I mean… you just ignored basically all economic aspects at once, it’s even baffling to see that.
What’s the difference in monetization methodology? What’s the difference in server setup? How many active workers are working on those respective products?
Just for a start.
Provide exact examples for the specific MMO and I’ll gladly point out their expected costs and differences in server structure needed to even support their game, hence the differently sized needs for hardware and bandwith.
Obviously old MMOs are able to support themselves on a vastly lower playerbase, though they also don’t have 100 workers dedicated to that specific product which has barely any monetization available (the MTX shop is laughably small) without any merch or anything else on the side supporting them. The LE franchise is miniscule.
If you compare it to server structures then also there’s a vast difference. For example GW 2 supports 200 people per area, which is the limit of their specific server setup. That’s a full machine commonly, a decent amount of players with the relevant updates happening.
LE is a ARPG though, it has direct input which needs to work in milliseconds and precisely. You cannot use a predicitive method without severe downsides as most MMOs do and then simply sync with the client’s input afterwards should it divert too much. Both need to be up to date, which reduces the available capacity substantially. We’re talking about likely 10-20 people per server rathern then 100+. Hence significant higher upkeep costs.
If you go with very old MMOs like Wurm Online or Everquest 1 then you’ll easily see that those setups can support 200+ people easily on a simply home PC properly… a industrial server can likely support 2000+ even. That’s magnitudes of difference.
You’ll also hardly see a vast amount of official servers for FPS games because their bandwith needs are significantly higher then MMOs commonly are, which ramps the costs up. We’re talking 50-100 people per machine commonly, the hard limits for games like Battlefield usually.
And EHG does spending wise roughly 50k per month for their salaries (that’s lowballing it) with roughly another 50-75k for servers. Pre-tax even. That means they need to sustain a influx of at least 100k per month and I’m probably off by quite a bit still as I’m really lowballing everything there.
That’s if we only take the supporter packs (the most bought commodity of ARPGs as poeple are used to it) as income would mean a mandated sales-count of 3350 supporter packs sold per month. Which obviously is not realistic, MTX are also sold, some whales are there and so on. But for the sake to even it out (as a miniscule percentile of players spent beyond shelf-price anyway) I’ll put it in a fixed percentile of players actively playing the game that need to buy over the course of a Cycle (3 months).
We got roughly 50k peak during the weekend, a 50k peak means that we’ll have around 250-400k individuals playing. Obviously that drops substantially over those 3 months, but sales also happen in the first 2 weeks mostly, which has to be taken into account.
Hence just for arguments sake we’ll heavily inflate the number of monthly individuals playing to 150k for every single month.
That means from those 150k players we need to sell 3350 packs per month. The common amount of players actually paying into a shelf-price product is between 1-3% as much as I know (likely changed over time, got really old data there from studies over a decade ago).
That alone means we have between 1,5k and 4,5k potential payers. Which is barely drawing even.
If we take the reality that number is roughly 100k at best. The vast majority pays the pack for 10 and not the pack for 30. MTX payments in-game are generally a rare thing as well. It’s questionable if EHG is even drawing a net positive with 50k peak for a Cycle.
Now next up take into consideration that EHG hasn’t sold to Krafton solely for shits and giggles. There is a reason behind that, and that reason always boils down to money.
Be it money for expansion (which is miniscule visible only after the acquisition) or to sustain themselves (which is likely given the premature release which artificially created hype and hence monetary influx).
This points towards EHG hurting for money, seriously hurting for it. The ARPG live-service genre is a cutthroat environment, one of the harshest live-service environments existing, MMO’s are child’s play comparatively.
So the chance that they can sustain themselves in 50k peak as we see with 1.3 (which is by the way dropping, we haven’t seen a single increase since 1.0, only falling overall if the timeframe is taken into consideration) is very low.
Yes, you can hope and think it’s ‘fine’ for them, I do as well, and it would be great if it were! But the chance for that to be the reality is so so soooo low that it’s not worthwhile even to take as a chance.
Sadly so.
EHG is bleeding money, their product is literally dieing currently and they got a limited timeframe to fix it. That timeframe has since 1.0 become more and more narrow and the actions directly relate to the stress. EHG does create panic-releases since a while now, their pre-release quality wasn’t the best but their post-release quality is beyond atrocious already. They fumbled and they’re still on the ground after hitting it hard sometime between the last 3-4 years.
