Re: Games as service
ACII closed after they switched credit card processors, and all their "sleeper" accounts did not renew. I think they lost like 60% of their business from one day to the next.
I'm not sure that I agree with the decision to close the game down. Afterall, the coding is already completed, the servers have already been bought, and it's very doubtful that they'll need a hardware upgrade due to the lack of numbers. At the same time, I freely admit that there could be costs that I can't imagine such as tech support, customer service, player complaints against other players, forum support, etc. Perhaps those costs heavily outweighed the gain. These companies, unlike most mudding teams, have share holders to answer to, so I see why they might try to cut their losses once they go in the red.
Honestly, I think I would give our muds away to people who wanted to host them rather than shut it down, but even Mythic made the choice to shut down all their muds once they got huge in the MMO arena.
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