The Business Model of Relaunching Dead MMOs

With top tier games like Black Desert Online and Blade and Soul available, and Tree of Savior on the horizon, a lot of people are probably wondering why some publishers keep relaunching dead games. RedFox Games, a relatively new publisher, recently announced that they would take over the service for Rumble Fighter, RF Online, and 9Dragons from GamesCampus. All three of these games have shut down and changed publishers several times in the past, even before GamesCampus ever touched them. SubaGames is perhaps the most well known MMO Necromancer out there—having recently resurrected Dream of Mirror Online from the dead and planning to re-launch Luna Online in the near future. In fact, every single one of the games available on SubaGames.com was previously available elsewhere.

9Dragons was first published by Acclaim in Jan 2007

With a portfolio of failed games how on Earth can a company like Subgames compete with newer, more popular MMORPGs? Well. They can't, really. But luckily for them they don't need to. A company like SubaGames is never going to launch “the next big thing.” They aren't trying to. The games they launch on their portal are typically games that failed in the past. This means they can obtain their license (right to publish) for practically nothing. Luna Online for example, which Suba is launching later in 2016, was previously available from gPotato (Gala-net). This means gPotato already did a lot of the leg work in localizing the game for Western release.

Luna's South Korean developer EyeSoft knows the game already failed once—they know the license isn't worth much—so SubaGames can pick it up on the cheap. In fact, I'd wager that SubaGames is paying nearly nothing up-front when they license a game like Luna. Eyesoft's official website hasn't released any news about ANY of their games since 2014, which leads me to believe that they're already borderline bankrupt so they're open to licensing their games for near nothing.

Luna Online Ran from 2009 - 2012 on gPotato. Now it's coming back in 2016

Besides having to pay extremely low licensing fees SubaGames keeps their costs down by having very few permanent employees. A lot of their forum moderators, social media managers, etc, are volunteers, meaning they don't get paid. Physically hosting a game server isn't expensive either. A single powerful dedicated server can hosts dozens of different game at once and only costs about ~$400/mo.

On the revenue side of the equation, a lot of the older games Suba publishes have small dedicated fan bases which are willing to spend money to support their favorite game. On Kickstarter Luna Online raised $4,300 from 32 backers. (Wow. over $100 on average from each backer!) Not a huge chunk of change, but more than enough to pay the bills and keep the game going for quite some time.

RF Online Changed Publishers numerous times

So the reason companies like SubaGames can continue relaunching old games is actually quite simple. They'll never make huge sums of money, but their costs are extremely low, so every dollar in revenue carries a much higher margin. They pay nearly nothing to license the older games they publish and have minimal employee costs. It's not exactly a booming business, but a company like SubaGames can operate profitably by focusing on smaller more obscure titles.