<cite>Hellgate</cite>'s Subscription Structure Meeting With Public Disapproval

The pricing and content structure for Hellgate: London has been cause for much speculation and confusion in the gaming community, prompting Flagship's Bill Roper to post a letter explaining both the subscription breakdown and the reasoning behind it.

Basically, *Hellgate *is free to play out of the box, either solo or in multiplayer, but if you want any new content after that, you're going to have to subscribe:

In short, what subscribers are getting is new content – not simply
“better” things. Another way of thinking of this would be that we’re delivering smaller expansions over time rather than having players wait a year or more before they finally get something new.

This has been met with some pretty serious negativity from gamers who don't want to have to subscribe to a game that isn't an MMO. As far as I can tell, players who pay get some nice perks, but certainly nothing so must-have that the "optional" subscription would really be anything but. So, what do we think...are these people just being whiners or is Flagship screwing players?

A Letter From Bill Roper [Hellgate Guru, via Gaming Nexus]