In case you haven’t been following the pattern, when subscription games add free to play aspects the population tends to increase, as well as revenue. Following this trend, Age of Conan opened up its servers to free players over a month ago, and has since seen the related spike in population. How many? 300,000 according to Funcom. The revenues have more than doubled over the first month.
If you take the announcement that activity has more than quadrupled, this gives Age of Conan somewhere around 75,000 active players prior to the free to play transition. At $15 a pop, that counts for around $1.1 million in income per month, meaning Age of Conan is worth over $2.2 million now in revenue, even more since we’re only counting minimum.
This is just a very side thought, but is there even a conceivable future for a game moving from subscription to free to play and still shutting down due to low population? I don’t think there’s been a notable case so far of an MMO going free and managing to continue losing revenue.
Then again I could be wrong.
MMO Fallout 