MMO from November 1999 pay to play.

if you income is from subscription than it DOES indicate how profitable it is. is this a joke right now?

Dude you're not a true player until you have experienced the splendor of the VIP lounge and our glorious, constantly updated vendor.

0_-

Yes I was saying SWTOR is not profitable. Didnt you see that in my post? Oh wait, I never said anything about this games profitability.

I'll make it easy:

The number of subscriptions in an online game does not indicate the games profitability. It does not matter what game.

Lets say a game has 10 total subscribers but the cost of running it is 1 dollar. Thats %90 profit and a game with 100 milion subs might only make %10 profit. So saying "Game X has 100 million subs it must be more profitable than Game Y that only has 10 subs" is nonsene.

All I'm saying is that the number of subs doesnt indicate a profit. A lower sub game that costs almost nothing to keep running will make more money than a game that has tons of subs but costs a lot to run.

In the closed environment of each company then yes, more subs for any one company means more money. But the overall number compared across multiple games means nothing.

By that logic we could say any business that has more employees has a higher profit than a business with fewer employees. Not true by a long shot.

Titan is not out yet, Blizzard is famous for flip flopping on things they said never will happen or will go this way or the other way.

if P2P didn't work there would be no P2P MMO's left on the market, there are a decent number of them and they tend to be the better games overall.

By 2015, 85% of MMO revenue is forecast to be from F2P/Freemium business models. Blizzard does have a history of waffling on things..... but this is a waffle they will not flip. The only question for Titan will be if it goes Freemium (dual acess sub/free/shop) or if it goes true F2P (free/shop). Subscription only on a new MMO would be facing head on into a tornado.

hmm its charging less subscription than TOR and still has it game running on servers. with 15kish subscribers and still have to pay the dev there isn't much room for profit therefore yes you can tell how profitable a game is based off of subs since its the ONLY source of income they have. Don't believe why don't you go ask all those cable companies that lose a lot of subscribers if it didn't have a direct effect on their profit.

I last thing i don't get. your analogy makes no sense to me. employers and customers are the same thing?

I wonder what Titan is based on. Hopefully it's world of starcraft. I would so move over to a starcraft mmorpg assuming it's at least equivalent to swtor in terms of quality.

Final Fantasy 11 is still pay to play and it's been out since around 2001. Has more active servers too.

It's really kind of sad.

That's due to the main problems the MMO genre is facing:

- The number of overall subscribers peaked around 2008, since then it stopped growing. In other words, the market for p2p is saturated. Some may cry no good games have been released, but also the older titles aren't seeing continuous increases in subscribers, there's simply a natural limit reached.

- Time investment is of great importance in MMO's. The more time you invest, the higher level characters you'll have, the higher tier gear you'll have obtained, the more you'll have accomplished. This results in a scenario in which the moment players played for a longer period of time, many of them are less inclined to leave for a newer title as that'll mean the hundreds if not thousands of hours they have stuck into the title will go to waste. For many of the earlier MMO's launched prior to 2005 when the overall number of MMO's was smaller this has resulted in the formation of some very solid populations.

- MMO hoppers and people reading too much into financial calls and subscriber numbers. There's a great number of MMO hoppers, players who aren't truly satisfied with any MMO at the moment and of which many often have unrealistic expectations. They jump onto every major release simply to vanish within a month or two again. Their numbers started to arise more and more as of 2008. Their presence is great for initial sales, however the problem is that too many people use their insatiety as argument for the future of an MMO.



Lastly, active servers means nothing. For example a game may have 200 servers with 500 people on each average versus a game with 20 servers with 5000 on each average and still have the same number of overall players.