Was wondering what happened to the life time premium membership they sold when the game first started?
Lifetime subscriptions for The Secret World were removed from sale back in February 2016.
Any players who had them were granted lifetime patron membership (read: subscriber status) in Secret World Legends when they did their account transfer. The process was automated and relatively painless during the relaunch, but nowadays will require contacting Customer Service and having them manually apply it to your linked SWL account. But they are still honoring them.
Thx
They should still sell them but they donât. Lifetime leads to people sticking around when they normally would lapse the premium because they invested money in it and want a return on investment. Lifetimes also ensure you have active players, who, when provided with a deal very well might buy aurum if something cool comes around. Additionally, it generates a large amount of revenue at one time that was never guaranteed in the first place. Logic would dictate that if the lifetime costs more than the average number of subscription months a player buys then it is a net positive, but they have the stats though, maybe the lifetimes stuck around and never buy anything and they feel they lost moneyâŠidk.
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I think we can be reasonably certain that the decision to discontinue the sale of the Grand Master package was made based on actual data and not âfeelingsâ.
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I by no means was implying emotional decision making in a corporate company, the term âfeel they lostâ is just a saying, consistent with something like âbelieve they lostâ or âconsider it a lossâ.
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Semantics. The fact that they never brought back lifetime membership, not even as a seasonally limited thing, in the more than four years since its discontinuation should be evidence enough that the data shows that theyâve made the right decision.
I deleted my post because forum arguments are dumb, I made a logical argument and assumed nothing.
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I think they did make the right decision. I bought it back when they made a big advertising push to sell it, because I figured they must have cash-flow problems and needed my support. In the long term theyâd have had more money from me if Iâd carried on subscribing (which I was happy to do); now I only pay for things occasionally, as much to support the game as anything else. I think lifetime membership might be workable in future, but only if they plan to start releasing paid for packages of substantial new content, and the lifetime membership didnât include that new content, so people like me would have an excuse to give them some more money to get it.
Companies sell lifetime membership when they need short term cash. When that need goes away, they regret their decision to have sold lifetime memberships and often will try to change the rules. American Airlines for example also sold lifetime membership when they were in difficulties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAirpass
Funcom aggressively promoted the lifetime membership for four years and quit a year before relaunching secret world, so saying that it wasnât a âsuccessâ is ignoring a lot of data. The situation of the company simply changed.
American Airlines AAirpass is a good example why lifetime membership can be a horrible horrible ideaâŠAmerican Airline might have gotten money out of it short term but payed front, back and center for it in return over the years. They lost 2 to 3 digit millions on that particular venture.
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