Executive Producer Says Star Trek Online Brings In Plenty of Latinum

Written by: Jason Winter (@winterinformal) | August 2, 2012 2:00 pm

5 Comments

You know that MMO based on a wildly popular sci-fi IP with “Star” in the title that everyone says is dying? Well, it’s flat-out not true.

We’re referring, of course, to Star Trek Online. What did you think we meant?

Executive Producer Dan Stahl stopped by the STO forums to massage fans’ feelings about the game, stating that the game was “a profitable business and worth at least $50 million to Perfect World.” He also emphatically stated that the game was “not dying,” “continues to grow stronger,” and last month “took over as the top performing game for Perfect World in North America.”

Maybe BioWare could learn a thing or two from Cryptic. Star Trek Online was also heavily hyped — and probably burdened with expectations from a rabid fan base — struggling out of the gate before its conversion to a free-to-play title in January. The Old Republic might have a deeper hole to climb out of, but Cryptic has shown that the transition can not only work, but be profitable.

Executive Producer Says Star Trek Online Brings In Plenty of Latinum

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http://twitter.com/dndhatcher David Hatcher

I’m glad its doing well. It has the most liberal F2P model. You can play pretty much everything through level cap without paying a dime if you dont want to.

Maybe Perfectworld will buy SWTOR and turn it into a profitable venture.
http://twitter.com/coreyctom Corey

However, the plans for SWTOR’s f2p model are nowhere near what STO offers. STO still allows access to absolutely all content to free players. In fact, they provide a comparison chart between a free and a “gold” (paid) account and the key differences really are more storage space, respec tokens, and a few other small things that can be gained by the free player with minimal effort. There’s only really a couple things the free player absolutely can’t get and it’s not that big a deal. In SWTOR, you play free to 50 with all story content, but limited weekly access to pvp, and complete restriction from all new end-game content iirc. STO is, in my book, one of the true examples of f2p, whereas TOR’s plans still reflect a p2p design if you really want to experience anything end-game has to offer.

That being said, at least KoToR 3 is completely free.

I also still never regretted buying the lifetime subscription for STO. I definitely got my time in it before it went f2p, and returned to it for a bit after the conversion. I played TOR for maybe a month, I’ll just leave it at that.
http://twitter.com/Nathiest Nathiest

I’m such a huge Star Trek fan.. I cannot bring myself to play it.
- http://twitter.com/Bubba_Big Make It So
  
  Same here. HUGE Star Trek nutter and a life long gamer. Zero interest in playing this. Guild Wars 2 on the otherhand……bring it on! I am very happy to see this game thriving though.
Mike Wendell

If Cryptic Studios was worth $50m, why did Perfect World only pay $35m for it? Granted Atari was hard up for cash at the time I believe but why such a large spread of numbers? Sounds like someone was doing a bit of padding for their own worth.

Dan Stahl made a single post promoting his company that touched on a few points. Others have made them previously but nothing solid was stated. Cryptic has issues with customer service where support tickets get closed without even a reply, if they replied to at all. Hundreds of players can’t even log into the game currently or even into the support ticket system in an attempt to get help. Hundreds of bugs exist like even myself not being able to access the Foundry that have existed for months without even a response.

If you read the fluff piece that Cryptic put out for their last State of the Game, customer after customer pointed out that Dan Stahl just touches on fluff over and over again. If he was really interested in dealing with the issues, things would be a lot different.Have to protect that 35% Net profit after all.