I tought the Warhammer MMO wasnt going well in population. Still, look at what you just said. You mentioned 2 games. Only 2 games there are among the few exceptions to the rule that MMOs have to go F2P to survive. I can show you way more MMOs that were P2P and went F2P than just WOW, Warhammer, UO and Rift.

The exceptions just prove the existence of a rule.

Its impossible to deny that the MMO market has change a LOT in the recent years. A few years ago almost every MMO in the market was P2P. We had lots of them. And they did well enough to sustain themselves. Only a few of those survived, and most achieved this by going the F2P route. Now there are 4 or 5 paid MMOs that still survive, while there are hundreds of F2P MMOs out there.

Also, free MMOs used to be terrible in the past. But now there are loads of great AAA MMOs that are F2P.

I'm curious about the game, but I'm not sure if I'm curious enough to pay a sub for it. GW2 beta weekend event is up this week as well so I probably won't play it anytime soon.

WAR is basically dead, everyone has been taken off of it save a skeleton crew and there's hardly any servers left (actually I'd be shocked if there were more than 2).

Ultima Online has been going for decades, they don't have a big fat pile of development costs they have to cover. If they did you'd probably see them keel over like the rest.

Neither is recent. UO is over a decade old while Warhammer dates back to 2007ish and is actually quite dead (It was mostly dead six months after release in fact). The only recent MMO to make it was RIFT and, as it has been implied, it is STILL quite young so it could go F2P at some point.

RIFT's client is basically "free" now too, it's on sale all the time for 5 USD and if you attend a trade show they hand out codes that allow you to download it for free (and play for a month) like candy. I think I have 2 or 3 from last PAX.

They've also been releasing free content like mad, I gather, from speaking with the players.

Yeah, that's why I like RIFT actually. I don't mind paying up to $15 for the client that includes a month of game time anyway (And I got my RIFT account for about that on a sale), while the devs do seem to listen to the community. They know they don't have a huge share of the market, yet they also know they have established a following which is what matters most. They seem to know what they're doing mostly, unlike with other games *cough* WAR, FFIV, SWTOR *cough* where devs stick to plans the customers vocally hate thinking they'll love them once they're live.

You're saying pretty much something I've only heard from players of 2 MMOs: RIFT and EQ2 (after their disastrous initial launch). They do seem to show up at trade shows and advocate and engage with their fans, something I've never seen Blizzard do in fact (NCSoft, Turbine, and several other big MMO names are there, though).

Good on them, I say, but to me they're the exception, not the rule. For every RIFT that carves out a teeny niche we've got APBs, Final Fantasy whatevers, and other flashes in the pan or DOAs.

Damn, am i the only one that actually likes APB? I mean, it certainly doesnt have enough content for a P2P, since its PVP only and there are no quests or anything (there are just challenges, but not actually quests), but for a F2P game its quite awesome. Its an unique game in the market that has its own charm. I think of it as some kind of GTA MMO. Playing it especially with friends and using voice chat is really, really fun. And seeing so many people on a single server while youre doing missions is something i still havent seen in other shooting MMOs (except for Planetside).

Its truly an MMO, not some BS like those F2P shooters that call themselves MMOs but in the end you have to join a server limited to 16 people.

There is no rule. It's a fact that P2P MMOs exist (both new and old) and IMO they will always exist. There are still enough people (like me) who prefer to pay once and not be bothered with in-game ads and content they might miss if they won't pay.

It failing or succeeding doesn't seem to necessarily be a metric of how "good" it may or may not be. The fact is it financially imploded on release and had to be rescued from the garbage bin, retooled, and re-released as F2P by a separate company. We're talking about the merits of the financial model of pay for the box and sub MMO, not really the quality. There's an interesting discussion about quality to be had, for sure, but that's not to what I was referring.