When I was in high school, I could do the splits. I'm pretty proud of that, so I thought you should know - but also, that's about what I imagine striking a "flexible" balance between subscriptions and free-to-play in the modern MMO space to feel like. That, however, is exactly what THQ's hoping to do with Warhammer 40K: The Dark Millennium. How?
"The markets are different around the world for the business models with which you can ship an MMO," CEO Brian Farrell said during a recent conference call (via IndustryGamers ). "So what we've done is make the business model within Dark Millennium Online flexible, so we can use different business models in different territories and exploit the game on a worldwide basis."
"We will have not just one business model, like subscriptions. There will be other monetization mechanisms in the game... The team there is being very thoughtful about how we maximize monetization in this game."
So then, we could be looking at anything: subscriptions, microtransactions, fingernail-prying labor in the salt mines - you name it. Here's hoping, however, that players' wallets don't end up getting torn to shreds in the crossfire.
