Posts tagged subscription 
Hyperspace Beacon: Does SWTOR's F2P work?
Those of us who have played through the middle planets of Star Wars: The Old Republic know that chapter two is rather blasé. And as far as the free-to-play experiment is concerned, I really don't have anything new to report this week, or at least, not enough to fill a whole column. I will ...
The Daily Grind: Should World of Warcraft go free-to-play?
There's only one Western subscription MMO that can stand to lose 1.3 million subs in three months and shrug it off: World of Warcraft. But shrug it off doesn't appear to what Activision-Blizzard is doing. During the investor call that revealed the heavy sub losses, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick ...
World of Warcraft loses over a million subs since February, now down to 8.3 million
The world's most popular MMO has gotten a bit less popular in the last few months, it would seem. During today's quarterly investor call, Activision-Blizzard announced that World of Warcraft's subscriber numbers are down to 8.3 million. While that's still nothing to thumb your nose at, it does ...
The Daily Grind: Are subscriptions worth it any more?
It's amazing to me how quickly the MMO industry (at least in the west) went from being dominated by a subscription model to adopting free-to-play nearly across the board. In just a couple of short years, the hold that subs had over us was broken and players were free to sample way more MMOs for ...
Darkfall Unholy Wars hits Steam as Valve introduces new subscription service
In a press release issued on Steam today, Valve announced that it now offers something of particular value to MMOs on the platform: subscription plans. Gamers can now subscribe to MMOs on Steam and manage recurring payments to those games using Steam itself. With Subscription Plans, Steam ...
Mark Jacobs on the coming F2P apocalypse
Mark Jacobs isn't jumping on the free-to-play bandwagon like most of his MMO-making contemporaries. The Camelot Unchained developer and former Dark Age of Camelot head honcho predicted a F2P "apocalypse" in a recent interview with VG247. You know, free-to-play is just another model, and just ...
Scott Hartsman pontificates on the future of MMOs
We hadn't heard a peep from Scott Hartsman after he left his position as executive producer at Trion Worlds... until now. The former EverQuest II and RIFT lead spoke with Forbes not about where he's going but about where he thinks the MMO industry is heading. Hartsman sees the increased cost ...
EVE Online hits 500,000 subscribers, heads into second decade
Most modern MMOs launch to an initial flurry of sales followed by a steady decline in player activity, but sci-fi MMO EVE Online has lived life in reverse. The game initially failed to secure a large number of launch sales but has since grown organically into one of the most successful ...
Free for All: Wakfu's bizarre first year
Wakfu is not what many would consider a standard MMORPG. Its developer, Ankama, has never pushed out normal products. After all, this is a French company we're talking about. That's right, as in France, the same place that brought us amazing (but unusual) creations like Ryzom's plant-planet and ...
WAKFU welcomes the Masqueraider
First of all, the Masqueraider may be either the absolute best or worst class name ever devised depending on your tolerance for puns. Second of all, it's WAKFU's 15th class. Third of all, it's here, so go check it out. The Masqueraider switches between roles using a clever mask system. While ...
