Carbine Studios is part of NCSoft, which has been in a very financially bad position in the past couple of months. NCSoft was hit with a substantial round of cutbacks this past April, in which made them gave off their in-house customer support to an outsider or third party, which is likely somewhere, where the rate of pay is much less expensive than maintaining an in-house client support agents.
That being said, Carbine has recently announced starting September 29, this year, WildStar will transition from a paid subscription to Free to Play (F2P) game economic model in order to sustain the game. Carbine Studios also announced that aside from the F2P business model adaptation, they will also release the WildStar's closed beta test, a new build for the game which will be coined WildStar Reloaded.
Anyone can sign up for the Free to Play WildStar and any current and active subscribers, will be given an access to the beta staged WildStar Reloaded.
Carbine Studios' WildStar was formally released in the market on June 2014, and had a modest commercial success, with regards to the sales and membership subscriptions. What drew the crowd from getting WildStar was the fact that its developers are former Blizzard Entertainment, which is responsible for the hit series Warcraft.
However, after a couple of months of paid subscription, the sales start to go down which prompted Carbine and NCSoft to reconsider the Free to Play business model, in which they have finally gave in after a couple of debate and discussions of whether to adapt the model or not.
Just to point out how NCSoft is badly broken, financially wise, in October 2014, Carbine needed to cut back more than 60 percent of its development employees, less than five months after WildStar's launch, which was likely because of the game's disappointing sales and membership subscriptions.
NCSoft's move to make their WildStar adapt the Free to Play business model is not strange in the arena as other paid subscription MMORPG games had transitioned to the F2P platform due to the paid subscription's tendency to be a high maintenance venture.
On the other hand, despite the downward trend of the paid subscription MMORPG, game pioneers World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV were living proof that a paid subscription game can survive the stiff competition of the paid membership MMPORPG arena.
