Star Trek Online Going Free-to-Play

Seeking Alpha offers a transcript of the earnings call with Perfect World CEO Kelvin Lau in which he reveals that their wholly owned studio Cryptic “is working on the free-to-play model for Star Trek Online”, which “is going to be launched by the end of this year”. The whole statement on Cryptic:

As I mentioned, I think Cryptic, we’re going to consolidate the Cryptic’s financial statements starting from mid August. So clearly when that was compared with the whole group, it is still small and insignificant. So I do expect the revenue contribution from Cryptic will be not be so significant in Q3, especially only one-and-a-half months of consolidation.

Cryptic, the situation right now there, they have almost turnaround very recently, so the impact on the bottom line is also very minimal to the whole group. So as mentioned, we are expecting the big titles we recognized which is going to be launched in the coming year. So and then we will keep on adding for acquiring Cryptic is previously Cryptic is very keen on looking on all those substitution based model game.

So when Perfect World acquired Cryptic, one of the contribution from Perfect World to Cryptic is we can share our free-to-play experience with Cryptic. So I want to emphasize is that never we’ve done a free-to-play model game, so we’re going to launch this game in US and also in China, so we expect to run these type if free-to-play model game. We have a bigger potential in US and also in China. And also Star Trek Online, after the acquisition, in fact Cryptic is working on the free-to-play model for Star Trek Online. This is going to be launched by the end of this year as well. So I think free-to-play model we have a bigger potential in US market and also in China market. Thank you.

Thanks Joystiq.