Originally Posted by lewstelamon01

I can keep this up as long as you can. I haven't said the P2P system is a complete success, hell, I can name more P2P games that have failed than have succeeded.

In full disclosure, I don't just play F2P games, I maintain a subscription to FFXI.

I never said that WoW was failing, you took my words out of context. Anyone who's played MMOs for longer than a year knows that WoW set the bar that everyone tries to reach.

But--let me say this one more time and hope it gets through--WoW has a subscriber base of such size they don't HAVE to go F2P if they don't want to.

It's also the sole MMO published and developed by Activision Blizzard, which is a company of no small size. Therefore, they have the muscle and resources to reinvest EVERY dime WoW makes back into WoW. That means more frequent content updates and the like.

Same argument for EVE.

PWE, as well as many other Asian MMO companies and some Western ones, do not. They do not have the sub base that WoW/EVE does, nor is any one game the sole offering in their stables. Therefore, they must make up the revenue difference either by going F2P or by using a hybrid model.

Again, though, it is nothing more or less than an alternate means of generating revenue to make up for a smaller subscriber base.

Subscribers or players are not the sole barometer of a game's health, nor is the fact that games charge a fee to play at all fairly representative of the game's health. What matters at the end of the day to the higher ups in the company is, "is this game turning enough of a profit to justify the development budget and/or keeping the servers on?"

Doesn't matter how you get there, be it by paying a subscription fee or buying a metric crapton of stuff from the cash shop.

It's still the revenue generation that matters, ultimately.