ok.

Firstly, its my oppinion that EP 2 was deffinatly worth $10, on the other hand i think that meny of the BP additions arn’t worth their price tags. Lowering the price of 1 BP to $1 and the price of EP2 up to 10 BP might be a sensible move, however its ET’s choice to make how he prices his game.

Now, why should the game cost money at all?

The first reason that any game admin will give you (I am one myself) Is that it costs money to run the game. This is true. I spent £1500 on a server and pay £70 a month for bandwidth and power in a data center. Before that i was renting a server at just under £200 a month. I suspect that FW will require more than one server based on its traffic, so you can do the math and figure out how much it’ll cost to run for a couple of years. (based on 3 servers, for 2 years it comes to nearly $20000)

The first reason people will say something should be free is due to that fact that it could be funded by advertising. This is only partly true. Advertisers are not really that relyable a source of income. I’ve varied between making £30 a month upto making £300 a month (£140 of that was in a single week) It depends quite often on how much unique traffic you get as opposed (as meny people believe) to how much total traffic/clicks you get. A game such as forumwarz may not generate much unique traffic compared to the ammount of bandwidth it requires, so its revenue from adverts will be fairly low compared to how much it pays out for bandwidth.

All of this has so far been taken without considering the time that the admin(s) have to put in to running the game. Back when my game was at its peak popularity, i’d often spend several hours a day responding to players who had problems, questions or suggestions and several more writing new addons for the game. My time is not cheap. If i were being employed by a company, i’d be earning a minimum of £15 an hour and time spent working on my game is time that i’m not spending working for money.

Even considering that I enjoy working on my sites, I still dont see why i should work for free – I do need to eat, drink and pay internet bills. When i look back on the time spent working on my game vs the ammount of profits it made, I don’t think it could have been more than the minimum wage hourly, if i were truely a greedy bastard out to make as much money as possible, i could have spent that time working for an employer, at a much higher hourly rate, with a lot less grief from players and there wouldn’t have been a game.

tl;dr: Stop being so ungrateful. Be thankful that you got to play EP1 for free. If you like the game, support it. If you dont why the **** are you still here?