Good business move; take the money, expand the services. If you can keep banners off the site, great; if you can't, who cares, it sure hasn't killed KI.
People will complain, people will fret. That's what people do. Show them how much faster and better the site can get - no more cluster 8 problems, no more weird errors when you try to post a comment, no more lag delay on page loads, more users, more data, more updates, better content. Add some more admins and let people help with updates - never knew that Pikko alone was responsible for FFXI changes, what the hell's up with that? You need a few more hands in there. Cut the turnaround time on new data, make that stuff post as fast as possible, be the best site on the damn net for any MMO. The complaints will stop.
People will threaten to not renew premium. Let that one ride on its own; the lack of avatars and presence of ads will bring them back around like it did the first time. I wouldn't even worry about that particular impact. Besides, the ad revenues generated from the intrasite network will prop up the coffers while people work out their angst.
People have their knickers all twisted up over a potential IGE association. Ignore the issue. If you can keep the banner ads off the site, great; if you can get them to stop flooding the site with bs spammers, even better. IGE doesn't need the advertisements anyway, the people who want to use them already know how to find them. Google isn't hard to figure out.
What the IGE parent company is doing is not trying to create a gil selling empire so much as to diversify their holdings. Look at it like a business issue instead of like a bunch of ****** little gamers. They have all their eggs in one basket - the sale of online currency. This may or may not prove to be a viable future market; game companies generally oppose the practice, gamer backlash is an issue, sales are somewhat seasonal, and hell -- some companies are getting in on the deal (like Sony's online store for selected EQ2 servers, or like Second Life, etc).
You can't even guess what's going to happen three years from now. Maybe the market will be much larger, or maybe it will be non-existant. Maybe companies will finally do this stuff themselves, presenting unbeatable competition with prices under what you can afford; maybe they'll find ways to create an in-game economy that is resistant to exploitation in this fashion. It could be that currency arbitrage won't bring in a dime in the future.
But sites like these? These are tangible, these are product. These are going to be good in three years, in five years; just adapt to the changing trends in the gaming landscape, hire some geeks who love the stuff to keep it updated, slap on some ads, then prop your feet up and let the money roll in. Sell t-shirts and stuff. That's a revenue stream you can bank on.
There's no reason to assume the worst from this type of merge. Can't imagine Alla would have ignored all that when making his decisions on the matter -- chances are he understands the business angle a bit better than the crying armchair theorists out there.
I say let it ride, give it six months, see what happens. This could be the start of something great.
(And if it isn't, you need to get out of your chair anyway. Go outside, you pasty fu[gold][/gold]ck - get some sun.)
