M
Malador
Guest
It is clear you are not that business minded. Ok lets say you are correct and they have revenue (not profit as you described it) of a million a month. How much of that do you think it takes to power and maintain 28 shards? How much to pay for GM support, payroll, benefits? How much on development including developers payroll and benefits? How much on networking? How much on marketing (you might think there is none but there is)? How much on legal? how much for hardward upgrades and maintanence? I am betting that during any given month they are eating up a very large part of the revenue from subscriptions.Sorry to say it, but UO is not going any ware.
This game is a cash cow for EA. Even if UO has the least subscriber base then any other MMO, it still turns a profit.
Even if UO has 70k active "accounts" (each paying $15 a month) that translates to $1,050,000 profit a month. Do you really see em giving that up?
I DO see server merges happening at some point. It makes no sense to have all the original servers still open, most at what? 25% population?
I would be willing to bet this game is not on the highly profitable list. That is not to say it couldnt be but they have to make some hard decisions to make it work. Shard merges are not viable. Too complex requiring too much development time to make it work. They need to simply announce shard closures. There are 28 shards, give or take, where the subscription base justifies about 10. Offer the players on closing shards free transfer tokens bound to each character on the account and set a dead line to pick a new shard and move. Let them deed up what ever they want. They need to stop trying to develop two clients, pick one and fix it. Several years ago if they had simply purchased uo assist and integrated the functions of one of them into the 2d client no one would be complaining, much. They need to integrate a map like tool as well. They need to do something about the rampant cheating. I think if the cheaters were forced to choose they would continue to play without the cheats. Plus some old timers would return. With a third the number of shards many of ea's costs would be sliced by 2/3's which increases the margin a lot.
They are simply afraid to loose what they have now.