Monthly subscribers will find out there is no justification for paying once they've bought the box and paid for a couple of months. Heck, monthly subscribers might not even pay any subscription fees at all if they picked up a box that includes an extra 60 days of playtime -- the box price covers 90 days in total before a subscription needs to be paid.

In 90 days, STO is pretty much game over.

STO is almost F2P at the moment considering what you can get for just the box price.

I think STO will eventually turn completely to F2P and a model similair to DDO.

F2P would be the smart choice for STO.

I don't think the game will go under any time soon.  Looks at the crap SOE pulled with SWG and it's still running.   How long did Hellgate London last?  Didn't they shut it down as soon as the numbers of months money wise equaled what lifers paid?

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Originally posted by JerYnkFan
I don't think the game will go under any time soon.  Looks at the crap SOE pulled with SWG and it's still running.   How long did Hellgate London last?  Didn't they shut it down as soon as the numbers of months money wise equaled what lifers paid?

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I was just going to mention SWG, but thank you for putting that up there. I find it pretty amusing how everyone here bashes STO and Cryptic, like they have EVERY other game. I guess AoC must have gotten too boring since they announced the expansion and proved all of you wrong lol. They did the same thing to SWG and got shot down when that game decided it wasn't ready to die yet. Might as well give up....STO won't be going anywhere for a long time now, no matter how many bad words you throw at it.

Yep, just haters, STO doesn't deserve any of the panning it's received on every major game site, magazine, official boards and 3rd party boards like this one. It's all just a huge conspiracy by haters and Blizzard right?

All these people from around the world are just throwing bad words at it because the game is so good.

Let's wait to see what the council tells us is truth.

This thread is silly, Champions will be shutdown long before STO, and CO is being supported more strongly than ever right now.

Originally posted by championsFan

This thread is silly, Champions will be shutdown long before STO, and CO is being supported more strongly than ever right now.

That might not be true Champion. CBS owns the IP and if subs drop enough CBS might step in to reclaim their reputation.

Originally posted by Betaboo

That might not be true Champion. CBS owns the IP and if subs drop enough CBS might step in to reclaim their reputation.

Ouch, I guess you could be right.   Even as a fan of both ST and Cryptic, I couldn't get into STO, so I agree the game needs a lot of work, but I never considered that CBS might pull the plug.   It is surprising that CBS agreed to a small potatoes MMO in the first place, not that I would expect them to do TOR, but I am surprised they let the game be made in such a short time on such a low budget.  If CBS allowed for those production parameters, it doesn't seem like their reputation was foremost in mind, just the cash, but who knows how suits think.

Originally posted by championsFan

Originally posted by Betaboo

That might not be true Champion. CBS owns the IP and if subs drop enough CBS might step in to reclaim their reputation.

 

Ouch, I guess you could be right.   Even as a fan of both ST and Cryptic, I couldn't get into STO, so I agree the game needs a lot of work, but I never considered that CBS might pull the plug.   It is surprising that CBS agreed to a small potatoes MMO in the first place, not that I would expect them to do TOR, but I am surprised they let the game be made in such a short time on such a low budget.  If CBS allowed for those production parameters, it doesn't seem like their reputation was foremost in mind, just the cash, but who knows how suits think.

Yeah that mystifies me to. I dont think it will happen i think they will go F2P before they got that close but it could happen.

well their watching the threds on the mmorpg game sites for gamers complaints and comments as well.

so they just might pull the plug on it and end it all before a year is up.

cause all they wanted any way was the almight Dollar $ !

and plus the sto mmo' is not what every startrek fan exspected of it to be there was nothing good realy in the game to keep gamers to want to play.

even the gamers who paid a years subs for it are now also canceling and getting done with the game.

the gms also nerfed the fed side and their skills and disabled some of their skills cause klingon gamers cried duren pvp on beta.

I lost interest in the game when they nerfed the fed side more and more of their skills.

which was when the new patch came out for first season.

so I complained to the gms and on the game forums too, and nothing happened I also canceled my monthly sub as well.

its not worth the time or money to play this game when the gms ruined it for the biggest fan base out of startrek !

I rather take the $14.95 sub fee I was paying and go to a bar and have a few drinks with my friends and family and dance with a few hot girls, then pay for a nerfed game like sto.

I can play unbalanced games online for free so why would i want to keep paying for one ?

I would not want to keep paying for one when all the gms do is ruin my side of the games fun by nerfing the feds side and their skills for both pvp and pve.

plus there was no warp drive skill in the game to use like in startrek fleet command 3 !

I consider that old game more fun then this new mmorpg startrek online game.

at least on that game no gms nerfed the fed side or their skills or disabled any !

I like a game thats more even and balanced then unbalanced !!!!

when its unbalanced and I tried both sides and i see it ! .... I complain then I leave cause I know they wont fix it cause the gms are to lazzy to do so just like on the first server for old archlord ..

so whats the use of keep playing a game thats no good and no fun any more and only 1 sided ?

there is no logic or common sense to it. !

so i canceled my sub and left I wont even bother to go back even if they paid me $1,000,000.00 USD !!!

I rather go play ace online at least that F2P mmorpg flight game is balanced and free and more fun to play even the pvp loads more fun and thats a older game.

I got over 100 friends that was waiting for sto and had only few of use buy the game and try it out first to test it before the rest of our online game clan did so they wouldnt waste their money.

and ever sence our reveiws and the reveiws they saw on here and other sites.

they all refused to buy the game and try it and pay for it.

its not even worth our game clan time to play it if it became F2P !!!

I don't think STO will die or go F2P any time soon. MMOs have a habit of hanging around even with a tiny subs base, it doesn't take much to keep the servers running and maintain what's there already. Cryptic will need another source of income to support STO though.

As for the IP being picked up by another developer, that never seems to happen. Even Bioware have set SW millenia before the films to avoid the same timeline as SWG (unfortunately). I can't see anyone picking up ST in the same time period as Cryptic, which is a real shame.

I think that probably because of the IP alone that this game will hang around for a while. As it has been mentioned already MMO's regardless of how good they are have a tendency to stick around for quite some time. Just look at what happened to SWG after everything it's gone through, it's still around. That could be just because of it's IP or because they made it more WoW like and have been able to bleed off a few tired of WoW people but it is still there.

Perhaps a better question then would be how long do you think it will be before they cease development on the game, just leaving it to run with a minimum of staff keeping the servers going.

Originally posted by Spiderpope

Perhaps a better question then would be how long do you think it will be before they cease development on the game, just leaving it to run with a minimum of staff keeping the servers going.

 Well they've said they've got 7 people doing content which seems pretty low numbers given the amount of material in the star trek IP.  I guess if all they're doing is writing quest text and recycling art assets ala nebula exploration mission then it's probably adequate.

When they announced what their goals were for sub numbers I thought they said something along the lines that lifetime they were looking for was in the neighborhood of two years. 

As far as technical support, Im not sure they have any. The supposrt forums are a joke, just a bunch of players trying to trouble shoot each others problems. I think the last dev post in there was from soon after launch when everyone had the disconnect issue (which still exists with no explanation or resolution). The workaround they gave didn't work and there's been no follow up on the people that are STILL having the same issue as launch.  I think at one point ther were blamining people's ISP's which seems like a cop out to me. Let's see my ISP works with every other piece of online software I've ever used except STO. So the problem is with my ISP?  Give me a break.

This is my Official "I don't give a shit" reply.

And yet, I cared enough to reply to this thread... Man, that's just WACKY, ain't it?!

Not going to happen for a very long time. As SWG has proven, a game can be a complete piece of shit yet still hang around because of IP recognition. Though I have to admit, even with the sory state that galaxies is in, it looks wonderous in comparison to STO because you at least have player housing,crafting and vast worlds to explore. Who knows? Maybe cryptic really will add a housing type elemant  along with expansion of the planets. But if the monthly subs continue to drop, they'll simply keep it as is and just make it a F2P game for as long as they can.

Originally posted by TheHellfire

I say in about 3-4 months they will have run out of the operating capital they received from lifetimers. Anyone in the know has seen the subs drop off like rats fleeing a sinking ship, so they dont have any money coming in off of subs. Discuss.

 I say you have no clue what you're talking about, I don't know of any information regarding lifetime subs nor monthly subs and I can attest to seeing games much worse than this lasting much longer than the eight months you seem to be saying this game will last.  And while you seem to try to point to logical reasoning for your ideas you ignore fact, I can't think of a legit mmo that released a playable game that didn't last a year and many games I can think of delivered far less than Cryptic did with STO.  This posting is as mundane as the rest of the threads trying to predict the demise of a game.

Originally posted by ktanner3

Not going to happen for a very long time. As SWG has proven, a game can be a complete piece of shit yet still hang around because of IP recognition. Though I have to admit, even with the sory state that galaxies is in, it looks wonderous in comparison to STO because you at least have player housing,crafting and vast worlds to explore. Who knows? Maybe cryptic really will add a housing type elemant  along with expansion of the planets. But if the monthly subs continue to drop, they'll simply keep it as is and just make it a F2P game for as long as they can.

I concur

Originally posted by JerYnkFan

I don't think the game will go under any time soon.  Looks at the crap SOE pulled with SWG and it's still running.   How long did Hellgate London last?  Didn't they shut it down as soon as the numbers of months money wise equaled what lifers paid?

SWG had the luxury of being subsidized with the $OE Station Access Pass, in which it is part of the Station Pass game line up. If it were a stand alone game, it would have had the plug pulled a long time ago.

Originally posted by championsFan

Originally posted by Betaboo

That might not be true Champion. CBS owns the IP and if subs drop enough CBS might step in to reclaim their reputation.

 

Ouch, I guess you could be right.   Even as a fan of both ST and Cryptic, I couldn't get into STO, so I agree the game needs a lot of work, but I never considered that CBS might pull the plug.   It is surprising that CBS agreed to a small potatoes MMO in the first place, not that I would expect them to do TOR, but I am surprised they let the game be made in such a short time on such a low budget.  If CBS allowed for those production parameters, it doesn't seem like their reputation was foremost in mind, just the cash, but who knows how suits think.

Just a guess but CBS wanted a Trek MMO ASAP to take advantage of the new life Trek 90210 breathed into the franchise.  I don't know what their arrangement is with Atari/Cryptic is regarding the licensing fee, but I'm thinking as long as CBS is getting paid, they really don't give a crap that this "MMO" is a laughingstock.  Zinc or Emmert said they could "get by" on 50k subs (which they'll be seeing pretty soon IMO), so it doesn't look like there's a sub number threshhold where CBS pulls the plug, unless it is even lower than 50k.

I think this game is an all-time fail, but even I don't think it's going away anytime soon unless Atari files for bankruptcy.  CO probably doesn't even have 50k subs, and they haven't gone F2P or closed that down yet...

Originally posted by TheHellfire

I say in about 3-4 months they will have run out of the operating capital they received from lifetimers. Anyone in the know has seen the subs drop off like rats fleeing a sinking ship, so they dont have any money coming in off of subs. Discuss.

 I must not be "in the know," since I have yet to see a single verifiable source for actual subscription numbers released by Cryptic or Atari.  (Grossly misquoted milestones from developer interviews especially excepted.)

Where exactly are you seeing sub numbers upon which to base any speculation?  Links and/or references to a reliable source, please.