Thats great. Do you have numbers to back up all of that emotional spew?
If I have an artist make content, and one person buys it for $10, and then 12 people then get the item for free… thats bad business math.
Go out and do a proper survey now and find out who actually bought DLC and who uses DLC but doesn’t actually own DLC (bought it). I mean I know people did buy DLC. In my experience on several servers that came out to roughly 15-20% bought DLC with the rest of the server ignoring it or benefiting from free items in some way.
Is my experience the world? No. But that matches up to other games I’ve dev’d as well where I have 100% telemetry to see that.
I know that if I was a business manager and I was paying 50k a month for devs and I wasn’t getting the full value out of them, I would make some changes.
If I let one person make an item and a dozen get it for free, my dev is working at 1/12th of their value.
If I let one person make an item and one other person gets it for free, my dev is working at 1/2 of their value.
If I let one person make an item but only can share it to others that also bought the item, my dev is working at 100% of their value.
From a business standpoint, that math is garbage and any publisher in the business for MONEY is going to reject it outright if their devs aren’t making close if not at 100% of their value.
And here we are today.
EDIT: Also - Funcom doesn’t have to be on the edge of financial ruin. They just have to have a product that they are spending more on than it makes back for it to get cut. As you say - I’ll let you figure that one out for yourself 