WildStar Going F2P in August

[Einzo]

The sci-fi title is allegedly joining Steam later this year according to SteamDB and, when it does so, will be as a free-to-play title. Following this news, a group of Redditors began to speculate over what this all means and it wasn't long before someone claiming to be a Carbine employee turned up, asserted he'd given mods proof of who he was, and confirmed the news.

“As has often been discussed around here, Wildstar is going to be changing its business model in August (tentatively of course, patch stuff etc) to a Hybridized Free to Play model," he/she wrote. "Now thankfully it is not going Pay to Win, I suppose you could call it 'Freemium' in a way as a lot of the stuff that the paid accounts will get are buffs to experience/rep/renown etc gain and character slots and the like, no direct power buffs or anything like that. Micro-transactions will be included moving forward as well and you will hear more about that very soon.

"Steam release should be by the end of this year or January at the absolute latest. It should definitely be before the China release. The China release is slower because we have to change every asset that has bones or blood or teeth or eyeballs and all of that stuff that they are not fond of. Some whole zones, specifically those with the Strain, have to be overhauled."

Following this, the employee was asked about the current mood at the studio. They proceeded to claim it wasn't particularly optimistic due to high staff turnover rates and serious worries about the future.

"The PLAN is for content to stay at the quarterly cycles that they are now," they wrote. "We have soft and hard locks for everything. That SHOULD not change however we are losing employees left and right, for example our dungeon and raid team is 4 people, we have 5 class designers, hell even our QA team is about 7 people for Wildstar and a few of those people are leaving as well in a few weeks. We have lost 2 Art Directors in less than 8 months along with several Producers."

Though NCSoft hasn't confirmed anything about the game potentially shifting to a free-to-play model, it's worth noting boxes of the title were quietly pulled off shelves in Australia recently - exactly what was done with The Elder Scrolls Online mere weeks before a F2P shift was revealed.


source: ign