I know from online testimonials that a community of dedicated players loved the game. Imagine paying that kind of hourly rate not to play the game but to wait to play the game. There was a line waiting to get in to the server almost every night. When Neverwinter Nights launched, it was capable of supporting 200 online players at a time. You could have bought a new game every day for that kind of money. Thus, if you wanted to play Neverwinter Nights for 4 hours between 16:00 and 20:00 some Monday night, you paid $30 (almost $55 in today's money) for the privilege. They needed services to keep customers consistently online, paying those hourly rates, and online games were part of the answer. To save money, those of us who used AOL primarily for e-mail would compose our missives offline, dial in, quickly send and receive, and sign off (AOL eventually created something called a "flash session" for just this purpose).
The AOL materials that came with Neverwinter Nights shows that they were charging $5 per hour for non-peak usage (18:00-06:00) and $10 per hour for peak daytime usage. For those of you not alive at the time, you have to understand that in 1991, you got "online" by using your modem to dial in to one of your ISP's proprietary phone lines, a service for which they charged you by the hour.
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