Star Trek Online is going free-to-play. We've known for a while, but just when and why it's going free has eluded us, until now. Cryptic's decision to remove the subscription cost from their most recent MMO wasn't sudden, according to Stephen D'Angelo, Executive Producer on STO and Chief Technical Officer. "We've always wanted the game to be free-to-play," he says, "in fact we tried to make it free-to-play at the original launch, but our publisher [Atari] didn't want us doing that so we didn't do that." Instead of almost two years ago, the switch to free-to-play will occur on January 17, 2012.
Cryptic's experiences with their other subscription-based-gone-free-to-play game Champions Online "kinda got a mixed result." The system locked a lot of content out to players such as power sets (class abilities), and limited the number of character slots available. The developers found that players didn't really like paying for content, so for Star Trek Online Cryptic is taking a very different approach.
The process of making Star Trek Online subscription-free is a little more interesting than what we've seen in the past. It's due to STO's level of difficulty. Simply put, it's not very hard at all. According to D'Angelo, it's possible for players to hit the level cap and get the best gear inside of a single day. The end result is that totally sweet loot doesn't feel as totally sweet as it should. "A lot of the things people acquired weren't worth very much to them," D'Angelo says. So the plan leading up to the switch to free-to-play is to make the high-end stuff more difficult to acquire, and the low-end stuff simpler. Put simply, "[We're] revisiting the game's economy."
