The Elder Scrolls Online recently did away with its six-month subscription option, a change that the MMO’s developer and publisher have had very little to say about publicly so far. In the absence of any solid justification about its removal, fans are guessing this mean it’s going free-to-play in the near future.
The timing is what set people off here. Back in May, Elder Scrolls Online publisher Bethesda Softworks announced that the console versions of the game would be delayed by about six months. After months of silence, they came back earlier this month to say that while there still wasn’t an “official launch date,” prospective players could “expect to see lots of news about our console versions in early 2015.”
Nixing the half-year subscription option therefore eliminates any chance of newly-minted subscribers having the game suddenly change on them when they’re still in their six month window. Or so the reasoning goes.
It’s not just a matter of timing, of course. Rather, it’s that the timing seems awfully convenient given how…inauspiciously The Elder Scrolls Online debuted on PC this year. The MMO was met with tepid reviews when it first came out, and it’s been plagued with systemic bugs and bots. It’s difficult to get an exact read on how many people have actually been playing the game, but the consensus among critics and longtime Elder Scrolls fans is that the MMO hasn’t been the next great act to truly follow in the footsteps of the legendary single-player RPGs like Skyrim.
Many observers were surprised that The Elder Scrolls Online was going to charge a monthly fee in the first place, given that doing so bucked overarching economic trends that have pushed more established MMOs away from that business model. BioWare’s Star Wars MMO, The Old Republic, switched to free-to-play two years ago — less than a year after it was originally released. Even World of Warcraft, the silverback gorilla of the genre and the closest competitor to ESO in terms of high-fantasy MMORPGs made by top developers, has played around with free-to-play offerings from time to time. And that game has had plenty of its own problems holding onto subscribers since its 2010 high of 12 million — at least until Warlords of Draenor made the needle jump back up again.
(Also, just as a side note, when we polled our readers about whether or not they’d pay $US15 a month for The Elder Scrolls Online in August 2013 they overwhelmingly said “No.”)
Bethesda and ESO developer ZeniMax Online Studios have remained relatively quiet about the decision to ditch 180-day subscriptions. Players first began to speculate about it on the game’s official forums after an administrator on the French-language forum stated that six-month subscriptions were done away with because they’d found players “preferred” the 30 and 90-day options. A relevant page on the game’s official site now only lists prices for those two subscriptions. It was last updated this morning.
I’ve reached out to Bethesda for comment, and will update this story if I hear back.
via Joystiq
To contact the author of this post, write to yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq.
Comments
9 responses to “A New Sign That The Elder Scrolls Online Might Go Free-To-Play”
I’d pick this up again if it went free to play or keeps it buy to play formula. I find that MMO’s that are free to play but still offer good incentives to subscribe (Tera) do quite well.
If ESO loses its mandatory subscription (and doesn’t add a range of stupid limitations to non-subscribers) then I’ll happily purchase the game. I really liked my time with it in the closed and open betas but not enough to justify a subscription.
I was part of the various betas and had a month of subscription, which I let lapse. Think introducing MMO into it has ruined the immersion and I lost interest pretty quick.
One example was doing a mission where I had to sneak into a house and take something. The area was filled with players running around doing the same mission and the guards/enemy remain oblivious to the crowd around them.
I don’t think TESO was a very good idea at all for exactly the reason you described. When people cried out for multiplayer Skyrim, I’m pretty sure they were thinking of ‘2-4-player co-op’ or something. Not ‘hundreds of random fuckwits’ as per MMO.
TESO has actually recovered surprisingly well from it’s awful launch. I don’t expect it to go F2P any time soon.
If they want to break into the console market, they need to ditch suscription in my opinion. There are enough issues and costs around with having to deal with a game suscription that you may or may not be playing.
Especially since the platform-holders will be lobbying for online play to require XBL Gold/PS+, effectively double-dipping.
I really enjoyed ESO and played it a lot, but chose to cancel my subscription in November due to a huge backlog of games I needed to play/complete.
I look forward to playing again, but it won’t be for at least two or three months.
All I want is co-op slaying in the next elder scrolls game