So many companies, including Funcom, have done well by F2P (AoC grabbed 300,000 new players and doubled revenue after the conversion a year ago, and what happened with LOTRO is pretty well documented.).

I know probably 2 dozen people who have bought Lifetime subs for TSW, and we all know pretty much how that scenario is going to play out. $199/14.99 = 13 months 8 days and some hours.

August 11th, 2013 is when TSW will “pay off” the lifetimers, and that’s my (and my Lifetimer friends) projected F2P Launch Date.

I’m OK with this.
I missed out on the LOTRO Lifetime Sub, and have been kicking myself for 5 years now – doubly so once I looked up Turbine in my Mint account and realized I’ve spent $400 with them in the way of subscription fees, expansion packs and “extra” Turbine Points in times when I wanted something but the 500/mo wasn’t cutting it.

AoC is 4 years old now. LOTRO is 5.
I’ll get much more than my $200 worth out of TSW, I’m sure. =)

To me it looks more like a way to give the current player an option to log into SWTOR without a sub before they completely return to WoW. I don’t think it’s a move to grow the game, it looks more like a desperate move to not be crushed by MOP.

I think people have generally enjoyed the class stories and many of the planet stories and story-based instances, but as you say those are not the new content they’ve announced. (Too expensive to produce given how quickly players rip through them maybe? I don’t know. But I know it’s what people would pay for.)

I think though that you are on the mark with companies needing to design sub based games for a realistic player base. The players are out there who would happily pay subs for games tailored to what they want, and they don’t all want a free for all EVE-like sandbox. But there’s the basis of a profitable market there.

That is what kinda throws me. Where do they expect the money to come from if they give away the best stuff for free? /boggle

I find it very sad that many an MMO could live quite happily with 500k subscribers (or less!) but in this case the model is getting binned purely because the company wanted more. :S

I would have gladly paid full price (well, maybe waited for a reasonable sale price, to be honest) for that as a kind of KOTOR 3 type of game with optional multiplayer online features, which is pretty much how the game turned out by all accounts. Now I’m not even sure I’d spend $15 for it, depending on just how limited the F2P side of things are. They’ve dumped a good portion of the devs, so you have to wonder if the game has any real content coming down the road. If their hybrid option is as bad as the SOE games, then no thanks. Gotta give credit to NCSoft (as much as I hate to based on how they treated those of us playing Aion), at least their Truly Free type of F2P, aside from a stupid name, is the best conversion of P2P to F2P by far.

Here’s a corollary to that idea: if you already have those characters out there, you get to keep them if you go F2P, but you can’t level them.

If the answer is yes, then subscribe. If the answer is no, then don’t Considering that the raiding portion is arguably the weakest part of the game, this seems like it would push current subscribers to actually stop paying.

In the end though, you’ll be getting KOTOR3 with multiplayer for 15$. That is an awesome deal.

As for WoW going F2P, their content management process is so incredibly poor, they couldn’t go down that route if they wanted to. Adding new stuff to the “store” every 6-8 months would bankrupt any F2P game today. For those counting, the delay between last content patch and MoP will be 10 months – so people have paid 150$ for 1 patch. Rift’s process could sustain it, if need be.