Well, despite a stellar rating from the MMORPG games reviewes of 8.7 Aion is headed to free to play this month in EU.

Interestingly STOR is announced as having 1.7 million active subs. and has the same rating

I think it just goes to show how online press can really get it wrong for western online gaming tastes. Feel free to discuss.

meh. to each his own. reviews arent really about how popular something is or isnt gonna be. 

Aion is a good game and deserves the review scores, it just isn't what the majority of westerners want from an MMO, hence the low numbers.

On the flip side, Aion in South Korea has nearly 3 million subscribers, WoW has substantially less (exact figures not available, just rankings).

Cultural differences, that is all.

http://www.aionfreetoplay.com/website/featuresdetails/

If you look at the link the game is truely not F2P, yes you can login to game and make a character up to level 55 which will be the cap.. 

but if you want to gather with no limitations then you have to be at least a Veteran which still has limitations on how much you can gather... and how much abyss points you get...

but if you dont want any limitations, then you pay 10euro a month to take it all away and gain abyss points 2x faster.. from mobs and kills

instead of telling you all about it here you can read it for yourself...

IMO its just a way to get the people that always wanted to try AION but never really wanted to buy it, now they can try it and maybe some of them will love the game and fall right into the trap of paying 10 bucks a month to have no limitations 

Aion has way more subs than SWTOR, just not in the West.

I don't think  Aion is going F2P out of necessity, I think they are doing it because of the potential for making more money with the F2P model.

Originally posted by PieRad

I don't think  Aion is going F2P out of necessity, I think they are doing it because of the potential for making more money with the F2P model.

 

No it is out of necessity in western market. P2P model of AIon can not survive onslaught of SWTOR, TSW in march and GW2. It is a smart move by Ncsoft.

NC Soft has been selling costume packs and whatnots for years.

The F2P model is something they seem to certinatly understand and plan to exploit.

Originally posted by Shivam

Originally posted by PieRad

I don't think  Aion is going F2P out of necessity, I think they are doing it because of the potential for making more money with the F2P model.

 

No it is out of necessity in western market. P2P model of AIon can not survive onslaught of SWTOR, TSW in march and GW2. It is a smart move by Ncsoft.

hmm, mid 2011, still having just under 3mill subs worldwide... I don't think it's out of necessity.

http://www.mmodata.net/

Originally posted by PieRad

Originally posted by Shivam

Originally posted by PieRad

I don't think  Aion is going F2P out of necessity, I think they are doing it because of the potential for making more money with the F2P model.

 

No it is out of necessity in western market. P2P model of AIon can not survive onslaught of SWTOR, TSW in march and GW2. It is a smart move by Ncsoft.

 

hmm, mid 2011, still having just under 3mill subs worldwide... I don't think it's out of necessity.

http://www.mmodata.net/

Unfortunately it doesn't break down between Eastern and Western players.  From my understanding the vast majority of those are in Korea and China, hense why the EU is going ftp.  Anybody know how many servers there are for the EU?

Originally posted by PieRad

Originally posted by Shivam

Originally posted by PieRad

I don't think  Aion is going F2P out of necessity, I think they are doing it because of the potential for making more money with the F2P model.

 

No it is out of necessity in western market. P2P model of AIon can not survive onslaught of SWTOR, TSW in march and GW2. It is a smart move by Ncsoft.

hmm, mid 2011, still having just under 3mill subs worldwide... I don't think it's out of necessity.

http://www.mmodata.net/

Once again, i am talkign about only western market not the asian who follow a very different sub model for their games. Aion isn't doing that well in EU/US and F2P move will help them get more players.

I believe the word you wanted to use was phishing, not fishing, similar in theory but very different in practice, just saying. :P

Im the target audiance for this Free to play Option. I played lineage2 back in the day and liked it. Having come off both the fail of AOC and Warhammer I dident want to buy another MMO and get let down when AION came out, so I dident... But now years after release and polish I feel It can be a good game to try. And yes if I like it I may become a subscriber...

I also feel like Free to play or B2P are the only valid options these days P2P is a dead horse..

I have been playing this beta and have to say Game Forge are doing an excellent job.

Their player relations and communication is great, and the testing community is actually pretty good.

That and the fresh servers being offered at launch are enough to convince me to play this until GW2 gets here.

Good. Hopefully it will be F2P in the US soon.

Locked, moving thread to Aion forum. It's a duplicate.