Many years ago when my guild was between home games, we decided to conduct a little experiment to entertain ourselves while we waited for a specific launch. Over the course of a few months, we jumped into a new MMO trial every week and played around together. We tried obscure things, betas, games we hadn’t been to in ages, everything from classic Lineage to Anarchy Online. We even played A Tale in the Desert. And while the experiment was fun and gave us stories and memes that we are still repeating to this day, not a single one of those games actually “stuck” with us. We didn’t buy in. Maybe it was the nature of the experiment, or maybe it was the fact that we already knew we were jumping into something else when it launched. Or maybe if those games had appealed to us in the first place, we’d have already been playing them.
Granted, so many MMOs are free-to-play now that “free trials” aren’t really a thing outside of a handful of games, but you could still do this experiment today, and I wonder whether it’s particularly successful. Has a free trial – or a promotion, or the free-to-play equivalent – ever convinced you to buy an MMO or other game?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
