I feel like many in here don’t remember but IMC asked the community if they should self publish or find a publisher. And the majority voted with self publish.
So what did you expect? It feels like 90% of the cry babies have no idea how the world works. Things cost money. An MMO launch even costs A LOT of money.
In while for you 50$ already seems to be a lot of money i need to be specific: we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars here. At minimum.
Lets imagine they would just launch open beta without any payment like many in here want:
The game will get traction really quick outside this forum if it gets a steam storefront post because it has nice visuals and will be sold as a successor to RO. Considering 150k already showed interest the international beta (which was only announced on the ToS homepage with many steam players don’t even knowing about it) i am 100% sure you can easily x10 these 150k. So i am assuming we are looking at 1,5 million unique players in the first week or two.
And that is still at the lower end imo. This is not long term players, many will leave but still they need to be prepared for the initial wave.
Do any of you have the slightest idea how much servers and especially traffic will cost them for 1,5 million players? It is alot.
On top of that they need staff. Community managers, support, GMs and all of them for different languages since this is international and many people don’t speak good english. And staff costs money, too.
And all this needs time too. especially to pick and train staff, but you can only do that once you got some money in advance.
So how are they ever going to come up with all this on their own without a publisher? Founders.
They will get money from the get go. Money they can work with. No need to wait for the f2p to slowly kick in. Money to pay the server bills, money to hire people. Money to build the service all of you expect at open beta.
It also gives them time. The will start with a smaller group 3 months early.
They will have a good idea of the scope of players and know that everyone joining in at this phase already did pay their own “weight” in advance. Don’t need that much server capacity and staff to beginn with and then slowly build it up each month when new players and money kicks in. It gives them something to calculate and work with. A save business plan. Something each company should have.
You all voted for the self publish. The founders programm is one of the best solutions to the problems connected to it. So now i ask you all to man up and deal with your own decision and the consequences. Like adults do.
That does not mean, that noone can try to post alternative solutions that actually work, but NON of the posts in here have that. They all forget one or even two parts of the equasion.