It won't be too much longer before Anthem officially launches this month, and in order to give players a better idea of what's to come in the full release, Electronic Arts and BioWare have provided an open demo for this weekend. Of course, as with the majority of games, the action-RPG has gone through a lengthy development process in order to make it to where it is now, dropping some aspects and adding others. Speaking of which, it looks as if EA and BioWare had initially considered designing the game with a free-to-play model during its early development phase.

According to Anthem director Jonathan Warner and lead producer Ben Irving, the preliminary stages of the game's creation saw BioWare and EA discussing whether or not a free-to-play model would be viable for the game before abandoning the concept altogether. During these talks, the companies eventually decided that such a model wouldn't be fitting for a AAA release, as the development team would have to forego providing a service model beneficial for players and not have free DLC. Fully elaborating on the matter, Irving said:

If you go free-to-play, you still have to have a profitable business or we can’t continue to do an amazing live service for all our players. So what would you really be trading if you gave the game away for free? There’s all that money you’d have to make to be profitable. And so then you get into the territory of being less player-generous. I think in the triple-A space, people are more comfortable paying the entry fee and then having a great player-generous model with no paid DLC, and optional vanity items that you can earn in-game currency to buy anyway.

Without a doubt, free-to-play business models for video games can be incredibly lucrative and serviceable to players, as it opens up the experience to practically anyone with a stable Internet connection and a PC, console, or even mobile gaming device. Fortnite is a solid example of this, but not every game can reach the success of the Battle Royale title, much less maintain such frequent serviceability to its fans, and Anthem would have been risking fiscal insolvency should it have put itself in the same free-to-play arena as the Epic Games title.

All things considered, it's safe to presume that most players will be glad that EA and BioWare decided to eschew any free-to-play designs for Anthem, and opted for a more traditional business model instead so as to set certain levels of expectations for the release. And as previously mentioned, the open demo is live this weekend, so players on all platforms will get to see if the game's base contents should be worth a Day One purchase. Hopefully, the infinite load screen problem will be an infrequent occurrence this time around so gamers can get unfettered access to the demo's content.

Anthem is scheduled to release on February 22, 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Sourc: EDGE (via GamingBolt)