Thank you Matsui

I personally have a different opinion, you can already see the decay as sub numbers slowly drop. They have not helped their case at all by casually saying they are literally going to do less for the game and still take the same pay. The only thing left is for them to actually give the players the finger in some meta cutscene from the developer like they have in XIV. I think you 'll begin to see the decline more clearly once they wrap up TVR and theres not much after to look forward to.

One way people never look at it is that the sub keeps essentially becoming cheaper with inflation. A normal player might spend $13-25/month on this game. That means almost nothing in 2023 dollars compared to when the game was new.

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Originally Posted by Sfchakan

In their Japanese only census information released last year alongside the anniversary festivities, they revealed that they were operating at about 30% profit over expenses. For a game without a lot of large development costs on the horizon, that's a pretty safe margin.

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If this is true it's worse than you think. Do you know how you get the approximate actual cost of something based on its MSRP? It's not perfect but it usually comes pretty close:

Just take the MSRP and divide it by 3. 1/3 the cost to make, 1/3 profit for the maker, 1/3 profit for the seller. Obviously it doesn't work out exactly like this but it's a good rough guideline. If SE's income is only 30% over the cost of the product, a non physical product (the subscription, to the end user), that's a fairly low margin.

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Originally Posted by Immortal

I personally have a different opinion, you can already see the decay as sub numbers slowly drop. They have not helped their case at all by casually saying they are literally going to do less for the game and still take the same pay. The only thing left is for them to actually give the players the finger in some meta cutscene from the developer like they have in XIV. I think you 'll begin to see the decline more clearly once they wrap up TVR and theres not much after to look forward to.

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How do you gauge that? On all the servers I play on the logged in number of players seem to be same past 6-12 months

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Originally Posted by Rinuko

How do you gauge that? On all the servers I play on the logged in number of players seem to be same past 6-12 months

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I wouldn't trust it to be more than projection.

Personally, I don't measure the decay in character numbers. They aren't reliable and are significantly inflated or AFK.