Daybreak Sues The Heroes Journey EQ EMU Server Devs

You think there is no one in that situation. 1 in a 400 wouldn't be hard to believe, that sub to EQ but havent logged in for a while. Given the average age of someone playing EQ atm.

I am not dumb enough or have enough ego to state factually that there are not people in EQ in that exact situation.

What was that number up there, 66k members(people paying a monthly sub). You don't think out of 66,000, there could be 165 people that have not logged into the game in some months or even years? That is some crazy confidence.

Could be more or less, who know. But I can say with a strong confidence that its <0. How many only DPG knows.

Cinge said:

Who's coping? Man the new buzzword for every debate, when they cant think of anything else.

Oh someone offered why subs might not match in-game numbers(and who knows those numbers because no one has exact info and please dont use steam like an idiot), better pull out the "copium" response.

Also, you are a complete idiot if you think there are not people subbed to a game haven't played it in months or years and that includes EQ. How many who knows, but its happening and all depends on the size of the game. I bet WoW at its peak had tens of thousands, at least, that were like this.


I wish court cases didnt take so long. I just want to see what happens here, as I have no dog in the race. Especially if it goes against DBG, I am curious if we will see a ton of emu servers for all kinds of games suddenly come to life and start monetizing it all.

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There are absolutely 0 ways this goes against DPG. The copyright infringement is absolutely on lock. 100% of all art assets are straight up from the EQ client and used without permission. They are using the EQ client for everything. Making mods to it doesn't change that the entirety of the client's code is DPG owned IP. The game is EQ. Again, 100% owned by DPG.

The people trying to call P99 into this are pretty amusing, because P99 got sued and settled, which is why they have an extremely limited license. That does not, in any way whatsoever, give anyone else any right to use DPG's IP. THJ put out a server to much fanfare and took money for it, making it a commercial use. This is literally the textbook case of copyright infringement, so the only option THJ has is total capitulation. 8/12 is probably game over for the server, and if they don't settle all that's left is just determining how much over and above every penny they took in will have to be paid to DPG.

A report found that like 1.5 million people were still paying for AOL dial up internet for years after they shouldn't have been.

You might be surprised how many people just let auto drafts keep going for years and years. I wouldn't be surprised if there's 1000 EQ accounts that are this way. At least a couple DBG employees getting paid by people who are too lazy to keep track of their bank accounts.

moonarchia said:

There are absolutely 0 ways this goes against DPG. The copyright infringement is absolutely on lock. 100% of all art assets are straight up from the EQ client and used without permission. They are using the EQ client for everything. Making mods to it doesn't change that the entirety of the client's code is DPG owned IP. The game is EQ. Again, 100% owned by DPG.

The people trying to call P99 into this are pretty amusing, because P99 got sued and settled, which is why they have an extremely limited license. That does not, in any way whatsoever, give anyone else any right to use DPG's IP. THJ put out a server to much fanfare and took money for it, making it a commercial use. This is literally the textbook case of copyright infringement, so the only option THJ has is total capitulation. 8/12 is probably game over for the server, and if they don't settle all that's left is just determining how much over and above every penny they took in will have to be paid to DPG.

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I agree, but would be interesting to see, even if its a very very small chance.

Sylas said:

Yeah that one is on me, my bad. I looked at the chart and saw Quarter, didn't see YTD. since i saw september I figured it couldn't possibly be annual, I forgot that they are not an american company and don't use Fiscal Years for some reason, but calendar year? fucking weird. So i divided revenue by 3 instead of by 9.

The numbers though, they do not match up at all and now i'm suspicious of all their data. It's looking more like money laundering than anything at this point. They claimed 66k subs in 2020, and the chart shows MAU is mostly flat, slight elevation in 2021 (prolly pandemic) but then falls back down...but then in 2023 they claim that despite drops in subs due to post-pandemic activity, their ebitda was still positive due to low costs?

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Except you once again misinterpreting what was said verbally now. Starting @ 30:40 he basically says our overall revenue has gone down post pandemic, some useless stuff about mobile games, and then specifically says.

"whereas EverQuest you see it's you know if you it's difficult to see here but you'll see that EverQuest numbers actually havegone up because it's super sticky core audience that's not going anywhere"

It's in the graph as well.... I don't know how to explain to you that when a line goes up the associated number also too goes up.

Sylas said:

And you might not believe that one youtuber, but literally every single streamer and youtuber for EQ, ion, void, stoic guy, they all are saying the same thing when it comes to activity/sub numbers, so I'm going to take their word over yours. Personally I don't know any of these fucks, I don't play EQ, but these are the most popular EQ streamers (but only 1-10k subscribers themselves, which speaks volumes to how many eq players remain), there is no way they are still sitting at 80k MAU and definitely not anywhere near 60k subs. If so, where the fuck are they all? They aren't playing on any EQ server.

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It's not that I don't believe him. I just do not believe there's any effective or accurate way to track online players (much less total subs) and it only gets more difficult the further the game becomes instanced. The gold standard is tracking fucking general chat channels which is laughable within itself.

But just for anyone keeping score at home you went from "yea I won't trust dbg leak'd numbers from a youtuber, I'll trust eg7's numbers", being shown your massive error that you baked into all of your numbers and posts, and then "I don't trust eg7's numbers, it's probably money laundering, but here's a youtuber that will give us the real numbers"

Sylas said:

And where is all the revenue? if those numbers were accurate then that would mean they only have subscribers, no one buys anything in the cash shop, and they only sell exactly as many krono as needed to cover their active accounts each month? /doubt

If I had to guess, beyond money laundering, their sub numbers are massively inflated, perhaps they sold more of those lifetime subscriptions than you think? those will always show as active, even well past the deaths of the players, because their is never a renewal charge. maybe EQ is 40k lifetime subs and 20k month to month? Or perhaps they are manipulating the numbers via the station pass? its 1 sub that gives you access to every game, and they are double/triple dipping?

I refuse to believe a monthly subscription game only has 4% of its total paid player base logging in each month.

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The revenue is in the chart It's just that same situation of you looking at it upside down. I explained the breakdown to you in my last reply.
$11.5 M YTD bookings as of Sept 30, 2020 (nine months no new expansion sales), so it’s $11.5 M ÷ 9 = $1.28 M/month in revenue
Subscription revenue: 66 000 × $14.99 ≈ $0.99 M/month
$0.29 M/month cash shop and additional previous expansions

Sylas said:

Or perhaps they are manipulating the numbers via the station pass? its 1 sub that gives you access to every game, and they are double/triple dipping?

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What?? lol ....All all-access games share membership counts but yet all of their individual memberships are completely different?

Sylas said:

um, you guys are off by like an order of magnitude.

no doubt there are always some people who don't check their CCs and notice they are being billed for things that they should of cancelled years ago. It happens, hell there are even apps now designed to help you catch these forgotten subscriptions. That's not being debated.

The question is scale.

1.5 million people paying for AOL when AOL had 35 million subscribers and then suddenly dropped to nearly nothing once highspeed internet came out, that's is 4%. And how many of those kept paying until AOL stopped existing? for 20 more years? no. people forget to cancel shit sure, it goes a few months, maybe a year. not 20 years.

EQ live servers have no more than 4k players on them, perhaps 15k subscriptions total, logging in each month. Yet they claim 66k paying subscriptions.

51k people paying for EQ out of 66k is, insane. 72% of its players just forgot to cancel??

Even if you wanted to argue that they've all just been paying unknowingly for the last 20+ years, even though they stopped playing when WoW came out in 2004, that's still 51k out of 450k (their subscription totals at the time), its over 12%. it's ridiculous.

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The EQ has 4k live players is just more pulled out of your ass bullshit. You took absolutely the worst case scenario for every criteria to arrive at that number.

People also don't seem to realize how a large majority of players actually play EQ. When an expansion launches there is big rush of things to do and then 70% of the year is raid logging. This even happens on TLP to a lesser extent. Long-term players on live servers aren't doing 40, 30, or even 20 hours a week.

Kirun said:

Yeah, the hundreds of thousands of untracked EQ subscribers are all logging in via a launcher that predates the 2012 launch of the game on Steam.

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I actually just downloaded it via steam because I had no idea how it actually worked from there. Steam launches the EQ launcher.... I have no idea why people wouldn't use this amazing state of the art 2012 process....

Mmmm, EQ drama.
I'm surprised someone hasn't made EQ in Roblox yet. You have games like Grow A Garden, in Roblox, hitting 18 million active users during updates.

Old Man Potter said:

So this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had every intention of letting EVERQUEST DIE with no intention of attracting new players. That was the trajectory these miserable fucks were on. There's no backup plan. Like the greedy cunts they are, they were going to milk it then close up shop leaving only P99 and the EQ emu community left to memorialize EQ.

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Lawyers take on the screenshot in question, his thoughts, not mine

-Any motion for preliminary relief needs to make the case that the movant will suffer "irreparable harm" in the absence of an injunction
-so DBG is arguing that they are suffering from a loss of subscribers as a result of THJ and that, if that isn't stopped now, it imperils the business
-I should also clarify that, normally, pure economic harm is not considered irreparable because you can recover that at the end of the case via money damages
-but enterprise-threatening harm (i.e., we're running out of subscribers and may need to shutter the business) is irreparable harm
-so they can't just say it's costing us money. They need to show that it's costing them so much money the business is imperiled.
-there is a Supreme Court case called Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council that discusses the 4-part test for preliminary relief. But the most important element (the sine qua non) is irreparable harm.


But please continue to parrot "DBG = bad" take that aeth so badly wants you to believe.

dragonbr said:

People use the regular launcher that isnt tracked by steam.

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I wasn't implying they were using Steam. Just pointing out they top 100 games at any given moment. To think EverQuest would ever be even near that list is hilarious.

Ysu said:

-I should also clarify that, normally, pure economic harm is not considered irreparable because you can recover that at the end of the case via money damages

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I wonder if it's considered irreparable if they know they'll never be able to collect an amount commensurate with the harm? (not sure of the specifics here, but I'm assuming that they'll claim harm FAR in excess of whatever thj has been able to collect)

Mrniceguy said:

Wrong. It matters from both a Legal and Moral perspective. Legally it's one of things that determines fair use.

107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use​

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

If THJ isn't having a negative impact on the market value it makes it more likely that it could be considered Fair Use. Also if you read the court documents you would know It's also the reason Daybreak says it's going after THJ and not other EMU like P99, it's also effects the Implied License defense.

From a Moral perspective Piracy is like Stealing only when the Piracy hurts the value of Original. That is one of the big differences between Tangible and Intangible property.

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None of this contradicts what he said. I'm guessing you watched a YouTube video talking about fair use, understood around half of it, and now think you're an expert

forehead said:

A report found that like 1.5 million people were still paying for AOL dial up internet for years after they shouldn't have been.

You might be surprised how many people just let auto drafts keep going for years and years. I wouldn't be surprised if there's 1000 EQ accounts that are this way. At least a couple DBG employees getting paid by people who are too lazy to keep track of their bank accounts.

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Subscriptions to MMOs require a CC. You can't "draft" MMOs directly from your checking - even using a debit card doesn't allow for this, it's essentially just acting as a CC that's drawing from your checking. Eventually, your CC expires and has to be renewed manually.

What you guys are describing literally can't happen, unless it's your contention that these people are seriously logging into the game's payment service every 3-5 years just to renew their subscriptions and keep them going, after their CC expires. The amount of people doing this must be at least 4!!!

Gravel said:

I wasn't implying they were using Steam. Just pointing out they top 100 games at any given moment. To think EverQuest would ever be even near that list is hilarious.

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Wait... do you think when we say 66k members and 80k mau that we are referencing current online players?

If I had to take a absolute wild guess their daily concurrent peak across all servers is probably like 7-9k during non launch times and much higher during a tlp's initial launch and then retaining fewer and fewer as you get further than that time period. That number would put them around titles like "house flipper" and "farming simulator 22" on the steam charts.

The data available from Yelinak and Vaniki launch shows the following on unique logins for each day -

5/25/2022 - 43,987

6/28/2022 - 35,210

7/27/2022 - 32,480

I think normally these numbers are probably 3k lower in every instance, just due to Mischief still pulling in much, much more than a server normally does after a year of it's release. There's also no indication that the unique logins aren't being counted multiple times across servers either. My guess is they are counted multiple times and the Vaniki ruleset probably included people server hopping to give the unique ruleset a spin.

Using /who as any type of metric would be absurd. If any streamers did that and were using it as evidence, you can safely consider them fully retarded. It is so incredibly limited. Anonymous and roleplay effectively hides you and there's a max limit on results returned which would be easily reached on servers where most people are level capped.

This is gonna turn it around for Vanguard.

/who is a valid metric if and only if it is used for comparisons. If I do a bunch of who queries and do it again and again on each tlp, I should come up with a reasonable estimate for popularity or activity. I may also be able to find out stuff like x server has a popular asian timezone population, or has a lot of raidlogging, or dropped off faster than normal.

What it won't do is provide absolute numbers or anything approaching it.

Kirun said:

every 3-5 years just to renew their subscriptions and keep them going, after their CC expires.

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This isn't exactly true any more. I think the cc companies give certain companies some leeway on expirations based on some trust score. I've had some companies successfully charge my card long after its expiration.

edit: Also, if they accept paypal, it will happily charge your bank monthly forever. I'm sure there are other payment providers that will do the same. Not sure about eq, but some mmos use non-cc-based payments since ccs aren't as common in some countries.