| Dodece said: Massive Multiplayer Online games can actually be self sufficient with as few as ten thousand users. They can enter into a state of developmental dormancy. All that is required is to consolidate the hardware, decrease the bandwidth, whittle the staff down to a team of three, and bank some content patches. You can basically run the whole affair out of a small room. Sony Online Entertainment has been doing this for years. They run a number of games that are abysmal failures, and are able to do so year after year. Not only that, but according to them they are making a healthy profit. They probably spend less then a hundred thousand a month maintaining the system. So the rest is just straight up profit. Granted if your looking to make back a fifty million dollar up front investment. You will probably never make that back, but if you can make back a million dollars a year. Why wouldn't you just continue to drag the corpse. Honestly I cannot say just what motivates some people to hang onto a obviously dead game, but there seem to be enough such types out there to keep such games going for years.
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I can attest to this. I worked as a game tester for Sony for a few years and this literally was the case. In the same building where they did all the game testing for SOE, SCE and 2KGames, they had a seperate room that was basically handling the servers and all SOE services. It was pretty sad. And explains a lot of why the service for Everquest and SWG is so bad.
Six upcoming games you should look into:
