A similar MMO undergoing a "FFXIV" phase?

[Betelgeuzah]

Upkeep costs are laughably small.

[Antipika]

Upkeep costs are laughably small.

In upkeep, I do include anyone working in the project salary. I am not only talking about server upkeep cost. (which are negligible yes). But paying the dev team, the translators, the community team, the support team, the business dev team, PR and Marketing teams etc. That's another story.

Actually, there is a history. in the offline game world, of start-ups asking developers to forgo paychecks in exchange for profit share in the event of a success. So this kind of things can be done by companies with little capitol investment as long as they have a dedicated team. ex. Harmonix Music Systems did this for Rock Band

It's not like everyone can live off nothing. I tomorrow my employer tells me : ok for the next year, no income, but if the game is a success you'll earn profit in share. Well then I'm screwed. Cannot pay my rent anymore etc.

[Betelgeuzah]

In upkeep, I do include anyone working in the project salary. I am not only talking about server upkeep cost. (which are negligible yes).

I still can't agree that the 600k+ copies sold didn't cover the production costs for the year. There's a lot of employee's working fulltime on this game, the company's top assets included, but it's still merely a year of production time and 600k copies sold is by no means a small number.

EDIT: actually the game has sold a total of 560k copies in EU and NA alone as of this day. JP included the total would most likely exceed 700k copies, perhaps even climbing up close to 800k.