As stated ^^ Steven invested £30m personally. The kickstarter was for marketing + extras.
Also, yes, you probably dont need $15/month per player to cover server costs...but I havent seen the contract so can only guess the costs. Anyway, that ignores the fact they are also using the fund for continuous R&D/bugfixes/upgrades (staff/premises/equipment/maintenance) which is on top of the server costs.
Now sure they could have big box cost, but many people would rather pay $0.50 per day on a 1 day contract than $300 per year on a 12 month contract. And with monthly payment costs to make, it makes sense to charge monthly.
The cash shop allows enhanced bonus funding for R&D & steven quite rightly should feel entitled to see his investment repaid....and the game eventually sustain itself. Many people have already bought cosmetics that should go some way to paying this off. A revenue stream before the game is even released is no doubt a great boost while funding is essentially coming out of Intrepids pocket at the moment until subscriptions come into effect.
A box price of $40-50 dollars and the box price concept is only relevant to a one shot game without online servers. It is useless for a game that has an ongoing online cost with online game servers. A non-server game does not require monthly staffing, maintenance, upgrades, research and development costs.
The only way free-player + box cost would work, is to charge each player 12x$15 every year to cover the same 'ongoing' costs. But every additional player demands more hardware and maintenance requirements, so still never covers ongoing costs without an annual fee.
If you are not going to have extreme box costs or monthly subscription costs, then the only payment option to 'finance the company' is the cash shop.
AND THAT CASH SHOP MUST BE COMPULSORY.. to ensure a viable business model.
And this is how F2Play games work:
1. Create a 'fixation' on an object that can be improved and empathised with. A character association identified with an initial 'fun' process.
2. Create a devotion to that character by forcing the player to expend time and effort on its development and get your fix of endorphin based fun.
3. Slowly 'condition' the player (to avoid suspicion until they are too invested to object) to work harder and harder to achieve the same level of progress and thus dominate market share of their 'free time'.
4. Introduce RNG that gets lower and lower drop rates the further the player progresses, to further condition the player into 24/7 devotion for the now 'mere' chance of achieving 'some' progress.
5. By the time the player reaches the higher levels the player should now be fully addicted to his characters fixation to the point of abandoning the real world through their addiction. They should now be willing and conditioned to work endlessly for the mere hope of progress without complaint.
6. At this point the cash shop can be introduced without any pay2win elements until the cash shop is accepted. When the cash shop is accepted, slowly introduce more and more effective pay2win items. At which point, the high level players will be only to willing to gain through cash, what might take an eternity to achieve.
7. The grand finale. Make the pay2win items RNG based to ensure the players stand less and less chance of achieving high level items in the cash shop. In effect, making the highest level players so hopelessly addicted 24/7, that they are 100% socially devoted to the game, to empty all of their disposable income (and non-disposable income) into the game...with next to no chance of receiving anything for bankrupting themselves.
You see....Free2Play is a viable business model, because they know they can force players to pay..through the psychology of addiction. And even better, they dont actually have to offer anything for the money received, because its all RNG and they control the ever declining drop rates.
THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS ! You thought you was playing an eastern MMO for fun. The creators knew you were playing the game to give them all your money. Willingly. Ignorance is bliss I guess.
My dear sir it sounds like your describing Archage lol
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