Alan Davion, on 20 February 2017 - 04:52 PM, said:
It depends on what their operating costs are. Does anyone know how many people PGI employs?
Just for the sake of experimentation, let's say PGI needs a million bucks a year to stay afloat. That's $1,000,000.00
Under the current mech pack pricing model, of $70 for the top flight, get absolutely everything pack, they would need roughly 14,285 people buying that top flight pack. Keep in mind that is 14,285 people buying one $70 mech pack in a year.
Now seeing as there's 1 mech pack a month, for 12 mechs a year, they'd only need about 1,200 people to buy that months mech. Those same 1,200 people wouldn't need to buy the next months pack, but 1,200 different people would.
Of course that's under the current system. Sometime in the next few months they're supposedly changing how the system will work, probably reducing the prices due to their elimination of the "rule of 3" due to the new skill system.
you have to consider future games too. when mw5 comes out it will draw a lot of revenue for that as well, and by that time they will likely be working on something else. so pgi will have other revenue streams to fund mwo with, at least at a maintenance level.
there will likely be a few stages to the endgame. at first its going to go on as it is now.
then the feature mill will shut down, the mech packs will still come during this time, but that will be all the new content we will get. no maps, no code changes, and very few if any balance tweaks or f2p events (events might only be open to those who bought mech packs as kind of a sales pitch). this will fund the servers. the servers will of course be scaled down to match the population, and they might close down euro and/or oceanic (whatever has the least population at the time).
as sales taper off, or if mech packs dont pay for themselves anymore, then it will be the final stage of the end game. mwo will just be a money sink for pgi and its best to contain those losses. they can open the server side assets so players can run private servers, or they could go on a subscription service, they could let it fizzle and die, or they could replace it with a sequel.