Albion Online Will Not Be Free-To-Play

In a surprise announcement on the Albion Online forums the team have informed the community that they do not plan to launch the game with a free-to-play version. The team decided to take the route of another financial model to avoid problems such as botting, spam, over-crowded servers and other features that plague today's typical free-to-play launches.

Our goal is for Albion Online to be a long term success, therefore, we only want to release the game when it is truly up to its potential. The extension of the closed beta period will allow us to make significant improvements to the game.

For this reason, we are putting the free to play plans on hold as well. Making the game ready for a free to play model would take up significant development time which we would much rather use to make a better game. Free to play would also create a lot of risks for the game - spamming, botting, world too small, etc - which we do not want to take if it can be avoided.

When the game goes live, current founder’s packs will be discontinued and replaced with starter packs, which will give full access to the game but offer less value for money than the founder’s packs as this is only fair to all founders who help us in making the game. Of course, all founder's will automatically get full access to the game on release as well.

We are truly overwhelmed by the success of Albion Online thus far and would like to thank all of your for your ongoing support and feedback. Together, we will make sure that Albion Online will be a great game made to last.

The general response from the community has been a positive one and it's more than likely that Albion Online will eventually transfer to a free-to-play model some time after launch.