Someone asked me: “How can CCP make money, if players can just play for free using in-game currency to purchase Game Time?”

The answer is that even though players can purchase Time Codes from other players using in-game money, those Time Codes are sold exclusively by CCP for Real World Currency on their online store or through a retailer, for the price of 1 months subscription.

Outside of providing the game with an ISK transfer tool or in some cases, an ISK sink and even though the common knowledge is that for every account, there are 8 alts; this basically means that all accounts are actually paid for. If not by you, then by the people providing Game Time for you, your alts and your friends.

Its a truth that it shows us that less people are paying more money while others are paying the same. And so the circle of aquisition of subscription fees, payment of developer salaries, server maintenance and mortgage is secure. How much are they actually paying then?

The Quarterly Economic Newsletter (“QEN”) indicated that we’ve surpassed 360k subs at this point in time. If 80% of those (288k) pay subs for a price of 10-15 Eur then we’ll start out with a revenue of 37,843,200 – 51,667,200 Eur. Add on top of that, PLEX generated revenue.

I could go into a long calculus at this point, but in stead I’ll just make a rough estimate (based on extrapolated data, reverse engineered information) and tell you that my estimate is at 7-15 million Euro in additional revenue, where 3-7 are based on additional subs.

So the answer to that question?

CCP is not only making enough money to pay for all subs. Theyre actually generating excess revenue that has more than paid for the last expansion with little effort.

Bear in mind that revenue has nothing to do with surplus though.

 

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