Would anyone venture to guess what is HTCs cost per a customer?
Office rent and salaries are fixed and do not depend on the number of players.
They also have to pay for bandwidth, servers, tech support, accounting. Those expenses are more or less proportional to the number of users.
If they have $10/mo cost per user, replacing one $30 account (net $20/month) with 6 $15 accounts (net $5/month X 6 = $30) will cause them to make one third more money, not triple it - at the same time significantly increasing the workload and somewhat reducing the quality of the clientelle. Also, explosive growth would require to quickly buy 6 times the servers, hire dedicated tech support and customer service personnel, train them, rent a new office to locate those servers and personnel, etc. That would cost millions and require months.
If they do not do that, they will get blasted for poor service/connects, etc. - remember the success of UO or AOL flat rate and all the trouble they got into? If they (HTC) do that, the majority of $15 account holders may decide to quit after 1-2 months leaving the company holding the bag.
With $30/months dollars a guy who decides to spend that kind of money is likely to stick for a while.
Also, a guy who can afford $30/month is not likely to demand that the game be able to run on 4-year old computer.
Just by being the state-of-the-art and requiring top-notch hardware AH limits it's audience to those who can afford it.
Of course many peole cannot afford that kind of money, especially those outside of US and children/students. I sympathise with them, but playing AH is hardly a necessity.
AH is quite expensive even according to US $10/mo standards, though for many WB is much more expensive to fly. Well, AH is a premium product, I may even say a lixury.
miko
[This message has been edited by miko2d (edited 09-27-2000).]
