..... I also suspect there's a reasonable contingent of people who hold onto their subscriptions without actively playing.
Another factor in that purchase decision is in how sticky the subscriber base is. I suspect HT's subscriber base is pretty sticky.
I'm one of those in a sense. This is the only puter game that interests me. I maintain my subscription, despite periodic months of of little or no activity in the game.....depends on what else is going on in RL at the time. I do so because I want this game to be here when I do want to play, and realize it's a small outfit with a limited player base, it so I feel it worthwhile to support Hitech whether I'm active or not.
Another thought on the value of social networking. My oldest son started a successful online business, logicalincrements.com, with a guy from Malaysia that he met online. I recall early on that they got a huge boost in traffic from someone posting about the site on Reddit. I know little about Reddit, but apparently the post caught a lot of attention. The day of the Reddit post, the site received so much traffic that it shut down the Amazon server that was hosting the site.