| 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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True, but they're basically remaking FFXIV from the ground up. Nothing really worked for that game and everything has to be touched. The things that didn't work have to be made working and the things that did work have to be remade because they just weren't fun.
If SE does manage to actually fix the game, it will have the budget of a AAA game and a AAA MMO put together along with the drain of monthly upkeep and however many months the game was free to play (because they aren't making any money off of game sales).
