I have always been a fan of unintended consequences. It warms my heart and makes me chuckle when short-sighted planning and the general perversity of the universe gang up to undermine things.
Even when it happens to me.
Especially when it happens to me.
I have a bit of the anarchist in me. I like to be reminded that real life does not care for anybody’s plans.
So when I saw over at Werit’s Blog that Warhammer Online was removing the 10 Day restriction from their free trial offer, the intent was clear: Somebody felt that more people would subscribe to the game if the free trial lasted longer.
Now I haven’t seen anything official on this, and the Warhammer Online free trial page still says “10 Days,” but I understand that the key restriction in place will be that you cannot advance beyond tier 1 content. There are probably others, but that is the only thing I have seen.
So I will be interested to see what happens (if anything happens) when an subscription MMO makes the first 10-15% of its game content available for free for unlimited play.
I cannot recall a similar scenario. Certainly SOE offered their “Trial of the Isle,” but that had a hard geographical limitation.
So what do you think is going to happen?
A mass of free-loading tier 1 players? A surge in subscriptions? Nothing at all?
