Originally Posted by
Derek-Drake
I'm not a TSW player (I don't care for modern settings) but I'm pretty certain that TSW is a Buy to Play title now and that you don't have to subscribe to play. At the very least the end game content isn't locked behind a sub wall like AoC. What I'm getting at here is that TSW isn't generating enough revenue on it's own to fund the kinds of regular expansions it seems to be getting.
I'm a Windows system administrator for a company called Leidos. I am solely responsible for a server room with two server racks that have several physical servers and dozens of virtual machines, plus all the connected clients. The cost of running a server is pretty low, especially if you are the owner of that server and not renting space on a server farm like most MMO's do these days. I would bet that a single instance of AoC, at current population levels, can run on a server rack with no more than six application servers and a single database server. AoC came out before VMWare was fairly standard so I doubt they're using less hardware and running VSphere or I would say it could run on four virtual machines with dynamic load balancing / page migration in place.
Six servers running 24/7 with a once a week restart, which is really all "maintenance" is, is not all that expensive. The building housing those servers comes out of overhead. The money paid to the developers is a salary and it comes out of overhead. I just don't see these running costs that you think exist. They pay electricity to run the servers and probably 1-2 developers to work on the game. Considering those developers are working and living in North Carolina, one of the lowest cost of living states in the nation (I grew up in North Georgia right on the Carolina border) they probably are making a good living in the 65-80k a year range. Also, the game shares it's space with TSW, AO and the Lego game so all of those titles are sharing the same overhead costs (Again, assuming they aren't paying a server farm to host their software). I wouldn't be surprised if the AoC developers are also working on FC's other titles which would further consolidate operating costs.
So what I'm saying is, that given what I know about how server based services industries work, there really aren't the overhead costs you think there are and that I still firmly believe that a large portion of AoC subs are going to develop TSW.