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You are selling the business model of the MMOG short I think. A $50 price tag to install the game is a #### good hook to get people to stay past that initial "free" trial period. If money is already commited to the game it seems players will give a game a much more thorough look than iif they were playing it out of curiosity*. Along with player guides, expansion packs and now "booster" packs these games find plenty of ways to keep the interest of the player while growing the profit margin.
I as well was not suggesting what companies should do with their money, as I said if players continue to pay for retreads then more power to SOE and others. What my statement was refering to was idea that the lack of innovatition was due to the graphical nature of the games, the amount of programming time and computing power needed to innovate. IMO that is, if not completely false, then extremely misleading. ATITD is decent evidence of that.
*This of course is logic conclusion on my part. I would actually be very interested to see any type of study that compared the number of EQ game units sold and the number of accounts and compare that with the number of free trials a game such as Gemstone III gave out compared to the number of paying accounts they have. I would wager to guess the EQ percentage is a good deal higher.
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