WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO FIND A SOLUTION?
During 2016-2017, we have had discussion with some more possible partners, some investors. The only problem is we can't make deals based on Managersim as we don't own the game, and in order to make any deals we have to showcase a game ( portfolio ). SO yet again Catch 22 situation.
Ad revenues are perhaps a possible income source but most users use some kind of adblockers. We get about 1M pageviews per month and that is not a bad number, perhaps we can work out something with advertising still.
We chose to include Patreon as sponsorship model, and the latest changes rewarding the Patreons are great additional game mechanics where managers can adapt the player's career even more.
COMMUNITY DRIVEN SOLUTION ?
As of 2017, we are about 125 players playing the game and that number needs to grow 5 fold in order to talk about community driven solutions. Also the old retro style of the game is perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, in the jungle of games out there.
In the old days, SoccerSim had a stronger community. There is so much more that requires our attention so a normal session of 15 minutes a day is what you get out of players playing the game today. Perhaps a series of ( desktop ) apps could give a broader user base, and we could add few more game worlds. It is possible as long as we balance users and server capacity and performance, with it's own set of problems. Not too realistic that we can have several thousand users playing in a hundred game worlds. Not sure there is a need and demand for that much game space even.
The old idea about a "Forening" is trouble some as we have players from all around the world, not just a country or two.
Perhaps there are EURO funds that we could apply for funds to create a game but those are often slow and large processes that take long time and demand huge effort and time dedication. We don't have that unfortunately.
So yet again it is what it is and since we don't have owners that demand results and other things, it will have to go through natural process of getting better, more mature and tested by time. Hopefully we as community will have enough time and interest to keep things running for many years to come.
Time will tell, as they say.