Interesting Age of Conan Announcement

I originally saw the headline “Premium Subscription Campaign” and thought maybe they were following Turbine’s model and looking at a Free 2 Play system.  I was pretty excited about that as I do like AoC (see my previous post on it) and their extended trial but I just couldn’t get past the high price point if I want to move past the starter zone.

However, AoC isn’t going F2P at all, what they’re doing is incentivizing people to buy longer subscriptions up front.  Usually most do this by simply offering a cost discount, but AoC’s adding in-game perks to these as well.  Now many of these perks are consumable but they do seem pretty darn powerful including teleportation, healing potions, and xp boosters.

At first glance, I don’t have a problem with this but the more I think about it I”m wondering if this is Funcom dabbling in the Cash shop arena?  But, in doing so they’re asking people to shell out quite a bit of up front cash which seems a little strange.  Or is this an indication that they’re having funding issues and they’re trying to get more money now to stop the bleeding?

I’m not real sure on the motivation, but I thought it was a very interesting subscription announcement that I can honestly say I won’t be taking part of at all.  I have a lifetime sub for LOTRO and have gotten my money’s worth from it but I’m not sure I’ll do long-term subscriptions in another game as they seem way too risky these days.

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