I have roughly 1200 people paying $10/mo. I also allow people to play for free, but capped at level 20 (out of about 1000 meaningful levels). There are maybe

I have roughly 1200 people paying $10/mo. I also allow people to play for free, but capped at level 20 (out of about 1000 meaningful levels). There are maybe 1000 active free players, but not nearly as active as the paying players. At any given time, about 3/4 of the people online are paying subscribers. It's hard to say how sensitive the game is to critical mass, since the game has grown over the last 7 years with the number of people playing it. When it first started out, there were only a dozen or so star systems and it was a much smaller game in scope. Now we're up to about 6000 systems. Basically I keep growing the game / universe as more people join.