WildStar Uses In-game Gold as Subscription Payment Option

Carbine Studios’ WildStar, a new and stylized MMORPG, has announced that a subscription is required but you won’t have to fork over your own cash. In-game gold can be substituted in order to afford the subscription cost. How awesome is that?

Carbine Studios has a pretty innovated business model that they are trying with WildStar. Players must first purchase the $59.99 game and this includes a month of access and 3 “guest passes” to lure your friends into the imaginative world. To stay in the game, players can either sign up for a traditional subscription which costs around $14.99 a month (or lower depending on if you preordered the game) or by spending their in-game gold on “CREDD.”

Now “CREDD,” Certificate of Research, Exploration, Destruction and Development, is pretty complicated. It can add an additional 30 days to your game. The resource originates on the Carbine Studios website, where it can be purchased for $19.99; after that, players can sell it on the in-game Commodities Exchange for gold. After that we get into all this stuff you probably learned in your high school economics class all those years ago about how if demand goes up there will hopefully be more “CREDD” to buy.

Instead of me boring you with a lecture on supply and demand, lets just say that “CREDD” will definitely be for the more experienced players. Honestly, there will probably be some serious tutorials on it in the future. In an interview with Polygon, executive producer Jeremy Gaffney said,

“There’s two kinds of players we see that we need to make happy. Player number one is, they don’t want to pay a sub. They just want to play the game. Well, okay, they can buy CREDD using in-game gold from other players in the Commodities Exchange, like a stock market.

“How does CREDD enter the economy? Well, there’s another class of player. They are happy enough playing the game, but they want to make a little extra in-game gold. What they can do is buy a little CREDD, they get an item they can now trade on the Commodities Exchange for someone else’s gold. What this does is let the free market … basically be the way people can trade their time for money with other players, because some people are time-rich, and some people are cash-rich.”

“CREDD” will also hopefully cut out both gold farmers and the idea that they’re greedily selling in-game wealth for actual money. I must say it’s a very refreshing idea.

“It’s awesome, because it cuts us out of the loop, which is nice,” Gaffrey said. “We’re not selling you gold pieces, because that’s creepy. As a developer, as a publisher, that can rapidly get evil. If we’re going to be like, ‘Give us more money, give us more money and we’ll give you in-game gold,’ I don’t know about you but that feels sleazy to me.”

Hopefully this system will work in WildStar’s favor and get more people excited for the upcoming MMORPG. What do you guys think of the new system? Do you think it’s way to complicated or do you think gaming world needs something like this?

WildStar launches spring 2014 to a computer near you.