Single player pays once, MMO player pays every month
Those odds are incredibly stacked against you:
- an MMO inherently requires a lot of the player's time, so the by-far most won't be playing more than one. Would they choose your game?
- network effects: players will usually flock to a game that has a lot of players already.
- people that know Elite are generally older with jobs, the target audience for MMOs are younger players with a lot of free time.
With EVE Online being the big elephant in this room, I doubt an Elite MMO will be much of a succes. Then again, feel free to prove me wrong, I'd probably sign up just for old times sake :)
The cost of the infrastructure servers isn't high compared to the 1000s of man years salary to build a major game, and with cloud services it can scale so you only pay as new customers come in.
MMOs tend to be older players, mostly male in 30s. These are the audience that can pay $30-60/month without noticing. The Teenagers tend to be casual gamers and a bigger market for phones/consoles - especially 1-2 player games.