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TR= free?
Evasia
Member Posts: 2,827
Tabula Rasa Full Game Client (Free MMO)
But when i read this i wont be tricked by this no way i gonne give them my creditcard info omg are ncsoft stupid?
Tabula Rasa is now available to play for Free and new players can request a serial code from the game at the NCSoft support site. Former players can head also reactivate using their account management settings.
===>[ Credit card numbers will be requested, but no money willchangehands]<===LOL.
Anybody have try without credit card?
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Comments
It never even asked for a credit card for me. I just punched in the serial they gave me and was able to log in.
Tabula Rasa is now 100% free, no things to buy or nuffin, it closes on February 28, 2009
"Life is not judged by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
This is the way the game should have been released to start with.
Let me start off by saying that the Game in NOT bad. It's just not worth paying a monthly fee for. They should have made it like Guild Wars. I would not only play the game but buy the expansions for it too. The population on the game doesn't look bad. {Now that its free} Don't get me wrong, I wanted the game to work. I bought it on release and played a month past my fre month, but it just wasnt worth the $15 a month. I MIGHT even pay $5 a month but nothing more.
As for right now, I am playing it and will continue till they take it down. I hope they see its worth keeping without a Monthly fee.
The only problem with keeping it free is how do they ever make a profit off the game?
To make it like GuildWars they need to sell over 3 million copies at a profit to NCSoft of $30 per copy sold in order to get back to even on initial costs and this first years losses. TRs population at the time of the game being announced cancelled was 28k, that is not ever going to make a game that cost this much a profitable one. They would have to stop all new development and just allow a couple people to maintain servers to have any chance of making any money monthly and still never recoup the costs they have so far incurred.
In theory it sounds simple to just go the Guildwars route, but the truth is Guildwars is a one of a kind that came along at the right time. Thinking any game can simply use the same method and become a huge success is folly.
I disagree. If announced as a Free to play game, most people would not have cancelled. people beta test would tell you, Good game just not worth $15 a month. slap a $60 pricetag on the game and I think people would have bought it just because it is a Richard Garriott game {Even though I hated UO} but it isn't a sure thing. Then again it couldn't do worse than it did all ready. Failing in such a Short time. It's not like it was a bug ridden game like conan. It was stable.
You are under the illusion that all it takes is making it free to play and then it makes money. That is not true. They either need advertising in game or a cash shop. No one is paying $60 for this game as it is. It has no end game, it has no real high level content. Developing a cash shop would cost them more money.
People did not buy it when RG was actually involved with the game. People do not cancel a free to play, GW even if you stop playing you do not really cancel since you already paid all the costs you ever have to.
TR would not work that way and make a profit. They spent way too much to get this game to live to ever make a profit by going to free to play. Basic math tells you they are 90 million dollars in the hole right now.
Your thinking is flawed, no one flocked to this game like RG thought and even had it been Free to play from the start would never have turned a profit. It cost too much to get to the point of going live.
I do see your Point, I just don't agree. People pay $60 for games everyday. TB is a good game, Not a Great game. Like GW I think it could have been just as sucsessfull. But agree or disagree, we will never find out and thats too bad.
I for one would go out and buy TR right now if they said it would be going the route of Guild Wars. But like others said, I don't think it's worth $15. I don't expect it to fly off the shelves if they decided to keep it around, but I believe it would certainly allow them to recoup a bit more of their investment.
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You can't win - if you strike me down I shall respawn more powerful than you could possibly imagine!
The problem is some stores have either put TR in the bargain bin or removed them competely. In order to go the GW route the game would need to be shipped again and the price incresed back to normal release price. Right now you can get the CE for like 5 bucks in some places.
Maybe had TR gone the GW route from the beginning it might have had a chance, but to do so now with the game in the state it is in, it would never work. GW was a complete game the day it was released, TR still is not to that point. GW had an enjoyable PVP system to be endgame at release, TR had a poorly designed and boring PVP system and to me it still lacks any reason to engage in.
In order to recoup investment they need to make more than they sell and right now that would mean convincing retailers to take on the game again, the boxes in stores are paid for, NCSoft gets nothing unless they ship more and that is simply never going to happen.
The business end of making anything back off of this seems to evade many. In order to make money on this they would need to spend more and then have a miracle happen. Nothing they have done in the last year leads me to believe they could pull it off. This game lost 10k subscritions in the three months before they announced the closing of the game. That alone makes it hard to believe that even a GW like set up of buy it once and have it for life would have saved a game that never had any real popularity.
Simply saying make it like GW shows no understanding of business.
This game would never have sold 4 million+ copies like GW has.
I am well aware of much of this; the point I was trying to make, albeit apparently not very well, was that if instead of saying "Hey, in a few months we're pulling the plug!" they had instead decided to make it F2P, they would have pulled in players that weren't there before. As I said, I for one would have bought it, and others have said they would as well. It may have not been a very popular game in a P2P model, and I imagine if that was part of the reason it lost the amount of people you stated. However, as F2P where all you are doing is buying the game itself, with no monthly fee, even if it's not the best MMO or best sci-fi game, it's still a better deal than it's shortcomings plus $15 a month.
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You can't win - if you strike me down I shall respawn more powerful than you could possibly imagine!
I am well aware of much of this; the point I was trying to make, albeit apparently not very well, was that if instead of saying "Hey, in a few months we're pulling the plug!" they had instead decided to make it F2P, they would have pulled in players that weren't there before. As I said, I for one would have bought it, and others have said they would as well. It may have not been a very popular game in a P2P model, and I imagine if that was part of the reason it lost the amount of people you stated. However, as F2P where all you are doing is buying the game itself, with no monthly fee, even if it's not the best MMO or best sci-fi game, it's still a better deal than it's shortcomings plus $15 a month.
But at the time they decided to announce pulling the plug making it F2P and charging $60 for the box was no longer a possibility. Gamestop had already dropped TR to $.01 and was tossing the game in the trash. Having more players, but not having a way to make money off of them woulf not have helped them recoup the money they had spent. It very well may have added lots of people if it went F2P, but they would still need a way to make money. So they would have to add in game advertising because selling the box for $60 was no longer an option or add a cash shop like a lot of other F2P. Obviously the people running it saw no future for a game that was losing people at such a fast rate and decided they would lose less money by pulling the plug.