Reading all these doom and gloom reports from both PS4 and Xbox is as close to laughable as it gets.
See, the mentality of people on console is that unless a game has an absolutely massive pvp population, its dead. To a lot of console players, a game that is 90% PvE (which STO is) is dead on release.
I have news for these people - no sane games company invests in a console release of a game without first considering its potential population. As it is, STO on console attracts, at a minimum 1,500 players every single night on each platform. At weekends, that rises to 2,500. Sure there are rises and falls as competing games are released, but people return, especially with content releases.
Look at Neverwinter on XBox, Cryptics other major MMO release to the platform. It still has thousands of players a good year or so later, and is still getting new players all the time, most of whom end up spending money on it.
STO is, at best, a niche game for a niche audience. Sure it attracts the odd "outsider", who barely knows what Star Trek is, let alone having ever watched anything on TV of it. And most of the time, the outsiders get bored or at least massively confused by the goings on inside the game. They will most likely leave once something more interesting for them comes along. It happens all the time.
All MMO's end up developing a core audience, die-hard players, but the process to build that hard-core is often long and tedious.
STO is going to struggle more due to the simple fact that the majority of console players are PvP'ers, and STO doesn't cater very effectively to that demographic.
But it will, over time, develop a hard-core of players.
When Cryptic signed the deals with MS and Sony, they went in it for the long-haul.
Another example of this kind of thing can be seen with the game "Defiance", released by Trion many years ago on XBox360 as an MMO. Even right now, the servers are STILL alive, and the game is completely playable, even if it hasn't had a significant update in a very long time. Sure, it has only a couple of hundred players, but its still there.
I would reckon that the console releases are going to be many times more profitable than the PC release ever was, and what will end up happening is that the console income will end up funding the PC development.
Console WILL catch up to PC, but I would normally allow them at least 6 months to achieve this. Sure they rushed it a little, and it was far from bug-free, but its not as if the PC release is either.
