The Market and Financial Structure of MMORPGs
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Granted, bandwidth, hardware and support costs for these game are high, but if you take a game like EQ with roughly 400,000 players they are making about 5.1 million dollars a month from EverQuest, or about $62 million dollars a year. I highly doubt it's costing 5 million a month to run EQ, but I could be wrong. When you buy an expansion, usually the cost of the box covers the development of said expansion, so the hope is the expansion pays for itself. Dark Age gets credit for releasing two free expansions, a housing expansion and a complete overhaul of the RvR system, in addition to the two retail expansions. EQ on the other hand, has released 7 retail expansions over 5 years, and the free content has been restricted to a handful of zones. I'm not going to criticize either company for the costs of the game and whether or not the (free) content is plentiful; to be honest I have no idea what their costs are, and both of these companies are at least attempting to give some free content. The current business model of MMOG's has set this pricing structure as the norm, but Guild Wars is out to change all that.
