Rumor: Wildstar Going free to Play and Launching on Steam

Wildstar is reportedly going to be free to play and available on Steam soon according to a screen capture of an upcoming new Steam release as seen here. The game's billing type is listed as "Free on Demand" which simply means free to play with optional cash purchases. Those interested in learning more can see the game's official steam package here.

Willdstar is NCSoft's sci-fi themed MMORPG with brightly colored graphics. It launched as a pay to play game with a subscription on June 3, 2014 and after a lot of initial buzz, the game's playerbase fell. A free to play Wildstar could give the game a much needed boost in players possibly make it much more profitable for NCSoft. Wildstar wouldn't be the first subscription based game to go free to play. Since Tera dropped its subscription and went free to play, the game's playerbase has exploded and the game became much more popular.

Users on Reddit's MMORPG subreddit are speculating that the game may be relaunched as a buy to play game with no monthly subscription.

Update: A post on reddit from a Carbine employee (Proof sent to mods of his position) claimed that WildStar is embracing a hybrid free to play model in August, 2015. His full post is:

Hello everyone! As has oft been discussed around here, Wildstar is going to be changing its business model in August(tentatively of course, patch stuff etc) to a Hybridized Free to Play model. Now thankfully it is not going Pay to Win, I suppose you could call it "Freemium" in a way as a lot of the stuff that the paid accounts will get is buffs to experience/rep/renown etc gain and character slots and the like, no direct power buffs or anything like that.

MTX (Microtransactions) will be included moving forward as well and you will hear more about that very soon. What are your thoughts on the model? I personally like it and am excited as I can't see how this wouldn't bring players back and new players in.

Feel free to ask me anything about the game, company, folly of man, etc.