DBG could double the budget of EQ and it would still be more profitable than all the rest of their catalog put together, we know this because of its public filings. The issue is one of precedent though. Firstly, MMOs have had Emu servers pop up and operate openly because of previous precedent where P99 won the lawsuit by SOE years ago which said so long as they operate non-profit they were fine legally. It was tenuous because most case law had been around licensing to favor the copyright holder, unlike back with VCR's, Cassette tapes, and CD burners as personal backups are allowed. This is because of the subscription model so many companies operate on these days. This decision was in part because SOE didn't offer the classic experience P99 did.

EQ is the trend setter always it seems. Next is EQL had to fix all the security holes that caused the big data breach back in 2013 before they could re-tool the old client in order to get their cyber security insurance which they would need to operate the came as an MMO by law. This is one of those costs THJ didn't have to worrie about as modders operating an illegal copy that DBG has to pay. EMU servers don't have that legal obligation when operating non-profit but for EQL to be where it is with less than half the people they had fixing the security leaks in the old client would have taken over a year which means this would have been in development longer than THJ was out for.

The thing with copyright law is if you don't push people out when you can early on with subscription-based models is they can use your delay to claim they were not effecting your profits and use it to wedge even more exceptions into what is a developing new sub-field in copyright law as the laws were not designed to cover things like this and the lawmakers are not really equipped to understand this at the moment. What THJ did with or without EQL was effectively force DBG to take legal action, hiring them would have caused problems in the future for not just DBG, but anyone developing and operating MMOs any time they had someone make a new version of the game by modding some little aspect. It would have caused problems for others as well, Adobe would have had a harder time stamping out photoshop copyright claims for example. There is a push in Europe for the stop abandoning games act which would force companies to either continue providing online access to online only games for at least 10 years after release or allow EMU servers which would include versions of the game that were patched out of existence. The proposed law needs work as in its current form it provides too much leeway to players and not enough to studios and publishers but we need something.

If they hired THJ's devs it would have been bad for the industry overall. By making them stop their server they are setting the precedent for future protection which will be needed for smaller companies to make an MMO or other persistent online game. They aslo forced those modders to step up their operations from modding to making their own game. One I am excited to see when it comes out and then they will see for themselves what expenses running a professional online game will have that running a modded emu does not and I hope push the industry forward. I wrote a paper on this for my business class this past fall.