The count of 4,000 was reached on Christmas Eve, at which point the sale was done.
The Lifetime All Access Memberships have sold out. If you missed out, the 12 Month + Bonus Memberships are still available through 12/31/18! https://t.co/aX3QjS9gdL
However, Daybreak has relented due to “popular demand” and has decided to take more money for lifetime subscriptions through the end of the year.
LIFETIME ALL ACCESS MEMBERSHIP (PC) BACK DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND!!
This is not a drill! Lock in membership to your favorite games with the Lifetime* All Access Membership. Available for a limited time, this special offer grants lifetime membership benefits in every All Access game. All Access currently includes DC Universe Online, EverQuest, EverQuest 2, and PlanetSide 2.
No more resubscribing. No more recurring payments. All the access. All the time. Plus, if you already have an active All Access membership, we will convert your unused time to Daybreak Cash when you upgrade to this offer!
I’m going to guess the that the 12 month “bonus” deal, which was only double the price of a normal one year subscription wasn’t as big of a hit as they expected.
Anyway, if you were on the fence about the lifetime subscription, you now have a few more days to dither about the whole thing.
Addendum: At some point in the middle of the night Daybreak added a limit of 6,000 to the renewed offer. Either that, or I totally missed that in my first read. But I was looking for some sort of limit when their post went up, so I strongly suspect it was added later.
I guess they feel that scarcity makes people more likely to buy. They are probably right, but I bet if they sold all 6,000 right now, they’d “find” another few thousand to sell tomorrow.
Daybreak is getting into the Lifetime Subscription arena this holiday season as part of their Daybreak Winter Extravaganza.
The Daybreak All Access plan lets you play DC Universe Online, EverQuest, EverQuest 2, and PlanetSide 2 with subscriber benefits. (Sorry, this does nothing for H1Z1 or PlanetSide Arena players.)
The deal is good through December 31, 2018, but is limited to 4,000 subscribers.
If you’re not down with that level of commitment, there is also a yearlong All Access deal for a somewhat underwhelming $199. There are bonus items involved, but Daybreak has previously offered a year for $99, and the normal deal gets you 12 months for $119, so it doesn’t feel like they’re really selling it here. What bonus items are worth $80? [Edit: They offered a full year for $71.99 back in August 2016.]
Of course, those with a suspicious mind might wonder why Daybreak is offering such a deal right now. It seems late in the game, so to speak, to be offering up such a deal on titles that are, to put it bluntly, getting on in age. With the seemingly right so far rumors post from back in May predicting that we might be seeing the last expansions for the Norrath franchise next year to send off EverQuest and EverQuest II for their 20th and 15th anniversaries respectively, you might be buying into some games with limited additional content prospects.
And, since Daybreak is excluding their newest games from the plan, that might give one pause as well.
Still, I doubt Daybreak is going to close down any of the games on the list any time soon, so you will likely get years of play out of a lifetime subscription if you are committed to any of the titles.
Also, as a side note, I see that Daybreak has also included links to the Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online holiday bundles (not the subscription one, which already expired) at the bottom of that announcement as well. I do still wonder what the real relationship is between the Daybreak and SSG. Rumors are that Jason Epstein owns them both somehow, but I can’t quite credit that.
Anyway, a bit of odd and unexpected holiday news out of Daybreak. I am not sure what to think about it. Would you buy in on this? Go take a look yourself.
Addendum: Each of the four games on the All Access plan has their own version of the Winter Extravaganza banner. I went with the EverQuest II version at the top as they were the first group I heard from. But I thought I would include the others as well here at the end of the post.
DC Universe Online
DCUO went with Mister Freeze, which I guess is on point weather wise… more so that a couple of dragons anyway. It is a “winter” extravaganza after all.
PlanetSide 2
A Santa hat and a bit of holiday color and some decorations get the PlanetSide 2 offer in the spirit.
EverQuest
And then there is EverQuest playing up the scantily clad Firiona Vie, who is also holding a sizable candy cane. I realize that she is the iconic emblem of the franchise for many, but I feel cold just looking at her. Also, I’m not sure how that Santa hat is staying on given the pony tail in the back.
I am the third result, having purchased that option and feeling no regret,
In fact I remain very happy with my LOTRO lifetime subscription, but I played enough when it was subscription to break even, and then enjoyed VIP level status, with a 500 Turbine Point per month stipend, after it went F2P. That has allowed me to play, buy things from the store, including the last two expansions, and never spend another dime on the game. But I also played a lot of LOTRO over the years. It is easily on the top 5 of my MMOs in terms of time spent.
The list of things attached to my account…
I am not sure where to get that listing anymore on the LOTRO site, as it has grown by a couple of items since I last looked at it. Though if you go to Turbine’s site they still list Infinite Crisis as one of their games, at the top of the list no less, so who knows what is going on there.
However, I also went for lifetime with Star Trek Online and barely played that at all. I opted in on STO largely based on my LOTRO experience. If it is good once, then it ought to be good twice, right?
It was even more money than LOTRO… also, I went to Del Taco once…
But STO never caught my fancy and all my attempts to return to the game have ended in minutes… well, hours if you count trying to figure out how to access my account after all the changes that have hit the game.
So I am only batting .500 on lifetime subscriptions.
My experience with STO, with LOTRO, and with MMOs in general have made it unlikely that I would ever invest in a lifetime option again. And I write that with the world circa 2009 as context. I would likely not by another lifetime subscription again, even were we still deep in the era of monthly subscriptions.
Well, maybe if it was this cheap… and for a game with a future
Here in the age of F2P and cash shops, the age of PLEX and WoW Tokens, the age of lockboxes and nuisance barriers, the age of business model changes and broken dreams, the age of too many indistinguishable choices in the genre, the idea of sinking a couple of hundred bucks into an MMO on the hope that I might play it enough to get my money’s worth out of it… well… the idea just falls flat.
So color me surprised that Champions Online still had a lifetime subscription as an option… and that it was on sale for “just” $199, a third off of the usual $299 price.
Who knew?
And maybe that is a bad game to pick as an example, never having lived up to its predecessor, City of Heroes, and being run by a company that faltered and was acquired by another company that looks to be faltering, at least here in North America…. and which also happens to be the same company that owns STO.
And what does that say about lifetime subscriptions in this day and age? Is it just another desperation move now?
I mean, if World of Warcraft offered lifetime subscriptions for $299 I am pretty confident that they would sell a million of them pretty quickly, that the store interface would go down in the rush to buy one. But WoW is an ongoing success and the top game in its genre even with “only” 5.6 million players. Pretenders has to get creative with things like “registered users” to get close to that number, a number is less than half of WoW at its peak.
And why would Blizzard do that? It would be a short term boost to revenue and there would now be a floor of one million “subscribers” since lifetime is forever as long as the game is still running. But that million would also likely be the same people who never unsubscribe from the game.
So what is a lifetime subscription for these days? Is it a concept past its time?
I got a note from Cryptic today that has a little more information about the “extras” that those of us who bought lifetime subscriptions to the game get. Anything to validate my purchase!
STO LIFETIME PERKS
Greetings Lifetime Members!
We just wanted to thank you again for purchasing a Lifetime Subscription from us. As you already know, this entitles you to play the game without paying a monthly fee. But, that’s not where it ends. Later this month we’ll be releasing special perks for you, just to show our appreciation. Here’s some of what we’re working on, exclusive to Lifetime Subscribers:
Exclusive In-Game Chat Channel
Talk shop with other Lifetime Subscribers. Share thoughts and ideas about the game, or anything else.
Front-of-Queue Support
Waiting isn’t fun, and we don’t think you should have to do it. Any time the server is queued, you’ll go to the front of it.
In-Game Title
Visibly show off your support.
In-Game VIP Lounge
Spend time in an exclusive area inside the game. This social area is limited to Lifetime Subscribers only.
A Unique Costume Piece
Show off your lifetime status in style.
We’ll see you in-game, and thank you again!
-The Cryptic Team
It is nice to see the Front-of Queue item on that list, though it might have helped a bit to have that a few weeks ago.
And I spent most of that head start not being able to log into Star Trek Online for various reasons, not always the fault of the game.
Sure, at one point I spent long time looking at this message.
Then there was the case of the message in the launcher explaining that the server was down when the server status indicator said the server was up. And it was up. The danger of using the news feed on the launcher for transitory messages I suppose.
And then there was a point on Saturday when the server was up, but my daughter wanted to go do some quests in the Outlands to get her Deathknight another level. We did that and we watched a movie. (Shanghai Knights, because we like Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson and enjoyed Shanghai Noon the weekend before.) And then I had to let her play with the character creator. I went and read a book while that went on.
But eventually things seemed to settle down. There were a couple more updates. And by late Sunday afternoon I was able to spend a decent stretch of time concentrating on the game and… well… figuring out what was going on.
It would have helped if I had done the “go talk to the so-and-so at Earth Spacedock” missions (quests) first. But there was Commander Sulu (no, not that one… some relative I’d guess) ready with a patrol mission to go oppress miners again, so I put off, yet again, learning that I could just open a hailing frequency to Starfleet to finish a mission.
Were I designing, I might have put those guys in the same room with the Admiral and perhaps had Commander Sulu stand somewhere else.
And yes, I spent so little time in-game during the open beta that I hadn’t figured that out yet. There are all sorts of things to find.
I went about looking into skills, filling out my bridge crew, and running some missions.
I’m going to have to figure out how to get a group shot with my bridge crew. While I am mildly adverse to playing a female character myself (if only to avoid retribution for the metric tons of crap I’ve given others for doing that) I have no problem setting up a bridge crew that looks like an outer space episode of Charlie’s Angels, complete with a Vulcan Bosley carrying the medical tricorder.
And you should see them kick butt on away team missions.
Once things had settled down I found the game enjoyable. Ship combat works for me, and the ground combat went from something I wanted to avoid to something I started to enjoy. I did feel like perhaps I wasn’t inline with the spirit of the prime directive when I found that success on the ground often lay in shooting first and rifling the corpses for loot. But those Klingons… and Orions… were not really sociable when I tried introducing myself before shooting.
I also found Potshot (and Mrs. Potshot) in game where we continued our downtime obsession of figuring out the perfect fleet name. There have been many amusing ideas, but no clear winner as yet.
All in all, enjoyable once I could get into the game.
Was it like that very first weekend of EverQuest? Or even EverQuest II?
No, I did not feel compelled to play every possible second.
Things have changed since 1999. There are other options when the server is down.
And I am not as OCD about games as I once was.
Okay, that last bit is probably a lie. I just haven’t figured out what to obsess about yet in STO.
But I know I’ll be playing this game for a while. Adventurer Historian spotted the liberated Borg headset in my previous head start weekend post.
Happy early birthday to me from my wife. Thank you sweet heart!
And GameStop’s automated system called me up to let me know my pre-order will be available for pickup tomorrow. It appears that none of my local stores are among the ten that will be opening up at midnight for the big launch.
I missed a good chunk of the Star Trek Online open beta.
Part of that was because we spent a week on Maui, which is a pretty fair trade in the middle of winter. Even for a California winter.
But even when I have been around there have been problems getting into the game. The server was essentially full for most of the time before I was on vacation. That is when it wasn’t down. And it has been down rather regularly since I have been back.
Not that Cryptic hasn’t been working on things. I’ve downloaded about a gigabyte and a half of updates since I got back home. But I get the feeling that the Star Trek IP is a bit more popular than they calculated.
Somehow, between the outages, I have managed to get in enough time to, you know, blow things up.
Cruiser Goes "Boom!"
And I like what I have seen.
I think.
I have to deal my internal love of Star Trek which makes it difficult at times to evaluate whether I like something that is Star Trek related, or whether I merely like that it is Star Trek related. I’m a fan boy. Not as much as some people, but I am to the degree that I can be and still be me. And Star Trek fan boys can get uptight about some of the silliest of things.
These fish are totally non-canon I say!
So play I must. And having played a little, here is what I think.
Ship combat looks good. It is close enough to the Starfleet Command (my favorite series of Star Trek games ever, which culminated with Starfleet Command III) style of ship combat for my taste. Things go a bit quicker and I miss the ability to transport over marines to capture ships when the shields are down, but otherwise it feels about right.
I am undecided on ground combat. That isn’t what a Star Trek game is really about for me, but it seems better than, say, Pirates of the Burning Sea’s version of the same thing. And planet side seems to offer places to relax.
And the game as a whole? I am surprised by some of the complexities. But it feels okay, and you can tweak enough things to make the future feel a bit less sterile and mass produced.
USS Wensleydale Customized
Like Darren, I agree that being on a mission and finding myself in an ad hoc fleet working towards the same objectives works. Though it can stink when you draw a tougher mission and find yourself alone. I had to call on Skronk to help me out on one.
So, if nothing else, I am not going to try and get out of my GameStop pre-order. I will be playing this game. And I will be playing it soon since, as Cryptic pointed out, the last open beta weekend was upon us.
Next Friday, January 29th, those with pre-orders can get into the game for real. Things are live.
But there is a decision to be made between now and the official launch day of February 2nd.
Do I get the lifetime subscription?
It is available up until February 1st for $239. After that it will still be available, but it will be priced at $299.
The Trek fan boy in me says, “Get it!” In fact, the Trek fan boy in me wants to know why I am still typing this since the order page is up in another tab and I could be ordering it RIGHT THIS SECOND!
And then there is skeptical me. (Alternately known as thoughtful me, sarcastic me, or obstinate ass-hat me, depending on how far off I am from other people’s own opinions.)
Skeptical me still likes the idea of the lifetime subscription, since it takes the whole subscribe, unsubscribe, am I playing enough to justify a monthly subscription detail off the table.
But then skeptical me goes on and points out Lord of the Rings Online, which I don’t play all that much.
Sure, I patch and log in about once a month and play a little. But I spend a lot more time in WoW and even in EVE Online. And while that is partly because I have regular groups and friends in those games, it is also, to a certain extent, because I am paying a monthly fee for them, so I feel I had better be playing if I am paying.
And so LOTRO falls into third place because the pressure is off in that regard. I can play whenever.
Then skeptical me brings up Pirates of the Burning Sea. The parallels between that and Star Trek Online are clear, if not absolute. In PotBS I loved the ship combat, but the rest of the game really did little for me. Could STO be a repeat of that?
And while skeptical me has me on the ropes, he brings up Starfleet Command. Sure, I love that game. I bring it out every few months to play it. But how much play time does it really get, skeptical me asks like a lawyer in a courtroom drama bringing up the critical point in his case, exactly how much time did you spend playing that game in 2009?
Maybe six hours.
“SIX HOURS?” shouts skeptical me, waking up the jury, “You spent 6 hours out of the year playing that game, and now you want to get a lifetime subscription to a game because it plays like SFC? Is this what you’re suggesting? Does this make sense?
Damn skeptical me, he has a point.
And then skeptical me starts to play good cop. Look, he points out, they also have a discount year long subscription. That is $119, which saves you $60 over the course of a year and you lock in that price ongoing. So in two years you will have spent the same as the lifetime subscription, and you might be over the game by then.
Finally, skeptical me wraps up his case. Look at Turbine, he says. They offered a discounted lifetime subscription before launch, but they have brought back that discounted price a number of times. If you truly get into the game, you might have the opportunity again later.
But then the fan boy retorts that not having to worry about a subscription is more likely to get me through the rough launch ahead. And it is going to be a rough launch if my current experience, where I have spent more time trying to play than playing, what with patches, the server being full, or the server simply being down, over the open beta cycle.
But the year long subscription plan also works for that.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 