Lions roar, eagles soar, nonmembers DON'T deserve more!

V2, because V1 needed further explanation.


"Lions roar, eagles soar, nonmembers deserve more!"
There's one word for that: No. The reason nonmembers don't have as much as members do is because it's encouragement to buy membership. If nonmembers were to receive more, the amount of players buying membership may be lowered by a lot - and with millions of players, that's a huge difference. Animal Jam has a huge server to run for all of its players. Some MMOs use multiple servers for different areas of the map - Animal Jam could be hosting a different server for each of the worlds you go into. Let's say each room in a server holds 20 players. 20 players, x the amount of rooms there are (township, coral canyons, mt. shiveer, appondale, kimbara outback, sarepia forest, crystal sands, temple of zios, deep blue, crystal reef, bahari bay, and kani cove), 20 x 12 = 240. Now currently displayed on my screen are 28 worlds to go to. 240 x 28 = 6,720. This example is 20 players in each room in each world at the same time, not counting dens, the juice hut, canyons pathway, minigame servers, parties, dens, all smaller rooms, or even the duplicate servers (sometimes one may go to aldan but be put into a different version of aldan). Plus the processing of every game, every interaction, storage for all of the models and animations, and general gfx. Let's say it only costs 1$ per player (bandwidth, player storage, gfx data, everything), x 6,720 players active at one time is of course, 6,720. Multiply that by 30, for an account being active for 30 days, we get a whopping 201k. If every single one of those online members bought a 1 month recurring membership, 6.95 x 6720 = 46704, x 30 = 1.4m. Minus the amount it costs for 30 days, they only make 120k profits, and that's not much for a huge business. 8.5% of the money made remains.

Let's try this a different way. According to data in 2011, there are 11 million active accounts in World of Warcraft, and it costs 130k per day to run the WoW servers. If every account were to play every day for one month, 130k x 30 = 3,900,000. It costs 3.9m per month, at this rate, to keep WoW running with 11 million accounts - but as I previously stated, this data was collected in 2011. And this is not even counting the bandwidth costs, which could be another 100k per month, or possibly even day. If we count how much it is for a monthly subscription, say 15$, 11m x 15 = 165m. So they're making a TON of profit, aren't they? But these expenses have to go into the server; - 3.9m, (100k for bandwidth x 30 = 3m) -3m, and we're down to 158.1m. This extra money can be used to fund more developments, patches, pay their employees, backup money in case something goes wrong, and more expansion packs.
Now this can be applied to Animal Jam as well. Let's half the amounts, since Animal Jam may have less active accounts at once.

5.5m accounts, 65k per day. 65k x 30 = 1.9m - cost per month.
6.95 (cost of monthly membership) x 5.5m = 38.2m - money the members spend.
38.2m, -1.9m, -1.5m, 34m - profits in the end. 4.9% of the money made remains.

In addition, look at how much nonmembers have received recently - diamonds on every other Jamaaliday gift, the ability to change the color of clothes, at least one 2D adventure, the chat history, pigs, giraffes, sea turtles, masterpieces all through December, and even lots of nonmember clothes. In Club Penguin, there are far fewer items able to be purchased, at least, from last I played, while you don't have a club membership. Take a good look at what nonmembers still can do - there's a lot of features, everyone is just so caught up in it being "equal" that they don't understand that that's not how it's supposed to be. Animal Jam would lose lots of profits if they give too much to nonmembers. A small change can make a HUGE difference. Every feature they give to members is encouragement to get people to buy membership - the more people buy membership, the more they have to fund new additions to the game. Remember - it takes a LOT of time, resources, and effort to make one new animal.

TL;DR: It costs a TON of money to keep a server running and based on my own possibly uneducated calculations they only make 4.9% profit - estimating that half of the online players bought a 1 month recurring membership. I did go through and research costs beforehand through a lot of different sources. I may be wrong on this, but maybe this can give you an idea on just how much it is to actually run a massive game. Animal Jam even has 30m+ players in its database.

"How about just one more animal?"
There's two things that can happen.
The addition of this new animal can cause them to lose profits in two ways - the extensive resources it takes or the fact that a slightly smaller percentage of people may be buying membership.
Then there's the fact that after nonmembers get another animal, they become more spoiled and demand another animal. Since Animal Jam can't do this, said players quit and Animal Jam loses potential memberships, thus losing profits again.

"I want the Forgotten Desert!"
Again, encouragement to buy membership. A lot of people may want membership specifically for the Forgotten Desert. Even if they added a flying nonmember animal, in no adventure does it let nonmembers receive member prizes - so there would be a new nonmember box, and nonmembers would still not be able to earn spikes like they would want.

In addition to these, more Animal Jam players have been quitting recently, so Animal Jam is losing profits. All of these new promo items are likely because of this - back in 2011, Aldan was entirely packed with people. Even Appondale and Mt. Shiveer were full. Now, usually Crystal Sands is full at most, with the rare day that you're put into Appondale instead.

Though it is true that nonmembers make the game in the first place, the game would be cancelled very quickly if nobody were to buy memberships. Then there's another alternative to memberships - in-game purchases, and lots of them. Say instead of buying a piece of armor in the Diamond Shop for a few diamonds, you'd have to pay a dollar. 5$ for an entire armor set. When instead, you could pay 6.95$ for a one month recurring membership, cancel it whenever you'd like, and be able to buy the diamond armor set and so much more, especially with the new Member Spin coming in January.

TL;DR (again): Animal Jam needs to make sure members have quite a bit more than nonmembers do to keep the game alive at all.

End; I apologize in advance if I seem rude, I just want to firmly get the point across so people understand. Don't agree with me? Voice your opinion! I want to see arguments to see how I can improve my wall of text. If you read all of it, I congratulate you, it really is a lot to read.