When Wildstar was launched, many had high hopes and expectations of the game. After all it was developed by a group of former Blizzard employees, and given Blizzard’s reputation for making quality games, many had thought it would apply to Wildstar as well. The game had originally adopted a subscription-based model but if the speculations are to be believed, it could soon be going free-to-play.According to a report from Destructoid, this started when the game was taken off the shelves in Australia which led to speculation that it could go free-to-play, or adopt the Guild Wars model in which the game would cost players money, but after that it would be free. However recently Wildstar was spotted in the Steam database where it was listed as “free on demand” which basically means free-to-play.
This is later backed up by a post on Reddit in the Wildstar sub-Reddit where an alleged Carbine employee confirmed that the game would be adopting the model. According to the poster, “Wildstar is going to be changing its business model in August(tentatively of course, patch stuff etc) to a Hybridized Free to Play model. 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 is buffs to experience/rep/renown etc gain and character slots and the like, no direct power buffs or anything like that.”
They also note that there will be microtransactions included in the game moving forward. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard MMORPGs revert to the free-to-play model. In fact Blizzard at one point even stated that they are open to the idea of making World of Warcraft free-to-play one day.
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