Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) killed by Zenimax before launch

[Borgholio]

Not actually. EVE lets you buy game time using in-game currency. I haven't paid for my EVE subscription with real money in over two years.

EVE's certainly an interesting one. I don't want to play a game with its approach to griefing, but it's often good fun to read about it from the outside. Like that bank that vanished when the founder converted all its assets into battleship, spent the rest on a bounty on his own head and went off into deep space, cackling like a supervillain.

Heh, yeah shit like that happens all the time. EVE is basically one big soap opera sandbox, which makes it entertaining as hell. I've seen corp thefts, lottery scams, banks going under, people taking advantage of game mechanic loopholes that literally wipe out entire alliances just for shits and giggles.

Best part for me was last Christmas when CCP added a Santa Claus spaceship to EVE and had it fly around from system to system delivering gifts.

Some asshole blew him up.

[Broken]

As for pay-to-play MMO's, Final Fantasy XIV ARR just relaunched a matter of days ago. So far it has managed to pull a Guild Wars 2 with stopping the sale of digital copies and not allowing the creation of new characters on most (all?) servers. While it remains to see if it will flare out like GW2 did, there is still at least some market (FFXI, FFXIV, EVE) for pay to play MMO's. As for ESO, no idea; what I have seen/read so far does not impress and certainly not subscription worthy. I also would love to see a "reduced" sub cost for access to one or two toons in WoW to mess around with, I have not touched it in years, but it would be interesting. Of course, FFXIV gave its "legacy" members (folks who subbed to FFXIV 1.0) a permanent (?) reduction in their subscription price, so the idea is floating around out there somewhat.

[TheFeniX]

Brand name. It's the biggest mmo out there and has brand power behind it.

That's how it works now, but it isn't so much brand power as it is numerous time-sinks and "just over that hill" style of content progression. There's more to MMOs than just PvE Dungeons/questing/raiding and PvP. A lot of MMO developers just can't seem to realize that and wonder why they lose their playerbase at endgame.