Ole Schreiner talks F2P, subscriptions, and Metacritic

Ole Schreiner, the new CEO of Funcom, is anything but a foolish man. He's handling a company with a brand new MMO that (while being well received by players and quite enjoyable) is battling a small decline, layoffs at Funcom, a rough Metacritic score, and the inevitable anticipation of The Secret World going Free to Play. In a new interview at GamesIndustry.biz, Schreiner talks about these things and, most notably, TSW as a subscription or free-to-play based model.

If we had designed The Secret World as a free-to-play offering we would have made some different decisions along the way, for example in terms of how the in-game store works and how our post-launch content plan would play out. We tried leaving our options open during development so that we could launch with a different model should we have decided during development that's what we wanted, but eventually we did settle on the subscription model and that's what informed much of the game's design.

That said, we definitely have the tools to turn The Secret World into a free-to-play game - or even hybrid - should we decide to do that somewhere down the line. We did that with Age of Conan with significant success. 

Given that online games are becoming more focused as free-to-play, the change would be unsurprising and welcome for Funcom and gamers all over. 

Julian "Mirai" Williams