how to make a Billion dollars by making Pathfinder MMO

[Aunt Tony]

Quandary wrote:

Activision Blizzard is a publicly traded company.

I don't think publishing fraudulent data about things like revenue streams is something they casually do.
This is America, y'know, land of the civil lawsuit.
Gold farmers are just as contributing towards Blizzard's bottom line as any other paying player...
When Blizzard is 'bragging' about paying customers it is about the money.

I hope I acknowledged that very clearly.

I only dispute whether Blizzard's bottom line equates 1:1 with productive, that is, non-negative players and experience for us, as players, to experience.

[Hobs the Short]

Personally, I want PFO to do very well, but I'd rather it stay a profitable niche game. If PFO can have a large enough player base to pay for it's development team (which shouldn't be as hard as a theme park that has to crank out new content constantly), I would rather see it stay small enough to truly collaborate with its players and for it's player community to be tight knit and productive. Too large often means impersonal, both between players and with the company that runs the game.

[Waffleyone]

Hobs, well said. I feel the same way, even if that niche market ends up to not include me (I'm hoping it will =D).

Aunt Tony wrote:

-snip- My point being that a single number doesn't tell you much about the health of the game, the happiness of the playerbase, or the demographics of that playerbase -snip-

That's a really great point, and thank you for isolating it, I genuinely hadn't grasped that from your prior statements. I agree. I think the health of an MMO for the players and for the investors are different but intertwined, and using one to gauge the other is hazardous though correlation exists.