I've been an active EQ'er for 2 1/2 years with 2 accounts, have talked many of my RL friends into playing and sorry to say with 30% increase I've cancelled both my accounts and most of my RL friends have done likewise.
A resonable increase would be accepted with no question asked I would, but what this increase says to is to hell with the players. I feel that things that hasn't been working properly for time I've been playing should be fixed, before the poor decision to develop the Legends server and before the Luclin joke has been totaly fixed.
I've vented enough today. Everyone has to make thier own decision about the increase, I choose not to support such greed, not only from EQ, but everything that Sony makes from this point forward.
John Smedley Talks about the Price Increase at Caster's Realm
Baelish over at Caster's Realm managed to corner John Smedley and get a few answers from him about the recent price hike. It's definitely worth checking out. Here's a sample of what he had to say:
CR: Many people believe that your current intake of approximately $4,179,000 per month gross should be more than enough to cover the current expenses of EverQuest and still make a sound profit, what is your response to this? What factors have warranted a change in the monthly subscription rates?
JS: Over time we've added a substantial amount of new content to the game, and we will continue to do so at a large rate. The development team alone for EQ is currently around 50 people, and that's not even counting the people in operations, customer service and other parts of the company that keep EQ running.
It takes a lot to make a game as large as EverQuest compelling enough to keep people coming back. Because of the costs of running the game, we don't feel that the price increase is that unreasonable of a thing to ask. We haven't increased the price in 3 years, and we're not increasing it to an unreasonable amount.
Check out the entire interview at this link.