User blog comment:PsijicThief/ESO Business Model/@comment-5558140-20130819213429/@comment-7153552-20130820164741

If you compare it to the total numbers and profit, sure. But if you start adding the fact that Activision is using Blizzard profits to pay debts, the fact that they've lost massive amounts of subscribers (myself included, and I used to run two accounts for five years), then do the profit per player instead of total numbers. . . Blizzard is losing on WoW when you compare it that way. I'm not a professional analyst, but I keep up with the numbers and read up on the analysts. The microtransactions are not inherently pay to win, just becuase there's a cash shop doesn't mean you'll have to spend money to beat the game or stay competitive. If you had read closely, then you would have seen the small difference I noted above. A Pay to Win business model only has items in their cash shop that are game breaking. Meanwhile, the Buy to Play and Free to Play models never have game breaking items. The fact that you can buy a horse in Neverwinter online for $20.00US (or approx value in purchased currency) doesn't break the game, because you still have to wait for level 20 and that version of the mount is still the slowest one in the game. ~$40.00US will buy the fasted speed available, but it's not something only available to those with money. If you spend the time in the game, you can get that fastest speed of mount for gold or for another currency called Astral Diamonds. Plus, with all of Cryptic's games you can swap one of their earned currency for the bought currency on a living exchange market (like US for Euro, but digital and in-game). So it's actually possible to earn Astral Diamonds, exchange it for Zen (bought currency) and then buy things that other people are spending cold, hard cash on. You never had to spend a dime! You get the same thigns! None of the cash shop items are better than in-game items, just different looking! This is the nature of all microtransactions, the Pay to Win business model breaks the natural order of it! P2W is the exception, not the rule!