Masthead Studios has announced that the monthly subscription fee for Earthrise will be removed beginning December 1st. Players who have already purchased the game will play Earthrise subscription-free until the free to play transition is complete in early 2012.

From the press release:

"We decided to let all our players [experience] unlimited gaming until we all are satisfied with the experience in our game. At the moment Earthrise features some of the best visuals, content, and gameplay of all sci-fi MMOs on the market. However it is missing polish and has annoyances that spoil the fun in the game. We are learning from our experience and that is why we will remove monthly charges until we bring the game to a quality state that is satisfactory to us and our players”, said Atanas Atanasov, CEO of Masthead Studios.

Meanwhile Earthrise will be used as a test for the new free-2-play model and Masthead will limit the creation of new accounts. Invitations will be sent to selected new players and a new sign-up option will be provided. All existing subscribers will receive a number of invitations to bring their friends in the game.

Find out more about Earthrise.

We all know that will happen just after Closed Beta / final release. Played like 1,5 month with subs...nothing really has changed since then. F2p is good and only move they could take at this point. Hope it will not be closed just after f2p.

This game is so bad that changing business model will not matter imo.

Nice artworks, nice concepts, but game itself is horrible. From really awful animations to content and gameplay itself.

This is what I don't like. MMO devs releasing their unfinished games and charging players for beta access. Only to come out and say that they'll make it F2P, because they failed to somehow capture their market.

Why can't these games just straight up come out F2P, instead of waiting until most of their playerbase desert their game.

So please fix the lag and the poorly made gfx enginen that cant handle the game. 

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Originally posted by fenistil
This game is so bad that changing business model will not matter imo.
 
Nice artworks, nice concepts, but game itself is horrible. From really awful animations to content and gameplay itself.

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polish they say huh?

last time i played they got waaaay more important issues than "polish"

they should finally optimize their game engine instead of trying to stuff even more crap into it like the territory wars back a while lol.

you cant add more stuff/polish to a game if your basics are broken as hell

Good news.  I've not tried the game yet, so I'll probably give it a shot now.

I almost won't try any new sub game, cause it might go f2p in a couple months after release anyway lol!

Here's the thing all these games going F2P thinking it will plump out their game with a population but one must point out that the game needs to be of some standard for people even bothering to try now. I mean there are a lot of games now on the F2P menu and quite frankly darling I am not going to simply settle . I am not going to try everything out there I am only going to go get the quality games. I mean at one time when you were F2P shopping you were limited in choices but not any more and even if they are only trying to get people to test their game they may find that simply going F2P is not enough.

Gotta love how silly developers these days are. I mean sure you can be proud about your game. But to say "At the moment Earthrise features some of the best visuals, content, and gameplay of all sci-fi MMOs on the market"  while 1. There aren't many SciFi MMO's and 2. To say you have the best content and gameplay while your game is hardly playble is just lieing to yourself. THere are only a few SciFi mmo's and those are much better then this game.

Anarchy Online > Earthrise.

funny, i was not surprised to hear this at all

i guess this the 1st day i joined the Close Beta

and people was saying no F2P, lol on them