> A good example of that would be WoW - some people have cracked it to run on homebrew servers, but they're by far the minority. I don't know what the global n

> A good example of that would be WoW - some people have cracked it to run on homebrew servers, but they're by far the minority. I don't know what the global numbers are, but it's the opposite in my vicinity: there's a number of local WoW servers and most local networks have clients with patches for them. Only a few players ever tried the official server, majority uses the local ones. Same thing with Lineage, Ultima and others. This doesn't however invalidates your main point: those players are not likely to pay for the official server, even if there would be no local ones (I blame bandwidth costs and difficulties in money transactions). Anyway, the fact remains: there's a lot of people playing the local servers.