NCSoft’s forthcoming MMO Wildstar adopts an interesting business approach where gamers will be able to either pay a subscripton, or play hard and get the game for free. Jeremy Gaffney of Carbine Studios explains how things will work over at the official site.

Quote:

First thing’s first: you buy WildStar (either via a box or downloading) – this will give you 30 days of free gameplay. After that, you have two options to play, or pay, for your game time.

Option 1: Monthly subscription

Option 2: C.R.E.D.D.

A monthly subscription is pretty standard fare – you probably know what that’s all about.  Subscribe, and every month you pay for another 30 days of game time.  Straightforward.

But some people don’t like subscriptions. Maybe they just want to play for free, maybe they’ve been burned by a subscription game before and dislike the model.  OK, we hear you – for you guys we have C.R.E.D.D.

So for those of you who don’t want to pay a subscription fee: you can use your first month of gameplay to earn gold while playing WildStar. When the next month comes around, instead of paying the monthly subscription fee, you can use gold earned in-game to purchase C.R.E.D.D. from other players on the CX. Boom, you cash in a C.R.E.D.D for a month of game time. You can continue this cycle over & over again, enabling you to “play to pay” for WildStar.

So that sounds good – but what about those players who don’t have as much time as they’d like to play WildStar, but want a little extra in-game gold? Those folks can purchase C.R.E.D.D. online from our store and trade it on the CX for gold: basically trading their extra cash to help another player play for free in return for a pile of gold. We see this as a safe and secure way for players who want to buy gold to have a way of getting some in-game cash without funding gold farming outfits and all the hacking and scamming that can entail.