He pledges it won’t happen ”on my watch” at Rift’s creator Trion. It has long-term repercussions for subscription-only outfits, which means it’s a ”bad deal for the consumer” too.
The constant stream of overhead costs for an MMO is crippling if lifetime subscriptions are being snapped up. MMOs like Star Trek Online and Champions Online offered the lifetime deal.
”Nope; never,” Jim Butler adamantly told [a]listdaily in an interview.
”I was against the idea when we did it at Turbine, and it won’t happen on my watch here at Trion. Lifetime memberships are a great deal for consumers that plan to spend the next few years playing the game, and a financial disaster for subscription-only companies that have to continue paying for new feature development, salaries, server costs, marketing, etc. Ultimately, it’s a bad deal for the consumer in the long-term.”
Typically the lifetime offers only ran for a certain period of time, mainly as a way to extract a large sum of money from those who may well end up losing interest and abandoning the MMO after a month or so. Some subscription-only MMOs have since switched to free-to-play, but lifetime users still need to pay for items. This is often mitigated by granting those few with a fixed income of in-game currency.
Rift from Trion Worlds launched back in March 2011 and by January this year it has earned $100 million in revenue.
