Guild Wars 2 won't go free-to-play in China, but a free trial is coming soon

NCSoft hopes that a China launch will be the cure for Guild Wars 2‘s flagging sales. But now, the company has announced its China monetization strategy: in China as elsewhere, the game will cost one up-front payment, after which it is free to play forever.

That might seem like a good thing, but Chinese gamers prefer the free-to-play model, so any game with an up-front cost is likely to attract fewer players than free games. In an attempt to combat this, China publisher Kongzhong will be running a two-week-long free trial in China starting March 11 so that players can give it a shot before deciding if they want to shell out the full price.

But what that full price is could be another issue in and of itself. NCSoft hasn’t announced the official China price and plans to poll players about what a suitable price would be, but it may not like the results.

In the US, for example, the game retails for $50-$70, depending on which edition you purchase. But Chinese gaming site 17173 has already started polling readers about what price they’d want for the game, and with more than 20,000 respondents voting, the results overwhelmingly favor a game priced between 1-100 RMB ($0-$16, 46% of the votes) or 100-200 RMB ($16-$32, 28% of the votes). Only 11% said they thought a price of more than 300 RMB ($49+) was reasonable.

(via 17173)