Star Trek Online Going Free-To-Play In January 77
tekgoblin writes "Cryptic Studios, the developer of the Star Trek Online MMO, announced that they are switching to a Free-to-Play model on January 17th. Free subscribers to the game will be able to play, but will not get the same benefits as paying subscribers still get. Free accounts will be Silver, while paid accounts will be called Gold. Silver accounts will be able to pay for features that Gold members will get as part of their paid subscription. These features include but are not limited to respecs and extra character slots."
EverQuest II is jumping on the free-to-play bandwagon as well.
Re:it's dead jim? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that there are now roughly 300,000,000 different MMOGs on the market, and few people want to pay a monthly fee to each of them. If a game can keep a reasonable number of dedicated players but also bring in a lot of casual players who pay $20 every now and again then that's better than just giving up because you can't attract enough dedicated players.
The hard part is finding the right compromise between making money and pissing off the free players with nickel and diming.
Re:it's dead jim? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. It's one of those things that "everyone knows" to be true, but isn't.
Mostly you hear it from people who play a competing game that hasn't yet gone free-to-play. the best example I can think of was the reaction from certain players of City Of Heroes when Champions Online went F2P last year. They got pretty smug about how it was obviously a failure, going to shut down any time now, etc, and how the F2P move was incontrovertible evidence of that failure. Then came the announcement that City Of Heroes was itself going free-to-play...and all of a sudden F2P wasn't a sign of failure anymore. Of course, to every other non-free MMO's community, now it was City that was clearly doomed. And so on.
Over Saturation (Score:4, Insightful)
What I think is happening is it's coming down to time constraints. People can't spend a gajillion hours playing five different mmos. They have to pick and choose between one or two (at most) MMOs. Almost all MMOs have the same time grind system in place so it's impossible to just play them on a semi-casual basis and play other games along side of them. That isn't to say you can't, but you wont go anywhere fast and people generally lose interest if the entire game stagnates on them.
It's not the payment model that is working against them, it's their game play models. This completely puts aside if the game is even good or their friends play it. Their very core is what is holding them back. It doesn't help that WoW has ground in very deeply to the MMO community the idea that the only good MMO is one with a painful leveling experience and the entire game happens at the end. Sadly I've only seen two MMOs that have sought to change this. One I played and it went under, Tabula Rasa, and the other is still in development so I can't comment on it, Guild Wars 2. MMOs can be so much more then just the grind and level system that holds onto players by dangling a carrot in front of their face. Developers really need to stop looking to linear answers to largely fundamental and abstract problems.
No, not at all (Score:4, Insightful)
While it is true that it is something games do when their subscriber base drops, it is often not a death knell but a new breath of life. One such game like that would be Dungeons and Dragons Online. The game never really caught on like some of the others, probably because it is kinda complex, as it's D&D heritage might indicate. So subscribers had been dropping for some time. They decided to go free to play.
It didn't just save the game, it revitalized it, they have tons of players now and make plenty of money.
Remember that free to play doesn't mean the whole thing is free. It means part of the game is free. Also it usually means you have two options in how to pay: Ala carte or monthly.
In DDO there's a base part of the game that costs nothing. You CAN play without ever paying a dime, but it is rather restrictive in what you can do. Does mean that you can still play even if times are lean for you though. In terms of the rest of the content, and there is tons, you have two choices:
1) Pay a monthly fee. For like $15/month you get access to everything. Works just like any "pay to play" MMO. You pay the monthly fee and can do anything you want in game. You get a few other goodies too like some points to spend in their online shop each month and so on. When you stop paying the fee though, the game reverts back to the free to play version.
2) Buy the modules individually. When you buy a module, it is unlocked once and for all time. You don't need to pay anything additional to access it. The fee only gets you access to that module's content though, nothing else.
Now when you look at it, it works out to about the same price. If you buy all new modules when they come out, you spend about the same as just having a monthly subscription that automatically gets you access to everything.
However, it lets people pay how they like. I have a friend that plays it (hence how I know so much) and a major thing that got him in to it was the free to play thing. He got to try the game, no commitment, and then he gets to buy things when he wants. He doesn't like monthly fees, just how he is. With this, it isn't needed. Periodically he buys a pack of points, and then uses them on modules as he wants to play them. I don't know that he saves any money over a monthly fee, but he is willing to do it this way, not a monthly fee.
Also it works for people who can't afford a monthly fee. Not everyone can afford $15/month on a game. Maybe a person can only afford only $15 ever 4 months. Well, a F2P game makes that work. They can buy a bit of game content when they want. No, they don't get the whole game but they get something. The company then gets to get some money, rather than no money.
Now I'm not saying it is some magic system that saves any game, however it can, and has, worked really well. DDO went free to play in 2009 and has been going strong ever since.