After knowing them for a few months, all my thoughts about them have come to a clue: It is already a miracle that these 13 girls can last for a decade.
With such setup, they will be running out of options very soon. You may argue that new story lines can be made over and over, but there won't be infinity options as they have their own personality, and the story has to fit that. That way, they need new characters to assist those old ones to keep them alive (I'm looking at you, CG and ML fellows...) And irony thing is, those side-products are even more famous than the original.
With a few console games (yes, I'm not going to talk about side-products like mobile games) that almost make no difference, well maybe a full season of anime with a movie, plus annual celebration that gathered fans around vocal actresses does helped their long journey, it's still unbelievable that NBEI can keep them up running for so long. Although they're not all that famous across the world, they are still the first bunch of virtual girls in the world that have CD albums released under their own identity instead of their vocal actress, there are also a lot of secondary products like other anime all around. So all in all I may say NBEI created a milestone as they're producing virtual idols. But if they don't fix their selling strategy for the game, even those hardcore fans will eventually drop out of the circle; because Project iM@S starts as a game, not an anime or anything else.
Maybe my vision and thoughts aren't 100% correct, but by a simple glance at 918 incident I know that NBEI will not learn the lesson; they just want to grow larger and larger by taking our money, without concerning a title's spirit and consumer's true feelings toward those titles. This way, our best action to reject them is not to buy something you don't like.
