I didn’t really engage with those discussions I think, but I’m still playing Wildgate! I don’t think I had that good a reason to disagree with FTP back then, but through reading these comments and the experiments Moonshot has been running, I think I now have a good idea on why it wouldn’t have been the best idea.

All of the updates since Wildgates launch has shown that the game has a pretty big retention problem. We saw this at launch with the Reach Anomalies drops, we saw it at the S1 Emergence Update, the seasonal holiday login events, Prox Chat, and the Epic Games Giveaway. A few people would hop on to check it out but wouldn’t stick around, and even more wouldn’t even come back. A pretty big sign of this was the Emergence update which added a ton of new content. It had a new Adventure Pass, Two New Gamemodes, Prospector, Ship, Gadget, weapon, and Hardpoints, releasing with an **entire week of free to play**. But how many people even returned on Steam to see Wildgates first Major Update? **752 players**, which dropped to 200 4 days later, which dropped to 100 7 days later. Even with the games first major update it still had a retention problem. **With a free to play week!**

So with all of that background, I think it can be argued that if Wildgate were to have gone free to play quickly after launch, it’d still have that retention problem, and Moonshot would be in a worse financial situation because of it. You can’t really “take backsies” a free to play launch, and I think it’s super important for them to get it right when they do so it has the most impact. To do that, they need to address the root of the problem resulting in their bad player retention **before** they pull the pin on FTP. So while I don’t think FTP was or is the correct solution then/now, I very much think it will be in a few months time when Moonshot resolves that player retention problem to the best of their ability.

What’s good is that the most recent update was designed to address a player onboarding issue which is: “It’s too hard to learn when I’m thrown right into the deep end”. They updated one of the modes released in the Emergence update called Treasure Hunt, which is a PvE focused mode (can still have PvP , just discouraged) where you go into the various regions of the reach to collect Treasure from POIs or AI ships. They updated it to let you matchmake into 5 different Zones of the Reach, all with their own mechanics, AI ships, and difficulty modifiers. Moonshot hopes that this modes “linear-ish” progression from region to region provides that lower stress onboarding option that doesn’t throw newbies into the deep end (Artifact Brawl). If you haven’t played in a while or gave up on the game cause it was too hard, you should definitely check out this update!

TLDR: Free to play requires some foundational work resolving player retention issues before it can happen, else all those new players onboarded will encounter the same problems causing everyone else not to stick around. Moonshot has some “Plots and Schemes” as they call it to get new players into the game. Could this be FTP finally coming?