It’s still far too early to get confirmed details about many things concerning The Elder Scrolls Online, and one of those is whether or not the game will have a subscription fee or be free to play. One analyst named Nicholas Lovell (founder of Gamebrief) is convinced we’ll have to pay a monthly fee to play TES.

The reasoning behind it is that since the game’s development started way back in 2007 when pay-to-play games were at their peak The Elder Scrolls will adopt the same business model.

“It is conceivable that Bethesda will launch with a subscription service to attract the early adopters, because that is the model they understand.”

Dozens of MMORPGs switched to freemium over the past couple of years, many of which used to have monthly subscriptions. For games such as Age of Conan it worked great and saved the game from the brink of shutting down. Even Star Wars: The Old Republic, a fairly recently launched MMORPG is struggling to keep subscription numbers up, and an upcoming switch to F2P wouldn’t surprise me.

Lovell does believe that The Elder Scrolls Online will launch with a monthly fee but will eventually switch to F2P:

“It is conceivable that Bethesda will launch with a subscription service to attract the early adopters, because that is the model they understand.”

…

“They will switch to free-to-play later, in the same way that many iOS games go from paid to freemium over their lifetime,”

It does in fact make sense. Considering the insane popularity of previous The Elder Scrolls titles and especially Skyrim, many players will be jumping on the bandwagon and play this game. If many of the players end up being disappointed in the game, switching to free to play is a logical choice.

We barely know anything about TESO currently and this is just speculation, but I’m sure we’re all crossing our fingers that ZeniMax can make one amazing game worth playing, regardless of the price.