Star Trek Online F2P This Year

The unstoppable march of free-to-playification continues! Cryptic’s Star Trek Online – which is published by Perfect World – will be free-to-play by the end of the year. According to this report on Perfect World’s exciting Q2 earnings call, chief financial officer Kelvin Lau told investors: “Cryptic is working on the free-to-play model for Star Trek Online. This is going to be launched by the end of this year.”
This feels like a transitional period to me. All these MMOs that launched with subscription models reconfiguring themselves to F2P, while much better contenders – such as forthcoming Tribes-but-WoW offering Firefall – wait in the wings to prove that they can do F2P from the off. Nonetheless, I expect we’re a long, long way from this all being normalised in any fashion. What “free” actually means for these games is still very much up for definition.

Hi-Rez Boasts Of F2P Successes

Hi-Rez COO Todd Harris said of the decision to take Global Agenda free-to-play: “We have many many more people creating accounts every day, many more people playing concurrently, our revenues are higher than they ever have been before which means we can develop content and put it into the game faster than ever before,” and also: “We now have five times as many interested players every day going through that same experience knowing that it’s free to play and it’s not a demo.”

Free To Play Gaming Arrives On Steam, finally.

Valve have just announced that they will now be supporting free-to-play (F2P) games via Steam.
The first five will be Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms.

So that’s Hi Rez, Atari, Sega, Perfect World and NHN USA Inc. on board already, with very many more to follow soon

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