nikeshoxshoesca Thursday, August 7, 2014 test post I fully agree with Jeromai that you don't need a million players in a MMORPG for it to feel populated. Having said that, I think we need to look at the problem a bit closer to explain why people are perceiving tumbleweeds in a shrinking game. The first factor here is personal. Yes, you only have a "Dunbar number" of a hundred people you know in that game; but if let's say half of the players of a game leave, there is a good chance that also about half of the people you know leave. It is that personal loss of 50 people that affects you more, logging into the game and finding nobody in guild chat, not whatever thousands of people left the game overall. The overall number can be of importance to bloggers and game journalists, because it somewhat determines the size of your audience. It is easier to discuss a game that millions of people play than to discuss a game with a population of 10,000. The second factor of perceived decline is technical. Too many games still run with a fixed server model. If half of the players of a game leave, you remain at least for some time with the same number of servers as during the peak, with each server having half of the players. Games with mega-servers, which simply produce less copies of each zone when less players are around, feel less empty after a decline. Unfortunately server mergers have come to stand for an admission of failure for a MMORPG, so game companies don't do them as much as they should. The third, and largely unknown factor is financial. MMORPGs have high fixed costs and low variable costs, so they are much more profitable with more players. When player numbers decline, the economics of the game pass two thresholds: One where the profit of the game becomes lower than the cost of capital, and a second where the profit of the game passes zero and the game actually makes a loss. Different companies bail out at different moments of that process, for example NCSoft killed City of Heroes / Villains when it was still making money, just not enough of it. Most of the time it is impossible to know how many players a game needs to remain profitable, the makers of WAR once said they needed half a million players for that. But if you make with much lower development cost, you can presumably run it with much fewer players. There are even examples of companies like Aventurine who make more money from government grants and subsidies for producing a game in a poor region than they make from actual players.