How do you justify not paying for EverQuest?

[Bisonzabi]

The business model of $15 a month is archaic and the amount of things to preoccupy your spare time compared to 99-2003 when EQ was at its peak has drastically increased, especially for PC gaming, which is so far beyond in scope of what it was in the 2000's. If you went through an old brick and mortar catalogue for PC games back then, you'd get maybe around 25-50 games advertised, some of which were years old at that point. Compare that to how colossal Steam's library has gotten since 2003-2007 and how many people with 100+ backlogged games to divest their time into.

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

that's the only business model left for live and other zombie mmos, and running progression servers.

they used to just shut the servers down when people stopped playing a game then someone realized Whales exist and love the cash shops in games

Exactly this, it's a necessary evil. The only reason many old MMO's are still up is due to MMO's converting into f2p microtransaction shops for the whales. When DBG was sold off once again a few years ago, they stated in their financial reports that EQ2 only had 20,000 remaining subscribers (good chunk is probably boxers). That use to be a death sentence for any MMO back in the pre-f2p era.