Bravo Trion, Bravo.

No, I am not being sarcastic with the header. I am truly, truly giving Trion a nice, standing ovation.

Just to be clear, I do not believe that Trion is the Luke Skywalker to Blizzard or EA's Darth Vader as fans make them out to be. Trion themselves try to enchance the impression that they are what everyone else wants bigger developers to be.

Truth of the matter is that, while. as a relatively small company that automatically garners empathy from their customers almost as if they are an independent (or "indie") developer, they are still a big company with big goals. Not EA or Activision levels naturally, but large nonetheless.  They are not immune to bad press or bad decisions, but are small enough to be able to disappear through the cracks of larger news (i.e. next gen consoles, EA gaffes, etc.).

No, if nothing else shows that Trion is just your average corporation, there is always Defiance.

So why am I applauding Trion despite them being a cold, heartless company? It is because they seem to have such an uncanny sense of timing, marketing, and making things accessible.

Flash back to late 2010. World of Warcraft's playerbase was only getting larger but big companies were getting ready to attempt to take a piece of that consumer pie. In particular, Guild Wars and Star Wars: The Old Republic were getting their big guns ready to come out of the gate blazing. But they were at least one or two years away. There was just a huge gap of practically nothing noteworthy being released for the MMO genre.

Then a few months later comes lesser known Trion Worlds that suprised a lot of people with their MMO offering beta weekends. There is no shaking the fact that this was a huge marketing ploy for pre-ordering the game, but it was quite an excellent game. It was pretty much like World of Warcraft but with enough differences and improvements to be a fresh experience to experienced gamers.

Needless to say, Rift was a huge hit on release. Not only was it a great game in it's own right, it was lauched early 2011 when there were no other major competitors other than World of Warcraft. They even had monthly updates to the game, which, even now, is rather unprecidented.

It didn't take long for subscriber levels to shrink and larger competitors started showing up. Still, Trion was able to use this time to gear up and, just as they did during release, brought out their first expansion when there were no other major announcements from competitors.

Now that Rift is going free to play, they appear to be capitalizing on the one thing competitors like Neverwinter doesn't have - previous gamers. In advance of their free to play release, Rift has now become playable to anyone who has bought their game, even if you only played the free month that came with the original game 2 years ago.

Granted, the Storm Legion expansion has to be bought in order to play that content, Trion's partnership with media and the Raptr service (raptr.com) has provided a lot of free copies. In fact, Raptr still has some codes to give out should you meet their requirements. This is how I got my copy, but I certainly was willing to shell out the $40 to get the expansion when free to play started.

I know it is just circumstantial evidence, and my own experiences cannot be read as fact, but logging in to Rift duing prime gaming hours saw a bustle of activity from people coming back to the game and trying it out again. In many dungeon groups, 3 out of 5 would state that they have come back after months of hiatus. Sometimes, everyone in the group was trying to relearn the game, which proved very interesting.

In order for people to be willing to pay for virtual items in a game, they have to be able to play the game and Trion seems to understand this. Having free players access to all content is just a great decision which also been good for games like Guild Wars.

I have no doubt there will be a spike of players once the free to play update goes live. The question will be how much of that player base they can retain and, among those, how many would regularly buy from the store. Only time will tell, but for now I can say that it's good to be back to Telara.