It seems just about every major subscription based MMORPG that has been released over the last 3-4 years has either gone the road of free-to-play or has announced they will soon. Then there’s Warhammer Online, who’s sticking stubbornly to the subscription based business model regardless of how well it’s actually working for them.
Even though Warhammer Online had a stellar launch, it has since faded from the fore-front of gamers minds and has been struggling over the last year or two. Checking the Warhammer Online forums, it seems they are down to just 9 servers world-wide, which gives us some indication of just how far the WAR population has dropped.
So what gives? Why hasn’t Mythic made the switch or at least announce plans to go free-to-play yet? I’ve wanted to get back into Warhammer Online a few times over the last year to check out new content, but haven’t because quite frankly I don’t want to pay for a time card. Paying a monthly subscription is fine if I actually planned to dedicate myself to the game again, but to just check out a new patch or update, it’s not worth the effort.
I’m sure Mythic has had some serious discussions about going F2P internally, but it’s just surprising they still have’t announced anything while the rest of the industry has been making the transition. Wake up and just go Free2Play already Mythic, I want to try out some of your new content :)
I thought that WAR was free-to-play already. Is that only for the first 10/20 levels?
They have an unlimited free trial, but its restricted to the first tier area.
Well if Dark Age of Camelot (their other title) is an example, this game will never go F2P.
If you look at free to play games such as dnd onlinea and champions online etc you will see from the moment it went free the amount of players increased greatly.
If warhammer online went free to play it would come back a live, all thats needed is a overall of all areas and features.
look at runes of magic online thats got 5million players and never has cost money inorder to play.
DAOC is old so there’s no reason to change it to F2P. Even if they did, im sure the population would barely rise. However for Warhammer Online, I think they could revitalize it.
WarHammer being largely based around PvP (never did anything other than PvP when I played)could really turn its self around by going to F2P. The game demands a lot of people to be playing to deliver on the experience it is selling. What better way than free 2 play.
Every time someone quits due to low population (which is exactly why I did), that’s one less active person which makes the problem worse. That causes another person to quit….cycle repeats and grows.
I gave it another try 2 months ago and only during rare peak times was even a group of 20+ even doing anything. 20 hours of the day it was simply tiny groups taking things with zero resistance from the Order. How boring is that ?
Who’s going to pay $15 for a “large scale PvP game” when there’s almost never any going on ?
At it’s core I like the game, but Mythic/EA won’t go f2p and thus, it’s a dead game. They should just pull the plugs on the servers now.
they should make it f2p, as the war fans get really fed-up EA’s stupidity towards not switching the game to f2p, might cause the EA to lose fans and stuff…