Island Sanctuary is being discontinued?

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

I am convinced that the number of players who stay subbed just because of a useless pixel house is a small minority and it is immaterial when it comes to revenue. Definitely not the “cash cow” some people want to make believe

It really isn't, as much as people like to fantasize about it being so.

With 9000 plots per world with 80-ish servers across all regions, that's about 720,000 ish plots. At $15/sub, that's about 10.8mil/month off of forced subs
That figure however, is under the assumptions that:

- all plots are bought on every world (spoiler: no, Dynamis alone nullifies that)
- Every single plot is owned by a unique player that would require a sub to keep from demolishing (when players own multiple plots, or own a plot + FC house)
- Assumes every player under that umbrella is paying the full sub price, not entry or legacy discounted ones.
- Every plot owner is being forced to pay for the house and not just paying for the sub because they're playing the game at that time anyway.

In reality, the amount of money they'd make from forced subs is so small in the grand scheme that the idea of them purposefully doing it is ludicrous. The mogstation likely generates magnitudes more money than the forced subs ever would. In fact, they'd likely get more money by creating an instanced housing system, advertising it and getting tons of players to become excited, come back to the game/play it more often and thus having more oppportunities for them to buy something from the mogstation than the forced sub model ever could.

But as the beginning of EW & when IS launched have shown when so many housing-server related instances were open that prevented so many from being able to get into their house/IS instance, the lack of an instanced house system is 100% a technical problem - they literally don't have the ability to support it at this point in time. Putting it into the game until they solve the underlying issue (lack of server power) would be the most stupidest thing they could do, since it'd just cause more problems from constantly getting locked out of your house due to lack of instances and rendering the housing system unusable during any sort of prime-time hour range.

Hopefully, the cloud data test provided them with some good results, since hosting housing related stuff on the cloud would arguably be a very good solution for them due to dynamic scalability.