Before the beginning of Free MMO’s way back in the early 1990′s, the costs needed to power an MMORPG to cover its servers and constantly needed game upgrades forced developers to stand back and look for a new angle on where this kind of income can be pulled from.
At first developers decided on top of purchasing the MMO, a annual subscription would also be needed to be maintained from its consumers for the game to continue to finance its constant payment of expenses and wages. Some of the early subscription methods actually had the consumer instead of paying every month like we have and know of now, but having them paying by the hour!
This progressed into gamers focusing on one game at a time due to them not wanting to pay for a second. This then led to the birth of “World of Warcraft”. This game jumped in in and grabbed control of the genre. Gamers where dragged in by its emense array of combat mechanics and social grouping systems plus its ever expanding nature of new game features and new content which left gamers with always having something new and fun to do.
Still to this day World of Warcraft runs the online gaming genre. If you’re having to pay for a game better off paying for the one that has the most content and players to chat to correct? This was the kind of query that would have kickstarted off the new era of payment options. Not paying for anything!
The first Free MMO’s started to appear not long after WoW stamped its position on the P2P (pay to play) genre. At first these mini developed little Free MMO’s were reviewed as being poorly made and a shadow compared to their P2P (pay to play) brothers so were shrugged off by the general player. For most of the time this was a correct assumption.
Although with all fingers pointing in the direction of failure these free MMO’s begun to aim in the other direction. Pulling in huge amounts of gamers from all over the world and lead to a new payment market, the micro-transaction. In a nut shell Free MMO’s are for the most part free however located within these little money spinners usually contains an in game shop.
These stores can be used to aquire all types of extras for your online experience. From items to increase the power of your character or clothing to make you stand out from everyone else, this kind of money venture started to do just that and managers were seeing large amounts of income from gamers.
Now we are starting to see the popular developers take on the genre of Free MMO’s with big title games such as Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online and Conan all making the change from pay to play to free to play (F2P). And that’s just 3 to name, there are endless amount to choose from and with the extra bonus that they are free you can try them all till you find out which you like without having to pay for a thing!
If you would like to check out some of these Free MMO’s feel free check out this site http://planetmmos.com and read reviews and news about many Free FPS titles and many other top titles.
