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8:25 pm
January 10, 2013
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TERA will be going Free-to-Play tomorrow, but you won’t have access to an in game cash shop. In a blog post released today, TERA developer Ozma of EnMasse Entertainment explained the situation:
You’ll have full access to TERA: Rising on February 5, but we’re still migrating some game-related services. Our new TERA store, Valkyon Outfitters, won’t be available when the game launches.
Valkyon Outfitters, where you can purchase elite status and in-game items such as mounts and costumes, will be available shortly. We’ll make a grand-opening announcement when it goes live.
We didn’t want a store delay to impact your gameplay, so TERA: Rising itself is unaffected. Have fun killing BAMs—and each other—as you stand by for Valkyon Outfitters to open its doors!
While is certainly nice to see a developer sticking to their guns and releasing a game on time, this does raise an interesting question: What is a Free-to-Play game without its cash shop?
Free-to-Play games and MMO’s need a Cash Shop of some flavor to survive. An in-game reason to spend real world money is the price the player base pays for not having a monthly subscription fee, and while not everyone is going to purchase the items sold by an in-game cash shop, a game surviving in this way needs to make sure there are enough useful, cool, or interesting items to get enough people spending their money.
So why wouldn’t TERA have one from the get go?
Getting the game changed over to F2P on time is important, but why would the TERA team not make sure to have the Valkyon Outfitters, its version of the cash shop, ready and open for business? This is their lifeline, and the decision to neglect doing whatever they had to do to get this feature live for the Free-to-Play switch-over is baffling to me.
Punctuality is a superb quality to have, but it is second to survival. A lot of my fiscal faith in TERA will rest on how quickly they are able to get their cash shop going. Wait too long, and they could be shooting themselves in the foot, and the MMO market is not a good place to be crippled.
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