(No title does this one justice)

Two of these in a row is extremely unsettling.  I promise that the next entry won’t have anything to do with Jack Emmert, CO, STO, or F2P, so hang in there.

Jack is talking about whether or not Star Trek Online is going F2P.  I’m not buying the whole “We’re just not sure yet!” or “Oh gee it might or might not”.  Bologna! The second they’re capable of doing it, it will be done.  Companies don’t brainstorm about this stuff in an interview with the public.

This quote is hilarious though:

“We’re not sold one way or the other with Star Trek yet. If people want Star Trek to go free-to-play then get in and play Champions and help make it a great success, because that would send a strong message.

If we did Turbine’s level of success that would certainly merit the discussion!”

That’s just too much, even for Jack.  Since I deprived you of a witty title, have a video instead.

  • I feel like the last 5 years of MMO development have been an elaborate joke, and the joke is on me.

  • Well, I guess we need to convince people not to spend their money on F2P junk. Keen, kudos to your efforts. Here’s hoping it begins to pay off at some point.

  • Going F2P after planning on subscriptions … is like a giant ‘our product and marketing are complete failures’ sign.

  • Im gonna have to agree with Mala. At least I think more people are starting to “see the light” now, I just don’t think it’s enough yet.

    I think now the best we can hope for is a sever crash in the mmo industry that may wake up the developers and the producers and make them see it’s time for a change. I just want the whole mmo genre to go back to it’s roots.

  • @MMORefugee
    The only problem with going back to the roots is most gamers can’t agree on what part of the roots were good.

  • @Qpon

    Going F2P isn’t an admission that a product is garbage (well, not always), but an admission that it’s players don’t think that it’s worth $15 a month. Some of this is to do with the price itself being seen as too high and some of this to do with the restrictions of the subscription model (ie, if you’ve paid to play this month, and you aren’t allocating a maximum of your gaming time to it, you’re effectively wasting money). The subscription model simply isn’t good value for people with little free time or little interest in a game and the F2P model is a nice alternative for those people.

    Furthermore, going F2P isn’t simply a guaranteed cash injection, especially if you don’t know how to put in enough cash items for players to buy without crippling or breaking your existing game to the point that noone wants to play it, free or not.

  • Well STO fits the bill for FTP in that it’s:

    1. Crap
    2. A flop in terms of subscriber numbers.

  • What about all those people who payed for a lifetime sub? 249$? The game hasn’t even been out for a year yet 😛

  • @ Lavis: Those people are suckers and got treated as such again from Crpytic.

    I’m kind of glad some of the industry is turning into a massive F2P fest, it’s allowing for easy identification of what trash studios to avoid.

    F2P is now the acronym (because PROGIGETJASM just doesn’t have the same ring) for “players realize our game isn’t good enough to justify a subscription model, so we’re going to milk what few die-hards there are for all we can get.” I actually think Jack Emmert has some big cojones to muse like this in public, but at the end of the day a delusional idiot with big balls is still an idiot. He just re-affirms what people in the know have been saying about anything Cryptic has touched or put out in the last 6 years – it’s crap at the core. The largest reason for that is how they recruit, many are from outside the industry with little if any experience, but they have diplomas and are (to quote Homer J Simpson) so S-M-R-T!

  • Well the big clue for me with STO was that they were offering Lifetime Subs BEFORE launch – possibly before even reviews and the lifting of the NDA I think?: relying on people to make such an impulse purchase before they saw how terrible it was.
    That and the fact it was by Craptic (childish I know but I could not resist).