That's wrong anyway, you can have more than one character. Server bandwidth and maintenance is what costs. The initial cost of buying the servers costs a ton of money too, and they're constantly adding new content to the game. And on top of this, let's not forget the cost of a developing a game is huge aswell. When I had work experience at a computer company a few years ago, they told me the average life of a hard disk in a server is about 3 years. FFXI has a lot of servers, something like 20 or more I think, and they probably all have more than just one harddisk each. High-performance harddisks used in servers are also more expensive than what's in personal computers, The game is over 4 years old now, so going by statistics, they've already had to replace most of the harddisks in their servers already. Harddisks aren't the only devices that break and need maintenance either, but I'm not going to bother listing it all.
But indeed, they probably charge more than it actually costs to run it. if they didn't, why should they offer the service at all? Square Enix is a company, companies make money.
Guildwars doesn't have a monthly fee because almost everything outside of cities doesn't pass through their servers. It's all instances running on the PCs of the players. That can't be done with games like WoW and FFXI.
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