I’m genuinely asking, what’s the justification for paywalling the maximum number of server slots?
I mean, I get it when Cfx was just starting out and needed funds for funding development.
But a lot has changed since then, especially now that they take Cuts from Tebex sales and the whole Rockstar acquisition thing.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the slot limit entirely artificial?
Wasn’t the whole justification for Element club before “Access to beta features”
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Its a corporation with responsibilites to its shareholders
shareholder or not, you still need to justify what are they selling exactly ? servers are self hosted, take dev/maintenance time so i don’t really see, the justification plus they got other sources of revenue
at least with them taking a percentage from resources (tebex), is somewhat justified since they offer a platform for devs to make money.
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No company is going to give up a profit center for one of their divisions easily. Especially a reoccurring one with limited overhead. Even though Rockstar acquired Cfx, Cfx as a division of Rockstar still needs to be able to support itself where possible like with Element Club subscriptions.
The answer is always the same in the end
Memes aside, when you are running a server that would require a subscription, chances are that you are also paying quite the sum for other things. Be it a powerful server, resources or other expenses (when I was still part of a server team we had quite a few services running even outside the game).
This in turn very often means that you are already making money to cover expenses. (Not necessarily for profit of course)
But at that point what is 15€ more? (or whatever the first tier costs these days)
To be honest, I personally don’t really mind the paywall beyond 48 slots. Getting there for new servers is difficult enough. And if you are already investing in marketing, might as well get those extra slots. (though I very much don’t like the high pricing for that first tier for only 16 slots more)
I don’t like the paywall for custom clothing. Why clothing in particular?
While we personally never made use of that feature (as far as I remember), this does limit creativity.
i think the assumption back then was that custom clothing and onesync were beta features that would eventually go public for free, so paywalling them as a ‘donation’ tier made sense, it was basically the only way they could make money without legal scrutiny from rockstar at the time. but onesync went public and we’re still paying for slots, and custom clothing never even left the paywall. and thats before even mentioning the rockstar acquisition and tebex cuts so what are we actually paying for at this point
the only other thing that used to do this, is teamspeak 3 where you would buy a license for server slots even tho it was self hosted, but at least with Teamspeak, it’s somewhat justified since it’s their only source of revenue.
now imagine if teamspeak got acquired by discord, started taking a cut from every bot or plugin sold, forced an exclusive marketplace for extensions, and still charged you for server slots on top of all that.
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Afaik, you don’t have to pay for slots. You can set sv_maxclients 1 and stop hardcap, and your server will be able to host an unlimited number of players and clothing streaming will still work. With this in mind, you’re not paying for slots or streaming, but for the ability to display properly in a server browser.