Initial entrance fee price for a park where the attractions should be free?

[Dragonis Gardia]

Someone already managed a price tag for that? All prices i set are to expensive :(

[iFred]

Nope. Looks like its not working. But I am still trying a combo of high entrance fee, no fee for rides, low food rates and very expensive toilet fees :)

[Cdr.Keen]

I tried that too, but i looks like you're better when setting the entrance free and overprice the rides. They will pay 30$ for a ride and still say it's cheap ^^

[Minato]

1$ for families and single persons work well. But you can't make real money with that.

[GrindEP]

the higher your park's rating, the more they'll pay at the entrance. I had parks with 30$ standard ticket and 25$ family ticket and was making lots of money. But with higher prices you have to lower the ride prices or they will start complaining.

[Andhard]

Personnaly I always set an entrance fee. At start, something like 4$ for single and 2$ for families, and when my park is bigger, I set at 6$ single and $4 for families. Sometimes I even set 8$ and 6$, but I set the price a bit lower for rides.
I disagree to say you can't make real money with that. Coupled with an advertising campaign, you earn money even if your visitors don't go on rides.
For example : 500 visitors at 6$ = $3000, it still usefull!

[Voice From Beyond]

Having a entrance fee and free rides is never going to work. It works in real life because the park closes and everyone leaves and has to pay to get back in the next day. People don't leave the park in PC at the end of the day. Eventually they leave after spending all their money on food and such. Unless the game charges everyone still in the park the entrance fee at the beginning of each day, you're not going to make money.

[Simpleton]

Originally posted by Voice From Beyond:

Having a entrance fee and free rides is never going to work. It works in real life because the park closes and everyone leaves and has to pay to get back in the next day. People don't leave the park in PC at the end of the day. Eventually they leave after spending all their money on food and such. Unless the game charges everyone still in the park the entrance fee at the beginning of each day, you're not going to make money.

actually running a park with 100% free rides and a high entrance fee at this very moment. entrance fee is set to $75 standard and $55 family. Im running at over 15k a month in proffit, about the same i was seeing when I was charging for rides. ATM withdrawals skyrocketed and concession sales also went way up. Guests are much happier and buy more items. Guests still leave after about an hour and a half to two hours becuse they just get tired. While this is longer than when I charged for rides they are buy much more food and drink than before.

[Bandit17]

Originally posted by SimpleTheNoob:

Originally posted by Voice From Beyond:

Having a entrance fee and free rides is never going to work. It works in real life because the park closes and everyone leaves and has to pay to get back in the next day. People don't leave the park in PC at the end of the day. Eventually they leave after spending all their money on food and such. Unless the game charges everyone still in the park the entrance fee at the beginning of each day, you're not going to make money.

actually running a park with 100% free rides and a high entrance fee at this very moment. entrance fee is set to $75 standard and $55 family. Im running at over 15k a month in proffit, about the same i was seeing when I was charging for rides. ATM withdrawals skyrocketed and concession sales also went way up. Guests are much happier and buy more items. Guests still leave after about an hour and a half to two hours becuse they just get tired. While this is longer than when I charged for rides they are buy much more food and drink than before.

How many peeps in your park on average?

[Simpleton]

Originally posted by Bandit17:

Originally posted by SimpleTheNoob:

actually running a park with 100% free rides and a high entrance fee at this very moment. entrance fee is set to $75 standard and $55 family. Im running at over 15k a month in proffit, about the same i was seeing when I was charging for rides. ATM withdrawals skyrocketed and concession sales also went way up. Guests are much happier and buy more items. Guests still leave after about an hour and a half to two hours becuse they just get tired. While this is longer than when I charged for rides they are buy much more food and drink than before.

How many peeps in your park on average?

6k to 8k

it is by no means a small park and I did have to start it by charging for rides.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=857335833

[Bandit17]

Nice! Looks like a well built park.

I was just asking because I have struggled making a decent profit from park entrance fees compared to just charging for rides. For example I have a River Rapids that earns around 10k, Loony Toons at around 6k and a Dragon coaster at around 11k a month. That's three attractions that earn about 27k profit a month with a large challenge park on medium difficulty. The park earns anywhere from 45 to 60k a month with a population of 7.4k

So you can see my skeptitism in trying to rely on entrance fees since charging for rides seems like the more efficient way to go.

[Simpleton]

Originally posted by Bandit17:

Nice! Looks like a well built park.

I was just asking because I have struggled making a decent profit from park entrance fees compared to just charging for rides. For example I have a River Rapids that earns around 10k, Loony Toons at around 6k and a Dragon coaster at around 11k a month. That's three attractions that earn about 27k profit a month with a large challenge park on medium difficulty. The park earns anywhere from 45 to 60k a month with a population of 7.4k

So you can see my skeptitism in trying to rely on entrance fees since charging for rides seems like the more efficient way to go.

you can make a ton of money charging for rides and i am in no way saying free rides are the best option to make a proffit. I did this as an experiment since this park has over 3 million in the bank so i figured why not try it, i can afford a loss, but like i said earlier, food/drink/gift sales all went up and the park admission really offset the cost and my month profit remains nearly identical to where it was before hand.

[Bandit17]

Originally posted by SimpleTheNoob:

you can make a ton of money charging for rides and i am in no way saying free rides are the best option to make a proffit. I did this as an experiment since this park has over 3 million in the bank so i figured why not try it, i can afford a loss, but like i said earlier, food/drink/gift sales all went up and the park admission really offset the cost and my month profit remains nearly identical to where it was before hand.

So you got me intrigued and I decided to try it with my almost finished park. I kicked everyone out. Set all attraction prices to zero, set ticket prices to $75 and $55, dropped my monorail to $2 and didn't touch anything else (I don't charge for atm, first aid and bathrooms and I bump all shop prices by a dollar or two).

The Good: My neglected flat rides all had healthy looking queues finally.

The Bad: Queues for track rides and most of my coasters quickly became full. I put in Priority Pass queues to no avail (charged $5 for the passes and they didn't sell well). The full queues led to a lot of unhappy customers so I decided to charge a small amount for anything with a full queue and it helped a lot.

The Ugly: My shop profits plummeted. No one was buying much and there was a lot of thirst and hunger in the park. I tried dropping entrance fee prices but it didn't help. I added even more shops and it didn't help. So it was probably due to a lot of peeps stuck in long queues and others with not enough money.

Conclusion: If one is going to rely on ticket prices the park should be built from the ground up with that business model in mind. Meaning heavy reliance on Priority Passes and putting them on most rides to help mitigate long queues and to help profits. With only about 20% of my rides with them they failed to help.

To combat long queues I ended up charging for many of my rides anyways (about $1 to $7 depending on demand) which helped boost my profits but also undermined the whole goal of having only entrance fees.

I played with ticket prices and I feel you did very well in finding the sweet spot of $75 and $55. Lowering them didn't do anything but drop my profits and increasing them only pissed people off and turned more away.

After a year of finally stabalizing the park and with a further two years of tweaking and adjustments my average profits were around 25k a month. So my profits dropped by about 50% compared to my free entrance fee model.

So as you and I have proven it is possible to make a decent profit with heavy reliance on entrance fees but one should only use this business model if they feel like RP'ing a real life park since profits will be cut by about 50%.

(All testing was done with a Challenge Park on medium difficulty with about a pop of 7.4k)

[Simpleton]

Originally posted by Bandit17:

Originally posted by SimpleTheNoob:

you can make a ton of money charging for rides and i am in no way saying free rides are the best option to make a proffit. I did this as an experiment since this park has over 3 million in the bank so i figured why not try it, i can afford a loss, but like i said earlier, food/drink/gift sales all went up and the park admission really offset the cost and my month profit remains nearly identical to where it was before hand.

So you got me intrigued and I decided to try it with my almost finished park. I kicked everyone out. Set all attraction prices to zero, set ticket prices to $75 and $55, dropped my monorail to $2 and didn't touch anything else (I don't charge for atm, first aid and bathrooms and I bump all shop prices by a dollar or two).

The Good: My neglected flat rides all had healthy looking queues finally.

The Bad: Queues for track rides and most of my coasters quickly became full. I put in Priority Pass queues to no avail (charged $5 for the passes and they didn't sell well). The full queues led to a lot of unhappy customers so I decided to charge a small amount for anything with a full queue and it helped a lot.

The Ugly: My shop profits plummeted. No one was buying much and there was a lot of thirst and hunger in the park. I tried dropping entrance fee prices but it didn't help. I added even more shops and it didn't help. So it was probably due to a lot of peeps stuck in long queues and others with not enough money.

Conclusion: If one is going to rely on ticket prices the park should be built from the ground up with that business model in mind. Meaning heavy reliance on Priority Passes and putting them on most rides to help mitigate long queues and to help profits. With only about 20% of my rides with them they failed to help.

To combat long queues I ended up charging for many of my rides anyways (about $1 to $7 depending on demand) which helped boost my profits but also undermined the whole goal of having only entrance fees.

I played with ticket prices and I feel you did very well in finding the sweet spot of $75 and $55. Lowering them didn't do anything but drop my profits and increasing them only pissed people off and turned more away.

After a year of finally stabalizing the park and with a further two years of tweaking and adjustments my average profits were around 25k a month. So my profits dropped by about 50% compared to my free entrance fee model.

So as you and I have proven it is possible to make a decent profit with heavy reliance on entrance fees but one should only use this business model if they feel like RP'ing a real life park since profits will be cut by about 50%.

(All testing was done with a Challenge Park on medium difficulty with about a pop of 7.4k)

Almost all my rides have a priority Que. As for the full lines I just let it be, I made my ques massive to hold them, 30 minutes for a top tier Rollercoaster is realistic in my opinion so I'm not going to fiddle too much with that. I sell priority passes for $20 and they sell decently. It's not for everyone, I just got annoyed with how easy it was too make money charging for rides, it's challenge mode not sand box and with a bank account in the millions it felt that way. Also I've personally never been to a park that charges for rides so just doing what I have experience with.

[Bandit17]

Originally posted by SimpleTheNoob:

Almost all my rides have a priority Que. As for the full lines I just let it be, I made my ques massive to hold them, 30 minutes for a top tier Rollercoaster is realistic in my opinion so I'm not going to fiddle too much with that. I sell priority passes for $20 and they sell decently. It's not for everyone, I just got annoyed with how easy it was too make money charging for rides, it's challenge mode not sand box and with a bank account in the millions it felt that way. Also I've personally never been to a park that charges for rides so just doing what I have experience with.

You're spot on and it sounds like a pretty solid Entrance Fee park.

[VaKhajDar]

Originally posted by SimpleTheNoob:

Almost all my rides have a priority Que. As for the full lines I just let it be, I made my ques massive to hold them, 30 minutes for a top tier Rollercoaster is realistic in my opinion so I'm not going to fiddle too much with that. I sell priority passes for $20 and they sell decently. It's not for everyone, I just got annoyed with how easy it was too make money charging for rides, it's challenge mode not sand box and with a bank account in the millions it felt that way. Also I've personally never been to a park that charges for rides so just doing what I have experience with.

What is your park rating?
What rating is highest, rides or scenery?