Pirates of the Burning Sea - now free!

By David Hollingworth
11:04 Dec 1, 2010 | 7 Comments
Tags: pirates | of | the | burning | sea | free | to | play | mmo | gaming | news

Another MMO ditches the subscription model and goes free to play - good news, if you were ever curious about Pirates of the Burning Sea...

Free to play is all of a sudden the new black when it comes to MMO profit models. Most famously, one of our favourite games ever - Lord of the Rings Online - went free to play and all concerned, from players to devs, have loved the result. It's more profitable, more popular, and more populated than ever before.

And now, the latest MMO to make the leap to free(dom) is Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Our memory of the game is mixed, but that was a long time ago, and there were certainly some wonderful elements to the game, most notably the ship-to-ship combat. So, if you're curious, or liked the game but didn't think it was worth a monthly fee, now's your chance to give it a go or resurrect your pirate career.

Shiver me timbers! Check out the game's site here.

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7 Comments

sUpEr gEEk Dec 1, 2010 11:32 AM	Kinda wonder if WoW will follow suite?
Gubble Dec 1, 2010 11:56 AM	I get the feeling they won't. They already have how many million subscribers?(I lost track after 11) and their servers are already quite populated so there is never any troubles getting groups or with the in game economy.
codecreeper Dec 1, 2010 1:49 PM	Its kinda sad when MMO's go FTP ,but on the other side its actually opening the game up. I noticed after Lotro went FTP the community was far better than a paying community.
mohawk Dec 1, 2010 2:07 PM	I think I will have to have a look at this now.
Hawkeye Dec 1, 2010 2:24 PM	I don't think WoW will - they deliver a seriously premium product when you think about it.
Ihsan Dec 1, 2010 7:56 PM	TBH I don't think "premium product" is a fair comparison to a good deal of F2P mmos. A lot of F2P mmos are very polished and fun products. Due to the number of big titles in recent times going F2P and succeeding in increasing their subscriber base they're probably actually a better indication of where the genre is heading. GW2 and SW:ToR are both supposed to be released under some form of F2P rather then a subscription based model. WoW really is an outlier when it comes to mmos, it's probably the only mmo to make it to a million subscribers (let alone keep them for more then a month) so Blizzard are probably safe to keep their current subscription method for a while and probably the only reason for them to change would be for them to test a F2P model before the release of D3 or their next mmo. As for PotBS it was an excellent group combat game (particularly for PvP) with a a player driven economy and wonderful sense of humour. Oh, and it had pirates too, everyone loves pirates. It's weakness was it was heavily reliant on a healthy server population that was willing to participate even if they were losing (realm/faction pride is not something the WoW generation seems to have) or the carebears who would spend weeks abusing pve content to buy the best ships available and then refusing to actually use them to help their nation since they might scratch the paint on it (or more likely be a terrible player and lose their ill gotten gains in pvp). Once one side had been beaten to near defeat they'd inevitably start crying on the forums and refusing to log in and the economy would slow and map wins would start to take forever.
Bundy 2.0 Dec 2, 2010 9:41 PM	WoW would only go F2P if and when it suited them, right now there is no reason to do so. But int he future they might see a benefit in doing so to being more people to Battle.net they have a big vision for battle.net to be a massive gaming hub, and they have a new unannounced MMO that has been under development for 3-4 or so years. If Blizzard saw an opportunity to being more people to their other newer products sometime in the future they could use Wow as a great marketing tool on a F2P or even partially F2P (pay for high level content, low lvl free etc).

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