Stomping on up
After what seems like years of rumors and speculation, the free-to-play shooter MechWarrior Online is finally making the move to Steam. According to a news post on the MWO website, the Steam launch will happen on December 10, moving surprisingly quickly after playing coy with the idea for so many years. There is no word yet on what will be involved in the switch from an entirely stand-alone client to being a part of Steam (one assumes there will be a way for existing players to port their accounts over), but PGI is raffling off tickets to a launch party with the dev team at their studio in Vancouver, so there’s that.
Of course, it wouldn’t be MWO without a good amount of drama. While at first blush the idea of moving the game to Steam would seem like a no-brainer (more players, potentially more scrutiny to address bugs, maybe better pricing schemes to compete with other free-to-play titles on the service, etc.), the reaction from the community has been decidedly mixed. Forum posts range from exulting the move as if it were the return of Kerensky himself (don’t worry, BattleTech nerds got that reference), to saying it will be the final nail in the coffin for MWO — for reasons.
I’d write the complainers off as cynics, but we all saw what happened to poor old Hawkenwhen it made the switch. Hopefully this won’t be a case of a history repeating for mech fans.