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Tabula Rasa Goes Free, Brings New Content
Last month we discussed NCSoft's announcement that Tabula Rasa would be closing its doors at the end of February, and their plans to remove the subscription fee for all players in January. Well, they've decided to go completely free a month early, alongside the release of a variety of new content. The game has finally gotten a first-person camera view, something many players have been asking for since launch. A new instance and several other bits of additional content are available as well. NCSoft also previewed player-controlled Mechs and PAUs, which will go live in the next major patch. Ten Ton Hammer has an interview with Net Devil's Scott Brown about the closure of Tabula Rasa.
I was just waiting for Cedega to support it or a version of Wine that does to last for more than one patch and not require installing Mono. :(
It's called Windows, try it one day, you'd be surprised how well it works.
None of that silly Cedega nonsense.
They're doing a fair bit more than that, they gave this as a parting gift to active TR players when they were announcing the closing: * 3 free months of City of Heroes including digital client * 3 free months of Lineage II including digital client * Aion beta access (coming soon) * Aion pre-order access (available in 2009) * 1 free month of Aion (including digital client, no physical goods, available in 2009)
If they plan on closing it down anyways, doesn't it make sense to open source it so people can run their own 3rd party servers?
or am I missing something obvious here?
How stupid are you?
They'd want a credit card back when you were subscribing too. They're just changing the cost to 0$.
Man, no wonder we have so many stupid anon posts.
TR was a creative game, and this is a great way to end things, heck, a free bonus is pretty nice.
What's the point in playing any game? After reaching the end (or whenever they get tired of it), it's likely a lot of people won't play a single player game after that. Was it time/money wasted? Depends on if you enjoyed it or not. The enjoyment in an online game for some people isn't just having a max level character you can point to and brag about, but if you have fun. I'm playing the game and I'm having fun, even though I might not see the max level. YMMV, of course.
It's a real shame, because I think Tabula Rasa is a fairly interesting game. I'm more of an RPGer than an FPSer, so I like the combat system what puts more emphasis on preparation and strategy rather than twitch action. I think TR's cardinal sin was that they didn't define what they were. They appeared to be an online FPS, but that's not what the game is; so RPGers tended to give it a pass and FPSers were disappointed once they got into it. It didn't help that the development went on way too long and cost too much money to ever hope to turn a profit. It's also kind of sad to see Richard Garriott's career fizzle out on yet one more in a string of mediocre games.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
Trying to upsell Tabula Rasa users on three other products is hardly a good-faith measure. It's an attempt to get a bit more money out of them, pure and simple.
Frankly, were I a Tabula Rasa user I wouldn't touch this offer with a barge pole. They paid somewhere around $50 for a game, only to be used as its beta testers. Then to add insult to injury, they find that almost precisely one year after the release date (and perhaps only a matter of a few weeks or months after they shelled out their $50), the game would cease to work just three months after its first birthday.
This is precisely why I don't buy games or applications that entirely rely on a central server hosted by the parent company for their survival.
If NCsoft wanted to make a good faith measure to Tabula Rasa users, their parting gift to the community would be the ability to host the game on third party servers. They're not doing that though, they're taking the money and running - and insulting their users' intelligence with the suggestion that upsales are "gifts" when they're nothing more than a marketing campaign being run at a wholly distasteful moment.
Way to be paranoid. It's good to be cautious, but NCSoft isn't exactly some obscure outfit with questionable origins.
While I read that too, I went ahead and set up a free account to see what the game was like. I was never asked for my credit card number - I assumed that they changed the sign up policy since they wrote that page on their support site.
u is so smart. u saw rite thruh there evil skem to carg u money on ur credit card with out asking.
Right.
There are plenty of people not worth tossing your credit card number too for a free activation. Doing it for a Russia snuff porn site? Eh, probably a poor idea. Doing to a multinational company running a handful of other MMORPGs? Probably not all that risky. If they do decide in a blatant act of malevolent glee to empty your bank account like some Nigerian scam, I am pretty sure that the law kicks in.
I kinda agree with you, but then I can also see why they wouldn't do this also. There are probably issues with IP and third-party licenses that keep them from distributing the server code.
What I would like to see, though, is maybe something like a "dead MMOG clearinghouse" company. If I were such a company, for example, I would pay NCsoft $x for the rights to set up and run one or more Tabula Rasa servers so that players could continue playing. There would never be any more updates to the game, except maybe content updates to advance the storylines given the existing mechanics. (I.e. the stuff probably stored in text files.) I would charge some nominal fee to access the game, and the client would be given away for free.
There's a difference between "free" and "free if you give us billing information but trust us we won't dick you". I thought we all learned that in the heyday of AOL free trials?
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
it's not just an issue with 'upselling'. though certainly the company hopes to keep these people as customers, there's nothing dirty or underhanded about that- quite the opposite, i wish -more- companies put forth effort to reduce customer churn. TR is an MMO, the people who play this game really should understand that the majority of mmo's don't succeed long term, though i will admit TR went a bit quicker than most. generally, when this happens, you end up stuck. do not pass go, do not collect $200. Here, NCSoft is at least offering -something- it's a realization that it's a bad situation, but a company can't continue to operate an operation that isn't making, nor shows any signs of turning a profit. it's a "we're sorry we can't keep the game you want to play running, but here, have some time to get to know all our other games, and decide if there's something here you'd like to try before you leave." the attitude that offering access to their entire online collection for 3 months, plus beta access an a month free of the new game they're producing is insulting.. is just well, insulting. assuming a user took up all that offer, and spent 3 months with CoH and L2, that right there is more than double to cost of the TR game purchase, and while it wasn't completely clear with L2, i did note that the digital DL was included with CoH, so there wouldn't even be a purchase required. the idea of offering up the server software as a free item isn't highly likely. TR's engine has some unique features that would likely do well in another game, therefore, the program will likely stay in the hands of the creators to help prevent issues with any of those future products. really, just lighten up.
Dunno if your bank supports anything like this, but Bank of America has a feature in their web banking system, called ShopSafe, which (if you have a CC account with them) lets you generate a one-time use CC number whenever you want, with a limit you set. For something like this, you could genenerate a number with a limit of like $1 (or whatever the minimum is). Then, you don't really have to worry about getting ripped off by companies.
Not only could it potentially give a leg up to a potential competitor, but from the perspective of a company like NCSoft, if you release the whole thing for free, and it starts to get popular once it's free, even though you couldn't make it a commercial success, you setup a potential competitor for your own future products. It's hard (though not impossible) to compete with free products. There's already enough competition, without creating more for yourself.
Now, some might say that if it's free, that it doesn't really count as 'competition', because the people still have the money in their pockets that they are not spending on that product, so they might still pay for your future products with the money they aren't spending. That might, in some cases be true, but in other cases, people might decide that they spend enough time on, and enjoy the free product enough, that they decide not to look at other, 'premium' options.
I picked up a copy of TR from Best Buy the other night cause it was going for fifteen bucks, and I wanted to see the world before it closed down.
I took it home, installed it, registered for an account and started playing. I had to enter the serial code for the game, but I don't remember giving them any credit card information. I was off and playing.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
That's an aspect of MMORPGs that I find interesting. Players will often dedicate the same amount of time they put towards any given hobby. But even though they're spending build-a-ship-in-a-bottle time to build up their character(s), they don't get the ship-in-the-bottle at the end. When the server plugs get pulled, everything is gone. Like it never existed. There's an almost tangible loss.
The thing is, this isn't the first intangible hobby. People also dedicate considerable time (and money) to their favorite sport(s). Yet at the end of a game, you're still left with no ship-in-a-bottle for the effort. You do get the experience. And maybe you have some souvenir from the game to try and provide material representation of that experience.
So why is it so different with MMORPGs? An Onyxia t-shirt or pennant doesn't quite do it. And perhaps the reason is that we fool ourselves in to accepting too much of the digital illusion. With a sports game, you know how long its going to last - the game clock is there from the beginning (baseball notwithstanding). With an MMORPG you can believe it will last forever.
It never does.