The Free MMORPG market is undoubtedly growing at an incredible pace and there are easily over 100 free MMORPGs on the market today. For a free MMORPG, games can no longer be “good for a free game”, but rather genuinely good for the game to succeed. Back when free to play (F2P) games were relatively new, games could be mediocre and still be wildly successful, as they were free. When F2P games first began to come out, players excused developers for slow bug fixes and unbalanced game play, as they weren’t paying anything for the game and there weren’t any other free MMORPGs to play.
Today, for a free MMORPG to be successful it has to be nearly flawless. With intense competition from other established games and new MMORPGs coming out each and every day, developers have to constantly fix bugs and add new content to keep players hooked. If a developer is too slow to fix an exploit or inconsistent with content updates, odds are players will jump ship and shift to a new game. Searching for “Free online MMORPG” on Google today yields over 600,000 results, making alternatives to a bad MMORPG abundant
The massive amounts of F2P MMORPGs on the market today are also pressuring pay to play (P2P) games to either offer more content to their players or make their game free. Games like Archlord, Anarchy Online, Shadowbane, Rf Online and so many other games became free to play from pay to play. Rose Online, a long time pay to play MMORPG, has recently announced plans to drop their subscription based business model and make the game free to play. The games that remain pay to play have an enormous amount of pressure on them, as if they don’t constantly update their game, players may quit to play one of the many free MMORPGs out there.
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A friend of mine was telling me about Aion Online, and all I could say is that it would probably be free to play soon after it’s inception as the graphics once you get past the bloom looks similar to Perfect World. I have a feeling they won’t keep the player base they think since there are so many more F2P games that already offer flight and such that might be better.