Pjwned, on 03 April 2016 - 10:35 AM, said:
So if free players contribute nothing then I guess it wouldn't hurt if they left and the game's population dropped even lower?
But they don't keep the servers running and employees paid. That's up to paying players. There's this wierd thing in Internet stuff over the last while we're people think numbers=success, then look to money later. That isn't sustainable.
You'll see this soon in a lot of major Internet services, particularly social networks. A company needs to make a profit to stay in business, and users who pay nothing don't contribute to that. They're just eyeballs for the advertisers, but those advertisers are paying less and less (this is why the ads in social networks are getting ever more intrusive and the data mining more blatant.)
There's no free lunch.
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That's a long shot at best. If people stopped buying things, there would be a very, very short time to get things going. Changing management isn't nearly fast enough. The company would go under before new management was going AND a plan to change things was implemented AND that plan was successful.
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That person was stupid.
They don't make promises. This is game development. "This is our design" is not a promise. It's a design. Things change when budgets meet capabilities and time constraints.
If someone made purchases based on what they felt was going to happen in the future, then that's on them. It's not very smart though. More foolish than buying a product you enjoy at a price you find reasonable for the enjoyment you get.