EQLive Classic Server?

[Striiker]

Originally Posted by Reiker [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The servers were absolutely fucking packed the first month, I'd say easily 2000 players per server. Now, SOE doesn't make any additional money from people switching servers to progression, but nearly everyone I knew on progression was a re-sub. So let's lowball and use some extremely conservative figures and say that half of all players were resubs, and that each server lost 150 subscriptions every month. This should give us a very low-end look at revenue.

Month 1: 2000 x 15 = $30000 Vanilla
Month 2: 1850 x 15 = $27750 Kunark
Month 3: 1700 x 15 = $25500 Velious
Month 4: 1550 x 15 = $23250 Luclin
Month 5: 1400 x 15 = $21000 PoP
Month 6: 1250 x 15 = $18750 Loy/LDON
Month 7: 1100 x 15 = $16500 GoD

Total subscription revenue Vanilla -> GoD: $162,750, low end figure.

"Failure"
.

You can easily triple your figure if they locked the progression to a minimum of 4 months per expansion. (I think it would be best if it were locked longer.) So, if each server period were locked for 4 months, and using the above calculations, the amount at the end = $651,000
In fact, I think that they would see an increase as each expansion launches early on (Kunark for example on P99 is viewed as a point at which the server population will surge). If done right and marketed correctly, they could easily extend the revenue to $1,000,000.00 (Granted, this would still not be a significant amount for SOE.) This I think would be the issue though in that SOE really screwed up with the original progression servers. I was one of those who played it early on and I loved it. Then it became obvious that a lot of content was left in which should not be there. The Qeynos instanced zone is a great example. I was in Qeynos Hills and I'd constantly see players from the big guilds "beaming up" to the instanced zone. I even gave it a shot to see what it was. There were items in the zone which were very powerful relative to the original old world content. It was like the devs were told to make the progression server but with minimum resources or a tight lid on the budget to do so. P99 in contrast is a great project devoted to taking the time to "do it right". I love playing on P99 and plan to do so for years to come. I am also excited at the prospect of a second server many years off after Velious is done as the new server will have all of the bugs ironed out.