Codemasters Online interview

An MMORPG that's completely free to download, free to play and with no need to spend as you progress through the game? Surely too good to be true? Not according to Codemasters Online, who have made not one, but two of their MMOs 100% free to play. In this issue, we talk to them about ArchLord and RF Online and find out exactly what's on offer for free. Find out if it really is as good as it sounds in our full interview with Codemasters Online's David Solari.
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Codemasters Online interview
In what can only be described as a daring move, Codemasters Online announced a few months ago that one of your top MMORPGs, ArchLord, is going to become a completely free-to-play, free-todownload game. Then, a few months ago Codemasters Online announced that from Oct 17th RF Online will also be following suit, in that it's free to download, and free to play. To many outsiders, this may seem like an incredibly risky move - what was the motivation behind Codemasters Online decision?

It was a daring and risky move; however Codemasters Online is committed to developing the online games market in the West. To develop the market we need to be bold and explore new business models. There are a number of lighter free to play experiences in the West and some of these have been successful. We looked at what they had done and decided to experiment.

It wasn't a spur of the moment decision, we have been planning to do this with ArchLord for about four months and we were waiting for an updated shop functionality and the ArchLord system to come from our development partner. I'm pleased to say that ArchLord has really flourished since we went free client/free to play. Concurrency has increased by over 700% and we have had to open a new world to cope with the demand. We had always planned to do the same with RF Online if it worked well with ArchLord.

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