[UPDATE] New version of MMO attracts half a million gamers in Europe since business model switch last month; total registered user base now stands at over 1 million.
[UPDATE] After the publication of this story, a Tera representative confirmed with GameSpot that the 500,000 new player figure is related only to the game's presence in Europe and not North America.
The original story follows below.
Fantasy massively multiplayer online game Tera added more than 500,000 new players since the game adopted a free-to-play business model, Gameforge announced today. The total number of registered players for Tera: Rising now stands at over 1 million.
Gameforge said it opened six new game servers shortly after the game's free-to-play relaunch last month to accommodate the "high demand" for the game. Tera players have created about 1.5 million characters since the game switched business models, Gameforge said.
It was also revealed that the game's Castanic race is the most popular with new Tera: Rising players, followed by humans and high elves. Warriors are the most popular class, Gameforge said, followed by the sorcerer and the archer.
Tera is the latest MMO game to drop its subscription fee, following Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, EverQuest II, Aion, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Bethesda has not said if its upcoming MMO game The Elder Scrolls Online will carry a subscription fee, though consultant Nicholas Lovell believes the game will launch with a subscription before going free-to-play.
For more on Tera: Rising, check out GameSpot's review of the original Tera.
Eddie Makuch (Mack-ooh) is a News Editor at GameSpot. He works out of the company's Boston office in Somerville, Mass., and loves extra chunky peanut butter.
And by the way TERA is a great game, who like mmorpg should play it, and is the best F2P out there, best graphics, best gameplay and best social system clearly! And the combat system it is unique! WARNING: This is not pay to win! IN Tera clearly what you buy more are things like for personalization yourself, mounts and pets!
This is the proof of one thing, loads of people didn't buy the game because of subscription base system! That system is completely dead! TERA like other many subscription based games drop the system for a simple reason, people don't want to pay to play games. They prefer to have the choice and pay what they want, that's why the Free to play games are more profitable. Take WoW for example used to be the game most played on line and now the subscriptions are drooping more then 50% every year for 5 years! Most of the free to? play games have more player base then wow right now, WOW some time in the future don't have choice then turn F2P to.
Great news for all of us ! I like to hear what Eddie's have to say, especially when it comes to Bethesda. The Elder scrolls online is everything I need to hear.
1 Like Why is adding 500k players important? In F2P, if I'm looking at it from a business perspective, I don't care about players. I want to see revenue. If those 500k players aren't spending money, then I'd see that 500k player increase as a problem, not a benefit.
@mwenk2005 I think of MMO players as "part of the content", with empty servers and lengthy queues, everything falls apart. Having heaps of players at least counts as "something".
@aryanbrar wouldn't say big boob, nicely shaped & lack of armour. Like lancer class for example is meant to be a tank, but the armour is so little. :p
Once any game goes free to play, the amount of people playing it becomes irrelevant to whether the game is a "success" or not. 500k new players is a detriment if none, or only a few, are paying anything.
@mrboone01 but your so stupid to not realize that those people will end up spending more $$ on bs little items then regular people will pay on subscription
i gave it a shot but i was meh...
guild wars 2 is still my new baby.. got to 80 pretty fast and then void. Now with the new content i have new "end game" goals and having lots of fun again.The game still has flaws tho
@carolino Might actually give GW2 a try heard good things about it..tho Im actually enjoying TERA atm. High Elf female in g-string fighting big ass monster. :p
I hate this, they blocked ip of my country :@ for what ? so that we couldn't play this game... its damn too lame when you cant protect your servers from hackers just simply block their ip
GET A LIFE and learn from WOW.
?£?G??ÐÅR??
Playn time to time, Quite good game and good F2P style also, Who's interested in good MMo with good graphics and gameplay try this game.
I played it last month for a bit then uninstalled it, the combat is very fun but there wasn't any intensive to keep playing.
more A-holes to pk over slim resources...but this game is doomed to fail regardless of what paymodel they chose...the game is designed poorly and implemented poorly..unless that is fixed then we can talk.
@IanNottinghamX Sadly this game currently has one of the best and fun gameplay I've seen in a MMO
1 Like Only thing TERA really offers is unique take on controls which gets interesting seeing as you have to aim and dodge as a situation calls for it not just your old fashioned auto tabtargeting
other then that it's pretty generic, i personally liked and still do GW2 a lot more...and yes i was one of those ppl who paid for TERA when it came out and subscribed for a whole year...then quit when GW2 came out and now this... -___-"
The quests are too generic. I'm forcing myself to play it and seems like a chore. At what level it gets fun?
@jorge69696 you are right about quest fun comes when you join partys guilds and try to help each others
Two things:
1.) I'm glad I didn't buy Tera, because I would have been PISSED and wanted a refund when it went F2P. After I got burned by SWTOR I vowed never to buy another MMO, oh yeah and I called EA up and threatened to sue their ass if I didn't get a $200 refund.
2.) When did Tera go F2P??? I didn't even know they were going to.
1) I have to say, TERA handled the F2P transition VERY well. If you paid for it at any time you got the "founders" package (Essentially everything unlocked which F2P accounts would have to buy, like bag space, banks slots, character slots, etc), the only thing you don't get is the ongoing bonuses for subbing.
TOR's F2P is the worst implementation in the business by FAR, I checked the game out after paying for a year of subs and was given NOTHING, not even the goddamn skill bars. Uninstalled it immediately.
2) Early Feb iirc?
I thought going F2P might get me interested in TERA again..Nope. I really wanted to like the game but pretty colors and a decent combat system isn't enough to keep me playing for more than a few weeks.
Decent game when you play a class you like. Put in the time to try each; I, for one, hate the way the melee classes play, but have been having a blast with the sorcerer.
2 Like These articles about how many more players a game gets after it goes F2P are so misleading. Any game is going to get a surge of players, because It's being touted as free. What they don't talk about is the drop-off and turn over rate of the player base. When a player hits that "glass ceiling" where they can't do anything more or progress any further unless they shell out money, sometimes lots of money, they typically quit.
Tera easily has the best gameplay out of all the MMORPGs. Unfortunately the story is a bit lacking, and it's taken them a while to get certain features into the game.
Hopefully the F2P model will fuel their development for the foreseeable future, and maybe more games will adopt the action oriented style of gameplay, rather than the behind-the-scenes-dice-rolling approach.
@chibi-acer Totally agree. Definitely best game play in any MMORPG I have played. Which sucks in a way because it's hard to go back to a tab-target style after playing an awesome action-combat game type. Too bad the developers were jackasses and did not stick to what they promised, and ruining the whole vanarch system as well.
1 Like I guess I can respect if that's your thing. But I feel like I'm on mmo burn out. EVE, FireFall, I think diablo 3 and star-craft 2 somehow count. Any of these, all mmo games'll keep you pretty freaking busy that's for damn sure.
Tera is not perfect but it is neither that bad. I've a lvl 47 Castanica Warrior. The only problem is that playing it with a 360 controller is a mess. I don't know why, but the toon often goes in a direction different from which I want it to go, so that is really bad. I only I could fix that problem...
i was one of them, its actually a very good game and the community is the best ive seen in an MMO, and ive tried most of them all the way back to ultima online and Legend of Mir. theres no nerdraging in global chat, theres no eleetism, everyone is friendly and helpful. I put this down to the sheer amount of boob and ass on show from the characters hehe. Give it a go.
1 Like Gameforge is European Tera, so this numbers have NOTHING to do with NA Tera....terribly written article.
@xenexprime IF these numbers are actually true (which I highly doubt) they must be both NA and EU numbers.
And I do doubt these numbers are true because when I left Tera in November last year it wasn´t close to 500k subs - on the contrary, the game was seemingly dying with probably 100k subs at best at that time and we never got any official numbers because they were actually so bad...
So honestly, something is fishy here.
@Snake_Eater It's true lol, Player base have grown up, i'm playng on eu and it's high populated also.
New "Rising" version of MMORPG to be available without subscription fee next month with no level cap or content restrictions for new players.
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