2013-03-05, 08:50 AM
Curtiss Wrote:I want a mountain of it.
As for the actual quote at hand it could have been a change in management, they might not have had enough to keep afloat for longer or they just wanted more money. The second one is quite plausible given that a much smaller game I know of had servers that took $500,000 a month to maintain and as optimistic as we'd like to be on our cosmetic investments that really wouldn't have been enough.
I find it interesting to note that games like Guild Wars 1/2, which is essentially F2P (It's B2P, but that's pretty close to F2P in my opinion, with just an initial payment) can keep their servers up with a mostly Cosmetic Cash Shop. Sure, they have that initial payment from each player, but I doubt that goes very far in the long run.
Really, I think it all has to do with population, player interest, and overall view of the host from the players. When I payed for items in the GW2 Cash Shop, I did it mostly to support the developers. Most of the items in the Cash Shop are obtainable in the game with some grinding, I have no need or real reason to buy unless I want to.
But here, on MapleStory, you are REQUIRED to pay. You will get no where unless you do. Hell, even after paying much more on MS over my lifetime on the game than I ever have or ever will on GW, I still can't even do HALF of the game's bosses.
If MS was having issues with keeping monthly payments up, they were doing something wrong. I do have to say that they were smart in then appealing to the thing most players want, to be stronger, but they did it in such a massive amount that it ruined the integrity of the game.
I have no issue with paying for power, if it's a power you can obtain in the game normally through some effort. I don't mind EXP, Gold/Meso, Drop, etc. increases. Time is money, after all. The most serious issue with cubes is that, before Unlimited, you can not get them without paying, and they're not cheap. Even after Unlimited, you cannot get past a certain level of Potential and you can also be punished for using them. It's paying for power in the worst possible way. It's not built so that you can choose to pay, but you have to pay, and when you hit that point you were better off either dying with dignity or just making the game Pay to Play, because that's essentially what it is in a much more massive, expensive way.