Free to Play – Page 8

Forge Surviving Through Free To Play

Forge is an arena based combat game brought to us by indie developer Dark Vale, and it hasn’t been performing so well on the revenue side of things. In order to keep the servers online and roll out more content, Dark Vale has announced that the game will be heading free to play.

As you all know, we’re an Indie developer and are able to continue to support the game with new features from the sales of Forge every month. In order to continue to do this we must change our business plan in order to get more players playing Forge so it’s fun for everyone and to continue funding development. This is why Forge must go F2P.

The good news is that the Dark Vale will be avoiding pay to win at all costs, offering initially just cosmetic armor sets and experience boosters, with items that would normally take a long time to unlock costing more than others. Future cash shop offerings may include equipment customization among other items.

Check out the entire announcement at the link below.

(Source: Forge)

Rift Increasing Server Capacity

This may be surprising, but the recent transition of Rift to a free to play model has brought in swarms of new and returning players. As a result, the most populated servers have hit their breaking point resulting in long queues. In response to player complaints, Trion has been working to increase server queues and optimization, with some of those updates coming tomorrow, Friday.

I did raise server caps ever so slightly this evening which completely removed the queue on a number of servers. They may be able to go up further this weekend – our engineers were able to find a number of optimizations based on today’s load on the servers. We hope to have those optimizations up potentially on Friday. The % impact of the optimization is not yet known.

There are also plans in place for Trion to be able to lock character creation on the fly.

(Source: Rift Forums)

By The Way, Rift Is Free Today

One of the few remaining pillars of subscription-only MMO gaming has fallen today, with Rift officially going free to play. Offering “no trials, no tricks, no traps,” Rift free to play drops the required subscription and opens up all of the leveling experience free of charge. Players are able to purchase credits to buy mounts, services, convenience items, and more: nearly five thousand items to choose from. Even if you choose not to throw some real money in, you can always partake in the delights of the cash shop through buying REX, which can be consumed for cash shop currency.

Today also marks the launch of patch 2.3, bringing a new zone for max level players.

(Source: Rift)

Jagged Alliance Online Now On Steam

As previously announced, Jagged Alliance Online is now available for download and play on Steam. The free to play MMO was originally launched on browsers via Gamigo’s game portal, and is expanding its visibility to the Steam community. The game weighs in at a rather light two gigabytes of storage space and recommends a 2.4ghz processor and at least four gigabytes of ram. As with the browser version, Jagged Alliance Online is always online and naturally requires a constant internet connection.

While the original game is free, Steam is offering 10% off until June 12th on two DLC packs. Each pack costs $29.99 ($26.99 on sale) and contains 80 new contracts, extra rewards, achievements, prestige contracts, an exclusive mercenary and $150,000 in cash. Check it out at the link below.

(Source: Steam)

Rift Details Loyalty Plan For Members

Rift’s conversion to free to play is turning out to be pretty awesome, if I do say so, and I do. Generally when other MMOs go free to play and decide to keep hold of their loyalty programs, they either award loyalty for all players or they do so only to those who subscribe to the premium membership. In the case of Rift, Trion is doing a little of both. Loyalty points no longer accrue simply from subscribing to the premium service, since a subscription is no longer necessary. Instead, players will fill their loyalty meter by subscribing, purchasing or spending credits, or via Rift’s new REX.

The Loyalty system is, at its core, the same philosophy – it’s our way of saying thanks for supporting RIFT. If you choose to spend real money in RIFT you’ll gain Loyalty (with one little loop hole discussed below *wink*). As you accrue Loyalty, your Loyalty meter will fill and unlock new rewards, like Special Costumes only available through Loyalty, the ability to change your target icon to Elite or Raid status, and unique dimensions.

REX is, as you may have guessed, Trion’s version of PLEX: Cash shop credits that can be bundled and sold to other players, effectively allowing the game to be fully accessed for free. Current and former subscribers will be happy to know that their previous months of service in Rift will count toward their starting set of loyalty currency, and you will be able to keep your already obtained loyalty items.

(Source: Rift)

Taco Tuesday: How Will Planetside Manage Cheaters?

Last year I asked John Smedley if Planetside would be shutting down with Planetside 2 releasing, since Planetside was already dead in the water in terms of population. The response I received was that Sony would rather seek options including transforming Planetside into the free to play model before they shut the servers down, and that there would be more details as to where things were going in 2013. Just a day or so ago, Sony Online Entertainment threw a block grant of six months of game time in Planetside for Planetside 2 players. John Smedley also noted on Twitter:

This also gives us more time to make it f2p. So enjoy starting tmw late morning. And yes I’m sure we will miss flag some people.

Even though I knew that Sony preferred free to play to shutting the game down outright, my reaction to the announcement is still a sound “why?” I understand why Sony would want to take that road, since by their own admission no one plays Planetside anymore and therefore anything is better than nothing. On the other hand, players like myself are fully aware of why Planetside doesn’t have a trial system: because hackers were abusing it and mass-creating accounts. So when Planetside goes free to play, it’s hardly unrealistic to assume that the hackers will simply return in droves to ruin the experience once again.

Will Planetside become a den of aimbots, exploits, and hackers? At first, most assuredly. Afterward, who can say? Part of me wants to say that Sony will address the problem of mass-hacking in Planetside because otherwise the investment required to take the game free to play wouldn’t be worth it. A game like Planetside that is fully player vs player will see its population turn right around and leave if the game is infested with hackers. The hope, of course, is that Planetside will generate enough revenue after the transition that Sony can afford to have some full time staffers on hand to update the systems to battle cheaters at a software level while simultaneously having staff in-game to track down and ban cheaters by hand.

And again, this all comes down to how prepared Sony is to deal with the cheaters who will no doubt show up once the doors open.

Rift Is Heading Free To Play On June 12th

It must be Christmas. Rift, the MMO that served as one of the few remaining bastions of an age of subscription-only MMOs, has announced that it will be making the transition this June. June 12th to be exact. What can players expect to get for free? As far as core content goes, everything:

All of our content is available completely for free: every quest, every chronicle, every dungeon, every continent, every level, and every raid. You can level to 60 without spending a dime. You can earn the best gear in the game without giving us a credit card. No tricks; no traps.

The Rift cash shop will sell boosts, mounts, costumes, treasure boxes, etc. Trion has revealed that gear will be available for sale with the best gear only available in-game as drops. Massively.com has an excellent interview with Bill Fisher at the link below.

(Source: Massively Interview)

Revenue Doubled Under Free To Play

As much as I know there is a subsection of gamers who want nothing more than for The Old Republic to be down and out so they can justify kicking it over and over, I have bad news for you: According to an earnings call by Electronic Arts, The Old Republic has not only grown exponentially in size, it is making lods of emone. 1.7 million new players have joined since the game went free to play, bringing up subscriptions to just under half a million.

“The really interesting thing that’s happening inside the service right now is monthly average revenue for the game has more than doubled since we introduced the free-to-play option. And as we look forward, we’re going to continually invest in new content for the service and for players every six weeks or so.”

Granted that news shouldn’t exactly be surprising. We would have been more surprised if The Old Republic had somehow managed to have less players and be making less money after the transition.

(Source: Polygon)

Namco Bandai Loves Free To Play Now

Back when Namco Bandai’s Olivier Comte said that free to play games “couldn’t be high quality” and were “whittling away at AAA development,” I made the poor comparison to a child throwing a tantrum in the Walmart parking lot. Fortunately, in this day and age, money talks and so does the threat of unemployment, so like every other entity which diametrically opposes change on a moral level right up until that point where the threat of market irrelevance suddenly overcomes the desire to stand strong and wrong and stop denying that the house is slowly burning down around you when the wallpaper melted six months ago, Namco Bandai now loves free to play.

“Free-to-play is playing an increasingly important role so it’s very exciting to be bringing one of our most successful franchises to the free-to-play space for everyone to enjoy.”

Namco Bandai has unveiled Ridge Racer Driftopia, an upcoming free to play racer for PS3 and PC.

[Community] The Move That Saved The Old Republic

Massively has a great article covering James Ohlen’s comments at GDC about how free to play saved The Old Republic.

When free-to-play launched in November, it “blew all expectations out of the water,” said Ohlen. Subscriptions started going up again. Concurrent players on the servers went way up. Both of those statistics continue to rise. As Ohlen put it, TOR is the second biggest subscription MMORPG in the western world, it has had two million new accounts since the F2P launch, thousands of new players try out the game everyday, and TOR is one of the largest microtransaction money-makers for publisher EA.

I’m interested in finding out what EA’s largest microtransaction money-maker is, assuming The Old Republic being “just one of the largest” doesn’t put it at #1.

(Source: Massively)

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