User blog comment:Jimeee/Elder Scrolls Online will be subscription based/@comment-173.175.9.174-20130823191305

$15/month wasn't bad for WoW. I wouldn't pay $15/month for WoW these days, and I think that sentiment is being echoed by a lot of other WoW players. With that said, ESO looks and feels a lot like yet another shallow WoW-clone, and its whole existence and reason for being made reeks of a "ME TOO!!!!" move by Zenimax done way, way too late. I assume the reasoning was that since WoW is very much on the decline, the idea was to swoop in and fill the looming void, but the problem is that WoW was innovative for its time. Furthermore, it was an anomaly, and when people copy anomalies, they usually fall flat on their faces. That's why WoW-clone MMOs have historically tanked after the first few months, and the more they seem like what they're aping, the harder they fail. ESO would have a much better chance of success (however small that success might be) by using a buy the game, free to play model. It would risk becoming pay to win, but there's people out there who like to blow money they don't have on virtual pretties, so there would be that. I think if ESO was promising to be something that gave people instant orgasms every five minutes because of how amazing it was, sure. But unless Zenimax is hiding something very, very well, that's just not going to be the case. One of their showcase videos was literally nothing but "Hey guys, you can open barrels! And there will be STUFF inside them!"

So. Yeah.

Granted, I had no interest in this from day one and am just armchair analyzing the hell out of this, so I could be just way, way off-base. But from what I've seen, it's just not going to be the next WoW, nor is it going to be any sort of cash-cow.