So, even Wildstar is going f2p...

[Mugiawara]

That game was doomed from the beginning. Incredibly boring.
The only saving grace was the housing. The ONLY thing that was really, really awesome, was the housing.
When they started using CREED, you knew it was going the F2P route.

I hope XIV NEVER goes into F2P, EVER. I'd probably quit.
WS going F2P is a step in a right direction for them though.

[Eidolon]

Honestly, Wildstar failed to capture me as an early player. The gameplay just wasn't fun / there for me. And trust me - I was SUPER STOKED about the idea of playing Wildstar back at launch. Meanwhile, FFXIV Got me playing and leveling and hooked early on, and I love the end-game in this game (Contested by people.) I've heard a lot of dissenting opinions regarding wildstar which may have lead to their subscription loss and eventual F2P status.

[SummerSkye]

I played Wildstar at launch. After one month, I was bored and unsubscribed. They really hyped that game and had did well in terms of box sales. The game was not that bad, but it was obviously not ready for release. I blame NCSOFT more for this than Carbine. The guys at Carbine were kind of cocky came off like douchebags at times and this along with an unfinished game, caused a TON of people (like me) to not subscribe at all or drop out after one month or so.

I hate to see any big name MMO fail, because it hurts the genre as a whole, but the REAL issue here is perfectly clarified by Wildstar. It COULD have been a good game at launch, but development teams like Carbine have to basically sell their souls to publishers like NCSOFT. This is why Wildstar went free to play, NCSOFT would have pulled the plug, but figured this was the last ditch effort to regain some of the money they had sunk into advertising and publishing. Business has a way of getting in the way of game development when they push for an early return on their investment or demand that a game be pushed out months before it is truly ready to meet some quota or deadline for marketing.

FFXIV and WoW do not have a publisher to "pay back". They basically use their own money to fund and develop the game. This is why you will probably never see these games change the subscription model to a "ftp" system.

[Hyouretsuzan]

What I heard was that their Launch was just abysmal. They did their best to make it better and they sorta did? But they drove away too many people by the time they fixed or...try to fix whatever issue they had. And now that they are going F2P there is no going back.

[Gramul]

Wildstar was weak from the start.
And it didn't have the luxury of being able to remake itself or having a previous franchise backing it. FF14 has had a very unique situation.

[Valoiz]

NO thanks...... FFXiV servers cant prolly deal with F2P anyway, may a B2P model similiar to TSW but thats it (buy game + expansions + optional suscription + item mall) ... but no F2P.

Wildstar is the living proof: aiming to "hardcore players" and leaving no room / not taking care as u should of casuals is a bad... bad deal.

[RedShipRaider]

Well, nothing much besides me posting this to plead and beg SE not to make FF14 f2p too please. Don't make it happen ever. Just keep it sub based just like you kept FF11 sub based all these years. Don't follow the trend of the recent MMOs going f2p.

Yes, FF14 must remain Subscription based in order to discourage gold spammers, bots, and trolls! That is a brilliant idea that is sure to work perfectly!

No no, I know. It is so that we can continue getting monthly content updates like the GW2 subscription funds. Oh wait....

hrmn.... Well, at least with a monthly subscription we will get content without having to purchase it on top of that. Er....

Edit: Amusingly enough, I got tells from 3 different gold spammers and one friend request while typing up this very short post. ~.~

[Akuryu]

You are not taking into consideration the people paying a sub who dont log in all the time. Yes there are several who pay and havent logged on in a month or 2 maybe more. The only ones who actually know the numbers are SE. I have a friend who paid for the game for 7 months without logging on before he cancelled it. A FC member plays for about 2 months out of the year and keeps paying. Why? who cares, people do what they want.

While this is true, I think you'd agree such cases are a minority. There aren't 1 million+ players paying for the game but not logging in.


You can use an in-game metric like cactpot. From what I've seen, the number of tickets sold each week ranges from 2-3k on smaller servers, to 6-8k on large servers. But lets say 8k tickets sold on every server, every week (a gross over-estimation). That would be around 500k tickets a week. Now I realize not everyone plays cactpot, but you're telling me 75-80% don't play? Because if you think there are 2 million+ players, that's what you're saying. And again- I'm grossly over-estimating the number of tickets. Probably be more like 90% if we used actual numbers.

I think its far more likely the game has <1 million players, but there is nothing wrong with that. If 500k is all the game needs to survive, then good on them. Game doesn't need millions of players to be successful.

[Seig345]

Final Fantasy XI still requires a subscription, and they're ending the story rather than go F2P. WoW came out after FFXI, and that's still subscription-based too.

You can point at all these other MMOs from other companies, but more likely than not, there was a separate publisher involved as well as the dev company with those MMOs.

In the end, SE hasn't even shown a precedent of switching to F2P with FFXI, and even if they eventually did, it would be 13+ years after the game launched.

[KaedrianLiang]

op

F2p is a sign of a failing mmorpg. Wildstar is failing. NCsoft reported 400% decrease in profit from the game's initial launch and "success." It doesn't help that the lead developers of that game are resigning left to right as well. Wildstar going f2p is an attempt to revitalize the severely dwindling player base and to expose players to the new cash shop system they are implementing.

FFXIV is a hit. While not in the dozen million of subscribers. its nonetheless in the millions with China version launched. FFXIV is one of the few mmorpg's thats profitable and in a position to maintain a subscription based business model.