alambik;695565 said:
You should consider emulator as a competitor,....
I disagree. I regard server emulation as a complement, as in a "complement good," defined here:
Complement good - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The emulation community is where people go when they want to have a space for just them and there friends, or what not. It's not mutually exclusive with the primary product at all, and there is no good economic reasons why it has to be excluded. Current prohibitions in the EA EULA against emulators are wrong-headed. Imagine if Blizzard were to ban modding. Modding is a very important part of the C&C franchise.
UO, being the franchise MMO for world-customization also has a natural market in selling custimizability. There is nothing quite so custom as a whole custom server. That they haven't figured this out in the 10 years they've been running the game (rather incompetently, as far as I can tell) is just yet more evidence that they don't have good business sense over there.
What they ought to do is something like Stardock, and the way it licenses its Object Desktop product: people subscribe, and pay for a continuous stream of nifty software changes. Note that a user who paying UO but not using their servers is the
perfect customer, exactly analogous to all those people who buy gym memberships but never go.
That the gaming community hasn't figured this out yet shows that game company business executives are sometimes just too stupid for words.
C//