Quote Originally Posted by Ravenmore View Post
Still no where near enough for the game to shut down if they all went away. The game is already at the point were it is unlikely to get another full blown expansion and it it was already well on the way when SoA was released. I am willing to bet SoA was SE plan C if FF14 had failed again like 1.0. Like he said SE would just dumb the game down a bit after seeing the clear rates drop to a unacceptable level.
I implied that a hardcore player's subscription is probably more valuable to SE, which almost certainly true. But then we haven't even nailed down what defines casual and hardcore, and if no definition is agreed upon then how can we predict what would happen if one group or the other no longer existed? All I said was that there's more to a hardcore player than $12.95 a month, and that we shouldn't underestimate their impact on SE's bottom line.