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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Rift Transformed: From Subscription to Free-to-Play in Seven Months
Speaker(s): AR Schleicher
Company Name(s): Trion Worlds
Track / Format: Design

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Overview: This session presents a detailed overview of the successful transition to free-to-play for Trion World's subscription-based MMO, Rift. In this postmortem, AR will present details and statistics around the transformation, and valuable lessons learned, which can be applied to current free-to-play games as well as subscription games that are considering a transition. Details will include how we grandfathered in existing users and the evolution of major UI elements, going from early wireframes to finished in-game assets. The talk will also describe our take on pay-to-win, the popularity of gifting and anonymous logins, and graphs displaying concurrent users before, during and after the transition. Both successes and failures are presented, such as the need to prevent frictionless, unlimited credit to platinum conversions and the huge growth in population we experienced as a result of the changes.

GDC 2014

AR Schleicher

Trion Worlds

free content

Design

Design