Thank you for an MMO with deep lore

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I just try to give credit where credit is due. like Arcell said, I actually care about this world and the fact that they actually destroyed their own world to remake it a new shows great pride in not only their product but their vision as story tellers. This is unprecedented in the MMO space as far as I am aware and I hope it pays dividends to reward this vision. It may push the industry to not give up on their games so quickly and just close em up or put em on life support like so many companies do.

If ARR is successful, and SE can show a complete turn around in the game's popularity and revenue down the road, I think it could definitely go a good ways to be used as "proof" that the investment can be worth it.

SE is in a unique position in that they are self-funded. They don't have a third-party Publisher breathing down their neck, dangling development checks over their heads and rushing them to "release sooner!". They are the publisher. SE did to themselves what other Publishers do with their developers with 1.0's release, and look where that got them. They overestimated how much players would take and pushed it out the door before it was ready. With no publisher involved, they had no one to blame but themselves - and they learned from it.

Publishers don't tend to learn, unfortunately. They make the same mistake with game after game after game. They think only in terms of "bottom line". When something doesn't work out as they want, they pull the plug and walk. Or they do the "change of revenue model to try and salvage the game" routine that's become fashionable over the past few years.

If SE can prove that going back to the drawing board and changing everything out can actually work and turn out to be well rewarded, I think you may see more Publishers and investors more willing to give developers a bit more rope. Probably not much more (again, they're forever looking at the bottom line), but maybe enough.

Think of it this way, even with EQ1's roaring success (at the time, it was a roaring success), many many developers, publishers and investors wouldn't touch MMOs with a 10 foot pole. It wasn't "proven enough" a gaming or revenue model for them. WoW comes along, attracts millions of players, makes tons of money, and all of a sudden, all the developers, publishers and investors were like, "Oh! MMOs! Of course! We want one of those, too!".

So, who knows?