapper NPC, which gives teleportation to all major cities and major
dungeons.
o Hair and armor stylist.
o Hiring mounts.
5. Value added Services:
Those services are not sold in game but they are available in a special web portal, which are:
● Account gender change.
● Character name change.
● Character trade, where you can sell your character to other account.
● Readymade characters for sale, where you can buy a custom made character.
● Account storage expansion, where you can buy more storage space for your
account.

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VI. Marketing Plan

Europe, Middle East & Africa Online Economics from 2011 to 2014
● The number of internet users in Europe = 566,261,317 users.
● The number of internet users in MENA & Africa = 343,976,096 users.
======
● Europe online shopping spending = $465.23 Billion USD
● MENA and Africa online shopping spending = $15 Billion USD
======
● The percentage of spending on gaming in MENA = 41% from the total spending online in
MENA.
● The percentage of spending on gaming in Europe = 4.3% from the total spending online in
Europe.
======
● The percentage of online shoppers in Western Europe = 65.2% from the total internet users
in Western Europe.
● Annual B2C e-commerce sales growth in Western Europe = 17.1%
======
● The percentage of online shoppers in Central and Eastern Europe = 43.4% from the total
internet users in Central and Eastern Europe.
● Annual B2C e-commerce sales growth in Central and Eastern Europe = 30.1%.
======
● The percentage of online shoppers in MENA and North Africa = 33.1% from the total internet
users in MENA and North Africa.
● Annual B2C e-commerce sales growth in MENA and Africa = 43%
======
● The online shoppers in MENA with the age older than 26 is from %52 to %53 from the total
number of online shopper age.
● The male shoppers in MENA are %58 from the total number of online shoppers.
● Prepaid Cards like (CashU) are the favorite in MENA with %48 of the online shoppers using
this method of payment.
● Publishing Ragnarok Online in MENA got $1.5 Million USD in income between 2010~2012.

The most major issues that faced the Arabic release of Ragnarok Online were:
● These was a mixed reception of distribution of the game, while in some places it was a real
challenge, especially in Egypt where the internet lines were slow, and there were
government instability which contributed to the problem. In more developed countries like
KSA and UAE this was not an issue at all.
● Arabic translation of the game was a real challenge, since the market doesn’t have enough
creative translators, which resulted in poor translation of the game.
● It is very expensive to convert online traffic into players, with a cost per conversion equals to
$65 from GoogleAdwords and Facebook Ads.
● The game bugs were not solved in a fast and timely manner, which resulted in customer
mistrust issues.

References:
https://www.statista.com
http://www.go-gulf.ae/blog/ecommerce-middle-east/
http://www.wamda.com/2013/03/13-stats-about-internet-usage-in-the-middle-east
http://www.internetworldstats.com/middle.htm

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http://www.lai.com/en/middle-east-north-african-mena-turkish-game-markets
http://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/2014-global-gaming-stats-whos-playing-what-and-why/

Products
You can find a list of products and services in attached Excel sheet (aRO_products.xls).

Customers
We have four category groups of customers:

Veteran Elite RO players in Europe and US and Philippine and live in the region: are those who
played RO professionally for more than 3 years in their life time, they are many around 15,000
players.

● Age: 24~35

● Gender: Around %65 male

● Average spending per month in gaming: $200

Veteran Elite RO players in MENA and Africa: are those who played RO for more than 2 years in their
lifetime, they are few in numbers, around 100 players. They are rich and one of them can spend
allot.

● Age: 18~28

● Gender: Around %90 male

● Average spending per month in gaming: $1000

Tahadi Games Players: are those who know RO from Tahadi Games Media FZ LLC, they are unique
because of the way they play the game which relies heavily in spoon feeding and spoiled.

● Age: 17~32

● Gender: Around %80 male

● Average spending in gaming: $100

New Players: are those who didn’t play RO before, and having a totally new experience.

● Age 13~22

● Gender: Around %65 male

● Average spending per month in gaming: $10

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Competition

Table 1: Competitive Analysis

Importance to
FACTOR aRO Strength Weakness SkyRO 7amase.com
Customer

RO is a game
that shines
500,000 emails
with lots of
from Europe We have an It is unknown
players, our
and 80,000 edge how the
competitors
Advertising emails from advertising the people will Around 600 Around 800
doesn’t have
UAE, and 2,000 game with a react to the
the resources
emails from huge email list. game.
to market
MENA
themselves
like us.
The quality of
the game and
We have no Good eAthena the quality of
direct control Weak eAthena server admin, the customers
on the game server admin, with good and the quality
Official Server Official Server
Quality contents but with good quality designs of the
Quality Files
quality since quality but poor management
the source is relations relations all contribute
from outside. quality to the amount
of fun the
players get.
Official Server
Reliability
Experience

Stability

Expertise

Reputation

Image

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