Colorful MMO Wildstar looks like it's going to go free-to-play. I could have written that headline months ago, when the game first launched, but one supposes it had to get to this point on its own. An anonymous developer recently wrote on SteamDB about
“As has oft been discussed around here, Wildstar is going to be changing its business model in August (tentatively of course, patch stuff etc) to a Hybridized Free to Play model," the developer wrote. "Now thankfully it is not going Pay to Win, I suppose you could call it 'Freemium' in a way as a lot of the stuff that the paid accounts will get is buffs to experience/rep/renown etc gain and character slots and the like, no direct power buffs or anything like that. MTX (Microtransactions) will be included moving forward as well and you will hear more about that very soon."
Subscription MMOs made sense when there was no alternative: in the early days of the genre there were fewer options for connected games, and the very concept of something like Everquest was novel enough to warrant forking over a monthly fee. But now even something like Clash of Clans resembles an MMO, at least in certain ways, and it's getting harder and harder to convince people that they should be paying $15 a month just for the pleasure of continuing a game. $15 a month for cosmetic upgrades, now that's a different story.
There is of course one glaring exception to this rule, and that's World of Warcraft, now ten years old. And while that game is still seeing a steady subscriber decline punctuated with expansion packs, it still sits high and above any other product. But when World of Warcraft finally dips into unprofitably -- which it has to, eventually -- I don't think there's going to be another subscription MMO to replace it. Wildstar tried to emulate Warcraft's same silly/serious style, but the truth is that WOW is a legacy product, and there's no guarantee it would succeed if it were released today.
