» Tue Jun 26, 2012 8:44 pm In business and investing, there's always one key thing that business owners and investor aim to get: Passive, recurring income. The more you get the more it builds and builds, and before you know it, what started out a small stream of recurring income turns into a roaring river. For anybody, any individual, a goal should be to have more passive recurring income than expenses, because that my friends, is freedom (assuming you're not cutting corners too much to make it happen). That being said, large businesses aim for the same thing.
Before WoW came out, there were really 2 big MMO's on the scene: EQ, and DAoC. I'm not sure how many subscribers EQ had at it's peak, but DAoC was considered to be wildly successful back in the day, and they only had 250k subscribers at their peak.
Enter WoW.
WoW basically came in and took the entire MMO industry to the next level. That's the one thing that WoW actually did contribute (that and they're awesome graphix, loljk). WoW peaked at 12 million subscribers. 12 MILLION. Just to give you an idea of how much that really is, consider this:
A company that makes a software and the software earns them a recurring income of about 12 months the cost to create the software, that software is considered pretty darn successful. So, if you spend $100 Million designing a software, and it earns $830k per month, for a few years, you did a really good job.
But WoW, on the other hand, was earning not $830,000, but $180,000,000, PER MONTH. The GAME cost only $100 Million to make. That means, they were earning OVER 1.75x what the game cost to make on a MONTHLY basis, and that DOESN'T include, the cost to buy the game, or the cost of the expansions, nor does it include upkeep on the game, but I imagine that income generated from initial sales and expansions more than covered upkeep, without having to dip into subscriber incomes too much. Nowadays, WoW STILL has about 10 million subscribers, and so is making about $150 million per month in subscription fees.
So, here we are 7 1/2 years later, and WoW is still making 1.5x the entire cost to produce the game every single month, again, just in subscription fees.
Now, when people say the P2P model no longer works, they're looking at P2P games that seem to have "failed" but believe it or not, from a business stand-point, many of these games ARE still considered successful. That's why games like Rift came in, and didn't try to be innovative, but instead just tried to get a piece of the WoW pie, and they did. And it worked...
However, people are getting sick now of WoW, simply because it's not a great game and is coming up on its 8th birthday. that being the case, many of these people will be looking to relocate to another game, so this is the perfect time to release a game to try and grab that crowd, and we've found out time and time again, that though some games can copy WoW and still be somewhat successful, those games never truly last, even if they did get a relatively high ROI from a general business standpoint, they didn't come close to matching the success of WoW, or making a good amount of money from an MMO standpoint...
So, now is the change to make a game that's all-around solid, but doesn't try to mimic WoW. A game that's good in it's own right, for various different reasons. It doesn't have to be astonishingly innovative, no game since EQ and DAoC has been anyways, and most of them have been pretty awful, or they've been WoW clones (thus very awful). So now is the chance for a game to come in, and just be great in it's own right. Drag a lot of new players in from outside the industry (such as from the Single-Player RPG industry), AND get players from previous MMO's, like WoW.
So the P2P model is FAR from dead, when you stop and consider, how much money these games are actually making, but most of the P2P people are still hiding out in WoW. Once that changes, they'll be plenty of P2P people available for several great games, ESO included.
