_NiceKING_ wrote:musketeer925 wrote:
Also, they do still make plenty of money off the game, and ESO in particular. There were 2030 ESO accounts created in the last week. (http://agecommunity.com/_server_status_/). This would imply that 2030 purchases of the game were made reasonably recently. AoE3 sells for $40 on Steam. Even if Steam was taking a 25% cut of of that (which I doubt), that's $60,900 in revenue in a single week.
You should take into account that many people buy the game out of steam. I know some stores that sell the game for like $5 all the time.
Okay, sure. The point is that they make way more than it costs them.
Let's say they on average make a mere 10% of the full game price per new account. At that, 2030 × 52 x $40 x 0.10 = $422000/annually. I am pretty sure 10% would be much lower than actual average revenue per copy sold, so there's plenty margin or error for unaccounted-for variables.
As far as costs go, we could estimate high. The thing might take 40 hrs maintenance per month worst case I'd guess. Even paying someone $100/hr for that work would come out at $48,000 annually. Someone mentioned electricity cost. Estimate maybe 2400 watts X 365 X 34 hrs comes out to be roughly 20,000 kWh. Electricity in Redmond costs $0.084/kWh (but I bet Microsoft gets a better deal than that), so the puts this cost at under $2k/annually.
So in total you're at $420k revenue (probably a low estimate) vs. $50k cost (probably a high estimate). Almost 1000% return on investment doesn't sound like a failing program I'd be trying to shut down.