Trion Worlds (Rift, Trove) has decided to drop the free-to-play payment scheme it was planning to employ for its online competitive game Atlas Reactor due to player feedback during the game’s ongoing beta testing.
What’s notable here is that the change is attributed (at least in part) to the challenges the Atlas Reactor team faced in tuning the game’s design to be both satisfying for players and economically viable as a free-to-play venture.
“During Closed Beta, we’ve been figuring out how to best tune our Free to Play (‘F2P’) game to create a sustainable business,” wrote Atlas Reactor executive producer Peter Ju in a blog post published today. “To make it viable, we would have had to do some things that run counter to your feedback, making the game less fun.”
His comments echo those of Boss Key art director Tramell Isaac earlier this year, who explained at GDC that Boss Key’s upcoming competitive shooter LawBreakers was ditching F2P in favor of a premium pricing scheme because “we ended up being focused on how to get money, as opposed to how to make a good game.”
Going forward, Trion Worlds intends to sell access to Atlas Reactor using a premium pricing scheme that asks players to pay up front (from $20 – $100, depending on the bundle selected) in order to play the game.