'Mounts and pets and costumes and dyes,' Creative Director Chad Moore tells me. How do you get people to buy things without making the game unfair or pay-to-win? Fortunately, Carbine opted for an in-game shop that relies heavily on vanity items. Part of that time was spent figuring out a new revenue model. 'If you're not building your game with a free-to-play model in place, you could turn around and just kind of slap a bunch of kind of hap-dash systems on there,' Donatelli says, 'but we wanted to make sure we were doing it right so it's taken us quite quite a while to actually transition.' Donatelli says that over 100 people have been working for over eight months to make the changes necessary to transform the subscription-based game into a free-to-play game. They needed more players and 'livelier servers' for the players already on board. The first line of offense was simply more content drops but with subscription numbers still struggling, Carbine and publisher NCSoft settled on what's largely become conventional wisdom in the MMO space: The best way to reel in new players is to get rid of subscription fees and let players play for free. And while neither Carbine nor NCSoft will discuss subscription numbers, they couldn't have been pretty. It was only a matter of months before Carbine realized their mistake. We knew that maybe there should have been a change but it was too late and we were committed to launching the game.'

'We built the entire game to support a subscription model so by the time we were ready to launch and the landscape had changed dramatically, we kind of were in for it. 'Honestly, it's kind of in for a penny, in for a pound,' Donatelli says.

By then, Donatelli says, it was too late.

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