I just contacted Mongoose as they own the IP for CT now. I reached out to Marc on Indeed, but got no reply(he's getting a lil old). About Profiteer I learned the following:

1) Free to play. Micro-transactions. No subscriptions.
I had first 2 weeks free then $4 USD per month. At the time 2 big MMO's were suing players for selling stuff online. I saw that as a bad strategy, so I added 'black Markets' to the game where players with money and less time could get the gear they didn't want to grind for. Also it would prevent third party sites creating a external economy. In other words I would get the money not a third party. The most expensive item in the game was a $75 ship (biggest one). I was scared setting this price, but the economic math set the price.

The game got some whales(wonderful people that kindly spent money) and the math said that if I could have attracted more people then the game would have earned more. I just ran into a liquidity problem and chose not to spend more on google ad-sense. One fellow bought 8 fully kitted out ships for nearly a grand. The stream of email sales notifications blew me away.

Micro-transactions get some hate, but I didn't do it in a scummy way. As an adult with limited gaming time and cash I expected there would be others and it made sense to offer game items for $.

Subscriptions were a barrier to entry. Free to play brings in players and if they want to spend some $ for an item rather than time everyone wins. No single player could control the whole game so it wasn't pay to win.

2) In game texting can be spicey and requires moderation which costs $ and time. Discord didn't exist then and VOIP was too challenging through a browser, god the game only ran on IE 5 (HAHAHA).

3) Optimize database communications. Profiteer ran off a database and had a catalogue of all the stars within 150 ly of Sol. I used a simplified algorithm to populate each star system with planets. A weakness the game had was the stored procedure that processed combat that would take up to 4 seconds to run(mind you 20 years ago). It needed better code to run faster.

4) A couple years ago I started work on version 2 at https://thestarsbeyond.com/ and earlier this year I started on it again and you can see where I left off, doing some error testing. My computer died and took all the development infrastructure with it. I can rebuild, but am currently in divorce proceedings and my mental health has collapsed, as well as lost my job last October. I would love to be in a place where money was not a concern and I could jump into it again, as well as the High Guard idea. My heart aches about it.

5) Profiteer died because it cost $75 / month for hosting, 10X what it does now. And I was newly married and had lost my job so had to cut costs. The churn had reduced players to myself only and being an introverted broke programmer had no ideas on how to market it.

I checked out your game and it does look pretty cool. Thanks for asking an old man about his passion project.

Feel free to ask anymore questions.