Just to clear up a couple of things about EVE:
Yes, it is a niche game. No, it's dev costs are not necessarily lower. Those ships aren't static - plenty have moving parts, every weapon or drone has it's own animated model, and every module has a visual effect. Then there are the planets, lots of them, each one unique. Then there's all the beautiful, beautiful background art.
Oh, and let's not forget the regular, free expansions. Trust me, CCP pumps a crapload of money into EVE.
News to me, seeing as how I do nothing but PvE in EVE. Solo or in a group there's plenty to be found.
EVE was a flop because of its competition at launch: Earth & Beyond. Another space game, that was considerably more accessible and gave a more direct sense of involvement with the ship. E&B had the mass appeal - but not the content, so it died a deserved death. Guess where all the space-loving gamers went?On top of that, Eve was a flop when it released. CCP bought it back from Simon & Schuster for pennies on the dollar, and spent years slowly building an audience from complete obscurity. It took almost 3 years just to hit its first 100k subscribers, and has absolutely nothing in common businesswise with a big hyped-up hit like WoW.
It really is unfair of you to dismiss people using EVE as an example when it's pretty clear you know next to nothing about it. Besides which, just because CCP is using a different business model than Blizzard, doesn't mean their continued success can just be ignored. If Blizzard were to give their customers the same kind of attention and care that CCP do, they'd likely do even better.