No Monthly Fee MMORPGs

Seriphos

What other MMORPGs out there are coming out with no monthly fees? All ive heard of doing this is Guild Wars (and you better believe im getting it). Anyone got some info on more games doing this or rumors of some doing this? Thanks.

Seriphos

and im not talkin about those stupid cheap online games. IM talking about the games you buy at a store first.

higgsboson

I doubt it. At least not that I know of.

You have to know that even with monthly charge model (for supporting staff/GMs, paying bandwidth, update its contents, etc) developing MMORPG is very very risky business - MMORPG is arguably the toughest game genre to develop. If you can't gather more than say 5-7k active subscribers, the game is bound to be doomed.

Many companies have tried to penetrate this MMORPG market without any success. Most of them are gone out of business even before the release of their announced game because they simply couldn't gather people. I even suspect that many of the games you see listed in this very site will have to face similar fate.

Now think how even more risky it would be trying to develop/maintain a "Persistant World" game without charging monthly fee to its customers?

Unless you are sure of the product's success, no reasonable being will go through that path.

GUILD WARS looks like it's gonna beat hard Lin2, WoW, EQ2, and the all permutation and combination of MMORPGs announced so far.

There are an army of hardcore CRPG fanatics waiting for this game's arrival although they are not openly talking about it in fear of safe-guarding jewel from early hype.

But it seriously takes the caliber or the genius of GUILD WARS type of game design to pull this up.

 

xDeadlinex

Ryzom... I read in one of the newer PCGamer mags that it had to monthly fee... they were talkin to a Ryzom rep and he said it also.