I still don't get why there are apologists for this...

If a game is worth money, let it speak for itself, don't defend it like some kind of White Knight idiot on the forums, as if a major corporation needs your insignificant childish defense force to protect it from the monstrosities of people having standards.

The game SUCKS right now. Is it better than launch? A million times so -- but it still SUCKS. It is not a product worthy of a subscription fee; what's more telling is that almost no one plays it and it's FREE TO PLAY. Their financial issues are of their own doing and we should not have to bear the burden of their blindingly obvious mistakes.

A year of free game time on a shitty game is not a good deal when you spent $50-$80USD expecting a product of FFXI quality or better. There are several free-to-play games out and coming out that are changing the face of MMO gaming, while Square thinks they'll survive with a subscription plan in this day and age? People aren't even sure if The Old Republic will survive with its subscription fee. Free-to-play is becoming the way to go, it's extremely profitable and it keeps games lively for far longer.

The notion that you need subscriptions to succeed with your MMO is a fallacy that needs to die, and everyone defending this needs to get some goddamn perspective here in the real world. This idea is hugely unpopular, Yoshi-P acknowledged that in the goddamn post. Which means he's obviously having his hand forced.


That said... This is all just a distraction, I think.

But I don't think this has anything to do with generating revenue off of sub fees. I think it has to do with getting thousands of non-revenue generating players off of servers, lowering the player count immensely as they work on a product we can't really provide feedback for. (2.0)

The money they generate for fees will be infinitesimal. The money they save by creating that barrier, however, will be significant.

It's not a bad plan, but it has nothing to do with them needing money badly enough to rely on a few thousand subscribers (If they even get THAT many.) and more to do with them saving as much money as possible so that the game isn't hemmoraghing money until it gets its true release in 2012, which I greatly anticipate. (Honestly, that concept screenshot made me physically excited! (No, not like that. Well, maybe.) So here's hoping that it's accurate!)