jared96 wrote:I can't make the math work. Let's look at Aris and give a wildly conservative estimate of 1,000 subscriptions in month 1.
1,000 x $10 = $10,000
In a service business, the direct salary multiplier to figure cost of doing business is typically from 2.5 to 3.0 to 1.... let's use 2.0 to make it easy. So $10,000 a month of income / 2 provides a company with $5,000 for salaries after paying rent, taxes, server costs, ISP costs, electricity, phones etc. That hires one person at a salary of $60,000 per year. In short, unless they are able to convince dozens of people to work for free, salary and business costs will require thousands of subscribers before they can begin paying off anything.
Not in response to the above quote but in response to the general tone of the thread, personally, I never cared or looked to see who Nevrax was. I have a GMC vehicle and I have no idea who the President of General Motors is. I'm wearing some clothes from LL Bean and I have no idea who works there. Other than my salesman, I have no idea who the pricipals are at the company that made my laptops. I don't know anyone at Seagate who made the HD's in my NAS. I don't know anyone at Parker Brothers but I have a game of Monopoly. I just spent $10 for a Pizza and I have no idea who the owner of the joint was.
I am not investing a million dollars here. I am going to pay $10 a month to play a game .... If the pizza joint mentioned above changes Owners, I don't need the new Owner's resume before I will "risk" my $10. I'm not going to demand an ingredients list, not going to demand a roadmap of menu changes in advance. I will walk in and buy my pizza. When I stop liking what I am buying I will stop.
We're not asking to get to know the name and life story of one of the developers. We want to know about the company itself.
Lets take your example of a GMC car. If you had walked on to the lot and the dealer had walked up to you and said "well, we have a new car company on this lot. Don't know much about them, but they're called Sklubbub. They're brand new on the scene. How well does it run? its ok... there are a few defects, but nothing to be concerned about. Do the cars last long? uh... dunno that either... lets assume they do. Will they be making parts for the car and have certified repair facilities? uh... don't know that either. Lets just hope for the best and assume they will"
Would you buy that car? Course not.
Now we're not dealing with the same amount of money obviously, but I don't feel like handing over ANY money to a company that has basically done nothing to reassure the player-base, repair the game, or try to attract new players. Even repairing billing (something that would have been a priority if they really had a large staff to keep paying) took months and months. If the costs of running those servers or developing the game were so drastically high then they sure took their sweet time setting everything back up. This leads to me to believe that either they don't have a very large staff (if its even more than one person) or that they have a staff that works on it part time and isn't all that committed.
Now lets assume that you're correct in that they need to acquire 1000s of subscribers to get to the point where serious development can be done. This game has been half-finished for four years. The turn over rate of players is really high and its free to play at the moment. That right there should be a warning. It costs the player nothing financially, yet they are still leaving the game.
So what exactly does Ryzom offer that will attract those 1000s of subs? Why would a player pay for a game that basically has show little to no development in years? Even at its most popular, where the population was easily 10 times what it is now, Ryzom wasn't able to produce a profit. So you could say that they have a very hard sell if they expect 1000s of players to sub up for the promise that content will come as soon as a magic number of subs is hit. Many of the vets around here are tired of hearing the same promises from one company to another.
The exact number of subs is unknown, but its not even close to 1000 active subs. Not on Aris anyway. If you combined the German and French servers together, you'd be looking at less than 5,000 subs total (and thats being pretty generous). So $50k in sub revenue... 50/2 = $25k going towards development salaries... ouch. You basically make as much as someone working at McDonalds. Good luck with those school loans...
