Star Trek Online went down unexpectedly last night for a few hours. I only ran into the tail end of the outage as I was working on some Enterprise model kits, so it didn’t actually impact my playtime much, but I did realize something.
There really are a lot of people playing STO since the F2P relaunch.
Now, I pretty much already knew this because there’s been a noticeable bump in the number of ships orbiting Earth Spacedock and DS9,as well as a major increase in sector space traffic. But seeing how fast the outage thread grew last night really highlighted for me how much the playerbase has grown.
The upside of downtime.
STO is fairly unique among current FtP offerings, just as it was unique when it was sub based. I speculate that since the barrier to entry is now $0 more of members of the niches that it caters to are trying it. Let alone ST fans, MMO fans just looking for something different should find it appealing. The space combat resembles nothing else I’ve ever played, for example.
The removed subscription has brought in a lot (at least anecdotally) of Star Trek fans who’ve never played an MMO before. People who were curious but weren’t conditioned to pay for a monthly subscription.