Steam payment HUGE price increase!

[Vizu00]

I\'ll give you some notion of how much it costs to keep a MMORPG running,the numbers were taken from Blizzard, however the rates shouldn\'t be much different else, as you said, square wouldn\'t be able to pump content every 3 months.


Server upkeep per player: 0,1usd
Development + customer service + regional support(website etc) : 1-5 USD
Profits: everything else

Should be noted that Blizzard were recovering all the costs of the last 4 years of WoW development every 2 months.
And this rates a probably skewed, since wow overall costs most certainly have fallen.
This means that square could actually keep Russia subscription price at 5 USD and still make a profit, albeit a small one.

Any digital good you have a threshold that you recover the initial investment and your profit becomes almost 100%u0025 of the product price since the reproduction cost is negligible.

For a MMORPG once you have a certain amount of players you will only have an increase in costs once the current server infrastructure cannot support the playerbase, and it is a one time increase so you don\'t need to consider it in the long term.

What happens nowadays is that most mmorpgs cannot get to the first threahold, because WoW exists offering a huge amount of content for a set price, this means that you can never think about charging more than wow sub if you want to go the P2P route. So you need to offer "better" content for the same price as WoW, since you only need a minimum amount of subscribers to remain operational (look at ffxi).

Your operation costs are fixed at 0,1 USD per player and your allocated resources for the development are fixed, so a strategy is reducing the profit margin( that is huge) so that you can increase the profits by increasing the amount of subscribers. This is called regional pricing.


So I can guarantee you that square wasn\'t losing money on BRs sub and probably wasn\'t losing in the Russian one, they had lower profits, but you cannot claim that the reduced price was not contributing to the development of the game since profit exclude any amount you allocate for "maintenance" of the product since most places set the budget for each project with some antecedence


Tl;Dr: Square wasn\'t offering a subscription for a loss in Russia, so you should be careful with the "offer content for free" statement. Most of the mmo genre problems comes from WoW existence as the standard, and a reduction of players caused by the mobile exodus


P.S. the EU ToS doesn\'t make distinction between a one time payment and a recurring payment, so it is against the ToS the change in the RU prices, even if square only calls it an adjustment