While there are many, many free-to-play MMOS on the market, those games operate differently than the traditional, subscription-based MMOs like World of Warcraft. Not only do the free-to-play games function differently in the way they don’t put as much strain on their servers, they also offer numerous ways for players to spend money, whether that be on a new hairdo, costume, or a quicker way to earn experience points. Subscription-based MMOs, on the other hand, rely almost entirely on players’ money coming in every month to keep things going.
That’s what makes it so incredible that more than six months after release on PC, Square Enix is still not charging Final Fantasy XIV gamers to play its games following a very tepid response that also led to the PS3 version being delayed indefinitely. Along with apologizing, producer Hiromichi Tanaka resigned late last year, to be replaced by Naoki Yoshida. A number of other prominent positions were replaced, and Yoshida vowed that big changes would be coming to fix the game.
In an interview with Gamasutra, Yoshida explained the motivation behind offering the game to fans without a subscription fee while changes are being implemented. He said, “It was pretty much personally because I’ve been a player for so long. I wanted to make sure that I would only ask the player to pay for something that once I could say, ‘Okay, we have this planned, and we’re going to do this. This is what we’re going to do, so this is the point where we can actually ask you for money.’ Without that, I personally, as a player, wouldn’t feel good about asking the player to pay money without that information.”
