My money's paying for what, exactly?

Several people always come up with comments about how the game must be floundering and that IWG isn't making money from us. Or, they say that IWG is just taking the cash we pay and not doing anything with it. Well, I was going over some old posts by OneEye while trying to find some info about boss spawns and I ran across this gem.

OneEye posted in Possible new game to be developed by IWG:

As far as AE not being a success, that cracks me up. AE has been far more succesful than we thought it would be when we first put our own money into buying it (it was going to be turned off within days by TKO (it was only up because a QA guy liked the game and he was fired the week we took over). The game has been running for over 2 years straight without 1 cent of outside investment. We have had 2 expansions added construction, switched over to micropayments, lowered the costs, re-written 100% of the server code, taking it to a real codebase instead of a spaghetti-uber hack mess, added a trackable affiliate program and a web based account mangement system.

Since we have taken over AE has returned about 6x of our investment. We have been able to upgrade every piece of hardware (and software), gone from T1 lines to fiber, moved from a 700sq foot craphole office to a 2000sq ft professional office, been invited to lead a panel at the austin game developer conference on 'how to run a small MMO' (which ~200 people attended) and used the AE server tech to develop an online poker game from the ground up.

But besides all that, ae is a wreck...

Things to take from this is that a lot has changed since IWG bought the license from TKO. Those of us who remember the end of the TKO hold on AE remember that very few people were still playing the game (more play now than under TKO) because those that were leaving were doing so out of boredom. The GMs weren't really doing anything at that point either, save a couple who were trying to do an event on Sanctuary involving Talazar.

Ultimately, though, we're always going to have people who think that IWG earning money from Ashen Empires is a sin, despite the new $8.00 a month subscription fee or the token items that cost less than that per use. But I thought this was something worth archiving. This is what our money has gone to pay for. We can only expect more if they're doing this much, right?