((Dark Ages and Nexon))

((Let's say you've got a bunch of lemonade stands. You call your little bitter empire Lemon. Lemon has lemonade stands up all over town. There's this one little dinky lemonade stand, and it sits in the little district of Roleplayeria, population 20.

You start checking your notes, and figure out that you're making no money off this stand. Thanks to the costs of supplying it, you're losing money. Most of the customers aren't even from Roleplayeria -- They're from bigger districts, just passing through.

So, what do you do? Do you ditch the stand? Or do you give it some time, hoping it'll straighten itself out? Let's say you chose to give it time. Well, it's been a long time now, and you're not selling much more lemonade.

So, do you close off the lemonade stand? Or do you open up another lemonade stand only a little ways off, on a busy street near your customers in Roleplayeria? You could call it Shadows of Lemonuair. You start giving Shadows of Lemonuair all your new recipes and good lemonade, and fade your Roleplayeria stand out of the picture.

That's my thinking on why Nexon keeps it around. As a whole, they might be making money. But any project that doesn't make money is just a burden. They gave it a chance to straighten itself out by making it more mainstream -- Notice the fact that you can say 'u' and 'tnx' now. Even after that, it's still not profitible, so they'll want to move it somewhere more mainstream.

As for UO, cruise around their forums for a bit. Here's a game you can play. Do a search/replace for OSI and replace it with Nexon. Then post it over here, and see if it reads eerily like all the other posts here. Their support and development times suck, too. The reason they live a little happier is because for every server they have, they have a few thousand players backing it up with their $10/month.

The fact of the matter is that if Nexon gave any body parts whatsoever about these posts, we would have seen something different by now. But they don't.

No one is going to post some beautiful, poetic post about the failures of Nexon that will draw a tear from Mark's eye and make him pull out the pixie dust he keeps in a brown paper back taped under his desk, wave it around, and magically fix all the bugs.

The fact of the matter is that DA has roughly 1,000 accounts pulling in $15/month. That's $180,000 a year. That sounds like a lot, but by the time you pay Mark, Emma, Uncle Sam, the hosting costs, rent, and all the little expenses, it's all gone.

Thanks to a bug on Nexon's side, my account was inactive for 4 days, with no days creditted to my account. I'm not too upset. In the grand scheme of things, that's about a buck. I could write angry letters to them about it, or I could check my couch for change.

The point is, Nexon doesn't care because they don't pay their team to care. Because after all else, they have no money left. It's cold, but hey, it's business. As a consumer, you have the right to leave. And they get away with it, because people don't exercise that right.

So you really want to teach Nexon a lesson? Get your friends together and leave.))

Wuhao

Written Material © 2000/2002 Wuhao
This document maintained by Estara.
Page Copyright © 2000-2004 E. Swanberg (optimized for MIE 5.x)
Dark Ages: Online Roleplaying is owned and Copyright 1999, Nexon. www.darkages.com