[Riftmaker]

The whole point of the developers is to get people to play MMORPGs for a long time, that's how they make their money. Subscriptions are the biggest money maker out there.

You can't just counter it by saying that a demo will decrease sales, and therefore decrease revenue. The only difference is that you'd be forcing a person to pay $50 for the the game, which they find out they hate, and then quit.

So as a developer / publisher, your goal is really to please your customers. If your customers want a demo server, give them one. You'd gain potential customers out of people that never heard of it before, and aren't willing to buy a MMORPG just to find out they don't like it.

Sure you'd lose those short-term $50 customers, but you'd easily gain at least that number back from the long term ones, or at least be able to absorb the losses from all those subscriptions.

Another thing to remember is that 99/100 times, you can't play cracked versions of MMOs anyway. So that argument doesn't really hold any water.