I was reading through the Wildstar thread and ended up stumbling across quite a few mentions of "failed" or "successful" MMORPGs. This made me curious: what is, after all, the minimum subscription/active player threshold a modern MMO would have to break to be considered "successful"?
Even further, how different would those numbers be between:
- True Free to Play, with the only additional fees being cosmetic;
- Freemium, F2P with optional subscription for XP boosts or other perks;
- Buy to Play, where you buy the game once but play it forever (possibly with a cash shop);
- Subscription-based, paying a fee every month.
In my mind, at least, any sort of MMO regardless of its business model would need to have at least 20,000 to 50,000 players so it could have a good amount of well-populated servers and avoid the usual trap of opening up too many servers and having to merge them (as happened with so many recent MMOs and is going to happen with WoW's Connected Realms). What do you guys think?