Board Thread:Online Discussion/@comment-5107008-20130420101529/@comment-7153552-20130515203616

Nait Nelthar wrote: Didn't read all the answers but ESO will probably start out pay to play then it will go down the same path SWtor did...

The Old Republic went free to play on accident, it's actually a funny story. They opened with far too many servers compared to what their need was. They simply overestimated. After a few months they realized that they didn't need all the extra expenses (I think they opened with what Blizzard had for WoW in late Burning Crusade and hoped for the best) so they started merging servers and openly shutting them down. The only problem with that is when an MMO starts shutting down servers, it looks like they're dead or dying. This made people leave the game, and they weren't making any money at all and it wasn't worth staying subscription based at that point. So they downgraded themselves to F2P so they could get away with lessened expectations and less expenses overall.