Idiotic notions now contained in this thread:
-Eve has a F2P mode, but it's not available to people without enough SPs.
Eve does not have a F2P mode of any kind. Plex are not, in any way, comparable to F2P game models. At best they could be described as
alternate payment - a way of convincing another player to pay your subscription for a month. Reality is that, outside of a handful of special offers, for every month an account is subscribed to Eve,
someone is paying ~$15. This bears no resemblance to F2P models, wherein the ability to access the game is completely independent of any payment by any person.
-All MMOs share identical economic models, so if one MMO goes F2P at a given number of subscribers, other ones should, too.
I am sure CCP is dying to take business advice from people who think revenue - in a vacuum, absent any information about other petty financial concerns, such as "expenses" (
) - is, in any way, a useful measure of financial health.
Games don't go F2P because their subscriber numbers are under some arbitrary value - they go F2P because their subscriber numbers are so low that the revenue generated by subscriptions does not exceed their operating expenses.
SW:TOR had a development cost of something like $150 million. Their financial expectations were geared toward WoW-like numbers. You do understand what effect this has on operating expenses... right? Do you think theirs were at all comparable to Eve's?
-It's not fair to say Eve's numbers are climbing because multiboxers! On the other hand, it's totally fair to say that they're actually falling because (some tedious anecdote about how your friend, Tommy, came over from WoW and spent a week shooting spacerocks before he quit).
All we actually know f
or a fact is that the sub count and the peak concurrent users have fairly consistently* grown, and
even with the caveat regarding multiple account holders, it is a fact that trumps your personal observations many times over, so in this particular regard, fact up or **** off.
*Amusingly, the most noteworthy PCU dip that the game has ever endured was when it began making movements in the general direction of the microtransactional revenue model. It is only, just now, recovering from that particular action. Don't let that stop you from asserting that Eve is dying, and the only thing that can save it is by making it more like other games, though.