In a letter to the community posted to the official forums, the ArcheAge: Unchained team provides an update on their recent announcement to charge a, “low global access fee” for “new upcoming large updates.”
It begins by looking back at the business model which was quite different from ArcheAge Vanilla at the time,
“We chose to focus that business model on an up-front access cost and make use of sales of cosmetics and the ArchePass to support the game in the long run. With ArcheAge: Unchained, the game moved away from monthly patron subscriptions, APEX, labor, tradeable marketplace items, and direct sales of progression items in the marketplace. After Unchained was released, we experienced several shortcomings of the ArchePass system, which everyone is all too aware of at this point.”
The letter states that internal evaluation was conducted which concluded with the decision to remove dependencies from the ArchePass. The focus would be towards new content which will take the form of more traditional paid expansions with a one-time cost. To that end, the team writes,
“There were statements made last year at the release of Unchained addressing how future content would be delivered. At the time, these comments reflected how we theorized the future would unfold. Due to the deficiencies mentioned it was important for us to pivot to a retail expansion approach to continue sustaining the title. Still, we understand these decisions regarding new content as a commitment to the future development of Unchained and hope you understand this decision as we take this approach to continuously support ArcheAge and its loyal fan base.”
And so it goes. Sound off with your thoughts below.