As reported a couple months ago Star Trek Online is still on track to becoming free-to-play. It's set to make the jump January 17th, 2012. It'll soon be joining the ranks among DC Universe Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Super Monday Night Combat and even Team Fortress 2 as just a few examples of games who have all hopped on the free-to-play train.
The free-to-play model has been proven to be extremely successful, making it what I think will eventually be the new standard in the MMO market. It's certainly worked for DCUO, helping usher in one million new users within just a week after making the move. It'll be interesting to see how it works out for Star Trek Online, especially in such a competitive market for free-to-play MMO's these days.
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Contest:
6:00 AM on 11.11.2011 | 
Since I could see it ending up with the same fate. If anything it'll do what all MMOs do have a strong launch then a very drastic dip in users after a few months.
If anything, Guild Wars was and is ahead of the curve. Buy-2-Play is the wave of the future.
Star Wars: The Old Republic, now free to play!
@Jawmuncher: Most MMO's that have fizzled out didn't have a strong launch, it's just that they had to recuperate their costs by charging a monthly fee while sustaining as many subscribers as they could for as long as they could realistically maintain a fee-to-subscriber ratio, then, when numbers drop beyond a point they can realistically handle, BAM! FREE-TO-PLAY!
I for one DO NOT think Free to play is the way to go, since it splinters the game, and thus, the community in half(or more, when there are multiple tiers) and the base(free) game is nothing like the full experience.
See the "free to play but not really" World of Warcraft model. The game is free, but you are limited to level 20 MAX, you can't trade, chat, or do anything in the game that is really 'fun' as it doesn't even begin to get truly interesting until later levels. And since WoW has been made newb-friendly to the point that ANYONE can have a max level character now, it's really only there to attract people who wouldn't even get to level 2 much less 20, because of the subscription fee.
@Jawmuncher
I wanted to be all "NO WAY SWTOR WON'T GO THAT WAY GRRRRR GAMEZ RAGE!" but yea... I'm a little fearful that it'll slip into that sooner or later. I think it'll be later rather then sooner however. I really don't believe in my heart of hearts that it'll take that kind of dip and need to go free to play THAT soon.
Actually, Rammstein also hit it on the head when he said none of the games to go F2P so soon had a strong start. People like to claim DCU did and had a load of hype (one of D-toids newer writers said something like that recently I think), but it didn't, it was more or less a failure to launch from the start.
Also, look at Rift. Sure, me and my roommate personally I gave up playing it in the summer because it got boring for us (we didn't want to really join a guild, and after WoW we didn't want to deal with the politics of raiding for a while -so it was more our fault instead of the games, the game is pretty fun, if a little limited at times), but people are still grooving on the game and it seems to be going pretty strong. There's a rather large contingent of people who are looking for a "something-other-then-fantasy" MMO that are probably going to flock to ToR, so if Bioware brings the goods I don't doubt its success will at least rival Rift's.