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Champions Online -- Free?
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Apparently so. As of 2011, Champions Online is going to a free play model, where you only pay for the 'extra goodies'.
http://www.champions-onli...gn=10262010_Free2Play_NS -- Sucrose Octanitrate. Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
The "freemium" model is catching on a lot. D&D Online and LotR Online have both gone that route and each showed a noticeable increase in revenue after the switch. Global Agenda is the same too, I think.
In each of these cases, the game was going down the tubes, so this is a decent way to recover.
This might get me to try CO again. One hopes they'll have fixed the issue that was causing the game to crash on me every five minutes or less by the time 2011 rolls around. Although given that I first ran in to the problem last Halloween and it still hadn't been fixed as of August I'm not going to hold my breath.
-- ...nless we get obsessive and start assigning Sailors of the Galileans, miscellaneous Trans-Neptunian Objects, and just about any other celestial body. ("I am Sailor 99942 Apophis! In the name of the Torino scale, there is a slight but measurable chance that I might punish you!") -- ShadowJack on RPG.net 
I just noticed that Fark.com had a link to story on this two days ago. And I love the headline they gave it:
Quote:"Our poorly-coded, buggy superhero MMO isn't making any money What should we do?" "Let people play it for free?" "Brilliant"-- Bob --------- Then the horns kicked in... ...and my shoes began to squeak.
The solution couldn't possibly have been not to yank all the developers off of the project to work on ST.
You know, it is interesting how much bad feeling still remains over something I wasn't that emotionally invested in[0]. There's a lesson somewhere in there for me as a computer and systems engineer I think. [0] The existance of character creator features I'd sorely wanted in CoH and the nice way character names were handled built up a lot of expectations for me I think. Which is why the hard crashes right out of creation hurt so much. ... Right, I'll stop complaining now. -- "Something that only time will bring you is a nice round candy box full of lock washers, metric bolts, spare studs (that maybe you left out of the engine), miscellaneous bits and pieces like starter bushings and, as they say, etc." -- John Muir, "Idiot" manual.
The huge success of D&D Online pretty much paved the way for any other MMO that needs a sudden boost in popularity to do this... and with a few notable gorillas/exceptions, that's pretty much every MMO. As more professional MMOs do this (which should have a very deleterious impact on the older crop of grindathon free MMOs), it will become harder and harder for others that don't have a sustainable momentum of huge subscription numbers or who offer something uniquely attractive to avoid doing so to prevent their subscribers from moving to another MMO which has a comparable play experience and is "free".
So WoW is fine for awhile though they'll feel the hit (especially as the game is quite old, expansion packs nonwithstanding), and something with the appeal of the Old Republic game can pursuade people to shell out money each month for at least a while, but something like, say, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes? If it still exists in two years, I'll be very surprised if it hasn't gone free-to-play. The more professional free MMOs there are, the harder it will be to get people to keep paying subscriptions. Some will survive if they can offer a unique experience and/or are unsuited to microtransaction economies (Eve Online may hold out a lot longer than most, for instance), but I very strongly suspect that very soon free MMOs will be the norm and subscription-based ones the exception. Oh, and to illustrate my point, having cancelled my COX subscrip a few months ago (mostly due to not having any time to play MMOs on a regular basis anymore, although my unenthusiasm for Going Rogue was a contributing factor), once Champions goes free I'll install it again (having tried it out on one of the free weekends; I didn't prefer it to CoX by a longshot but it was an amusing change of pace). And if COX went free (which it most certainly will) I'd go back to it, most likely at the same once a week or so I was playing it before I cancelled.
What's bugging me is that if a game isn't offering me something unique, why would I even bother playing it? What you're describing seems to operate under the assumption that most MMOs provide essentially interchangeable experiences. That's not something I'd say of even the ones I've tried and dropped.
I really hope FFXI doesn't go to such a system. I can't imagine what they could provide as incentives that wouldn't break things. -Morgan.
YMMV, of course. But I'd actually say most MMOs are in fact fairly interchangeable to most people - medieval fantasy games with elves and whatnot that have levelling, quest, PVP and raid systems that are similar in broad outline if not detail to WOW (which itself draws from older MMOs but is obviously the current standard). Champions, of course, isn't one of those - it is primarily a competitor to City of Heroes (superhero games with easy travel, colourful graphics, a bigger emphasis on storyline, which encourages many alt characters rather than just focusing on one), although it's worth mentioning that many people don't even consider them to be broadly that different from D&DOnline or WOW.
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