Well, I signed up for the new Star Trek Online beta, so have since had plenty of emails from the developers of this new MMO. One of these emails was to offer "lifetime" subscription via a one-off payment (two or three hundred dollars), with exclusive content offered to such subscribers that is unique to these accounts.
In all honesty, it's potentially a good way for developers to boost the coffers to some extent upon launch (or pre-official launch) of a game, though for some reason I doubt it would work so well with UO. It might work well with a licensed brand like Star Trek, but UO simply doesn't have the following that a licenced movie/tv brand has the potential to generate.
From a cost perspective, clearly it's an attractive proposition to hardcore players. It's unlikely that EA would offer such a promotion in my view.
For one, I believe most likely to sign up to such an offer, would be existing players. This would therefore mean a long term loss in revenue from these account holders.
Secondly, I doubt that EA would be prepared to outlay what would be required to promote such an incentive, in order to generate new or returning players. You have to cast your line to catch fish, something which from a UO perspective, is very much neglected.
From a purely personal perspective, long term such a proposition would be attractive financially to sign up to. I genuinely do believe though, that there will be a point (and within the next two years) where UO will either be wound down, possibly sold on to another producer (arguably Japanese given the player numbers for their servers), or at least scaled down significantly (server closures, developer job losses, latter of which has already happened since the Mythic/Bioware merge).
I'm not wishing to sound like a harbinger of doom, I look at what EA has done over the last few years with some of their online games or online content. More recently, look at the following:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=230601
Granted, these are not perhaps games along the lines of UO, however, current UO subscriber figures
"to date sit around 135,000 subscribers (approximately 70,000 of whom are Japanese)" to quote Wikipedia, it certainly wouldn't be surprising to at least see UO server closures over the next two years. Note though that in the article link, servers are already being dropped for 2008/2009 launched titles.
It's evident that EA in Japan are supporting and promoting the Japanese servers more so than anywhere else, therefore it makes good business sense that they will support their servers while subscriptions remain at a good enough level.
In summary then, I would predict that we will see server closures to shards that don't have sufficient players (in the eyes of EA), to make them "profitable". With the merger of Mythic/Bioware production teams, there's potential that UO falls further down the pecking order of the manpower available to the merged entity, in favour of general release games. This may lead to further decline in the quality of of the "product" we subscribe to, which always risks losing further subscriptions. Alternatively, given some of the quality games that Bioware have produced, their input may add to the overall "quality" of UO, though it could be argued, this might not be to the UO "purist's" liking.
Of course, I hope that I am wrong. Although not particularly affectionate towards some of the changes over the years, UO remains the only online game I've continued to play for many years.
