LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
Beta and Pricing Clarifications on The Secret World
Interesting day today for the folks at Funcom as they’ve been doing quite a bit of back peddling and PR speak.
An article popped up on Massively with a video from their CEO, which had open beta dates and price points for the box and subscriptions model.
Mortei then chimed in on the forum thread with a little tamer response trying to shy away from specifics.
Then this evening Famine from the forums posted a link to the official site with the following information:
- The Secret World is currently in closed beta with internal and external testers participating.
- Open beta will NOT begin before Christmas, but sometime prior to launch
- The business model and price points for the box and subscription prices have not been set yet.
I’m not real sure what happened, but certainly an interesting string of events for Funcom and not one that instills great confidence in the company. Or maybe this is all a ploy to confuse the heck out of the community…
I guess I was hoping that video was true, but a 4 month open beta is VERY long and a $15-$17 subscription fee is quite high.
I’m expecting that the December date will be the next “big” expansion of the closed beta community and the sub will be closer to that $15 price point. Open beta would then start sometime in February or March.
Or in other words, nothing really has changed or been officially decided 
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I’m a little surprised they are going with a Sub with Age of Conan having gone f2p. Both are fairly niche games. I figure open beta will start around Feb/March to give people a chance to love/hate that space game.
Closed beta opening up to bring in more people in December makes sense. I joined the DCUO beta in Oct last year and that game launched in Jan. My biggest concern with Secret World is it not getting enough attention from news outlets. If Guild Wars 2 announces a release date in the next month or two they will likely get all the coverage. Hopefully Secret World will be in open beta before a date on GW2 drops.
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#4 written by DocHoliday 1 year ago
I think the sub does make sense, at least from the start as I do think they will have some significant momentum built up. They’ll have a cash-shop from the start, so making the switch over shouldn’t be as bad if they need to as they could slowly migrate to a F2P model down the line.
TSW is flying low, although there have been times when its trending worldwide on twitter. But I think they’re flying low on purpose
They do have an insanely rabid fan-base already as I don’t see that going away any time soon.
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I suppose it’s possible that this was intended to float a trial balloon to see if they could get away with the higher subscription pricepoint by gauging exactly how bad the reaction would be.
Then again, I hadn’t really been aware that the release date for this game was Q1 2012 because I just don’t follow games that are under NDA all that closely anymore, so I guess they got some free PR out of the deal.