Instead of having users pay for warlight, why not just put up some ads? You could make lots of money. The people who have already payed would get their money back, of course.
Or you can continue having some people pay, but instead of giving them more benefits, simply disable the ads for them.

Fizzer was pretty detailed in his explanation of why he chose this method rather than ads: http://blog.warlight.net/index.php/2011/02/lets-talk-about-warlight-1-0/

Randy wrote about it here: http://blog.warlight.net/index.php/2011/02/lets-talk-about-warlight-1-0/

Basically, ads are either nice and barely profitable, or in-your-face and mildly profitable.

And Warlight has high per-user cost of hosting, will all the games being created, played and saved forever and stuff.

you could do a mixture if there is a wide appeal amongst non-paid members..


I played a game once with a freemium type model, where non-paid members had ads, while paid ones didn't *as well as many other benefits* this could add in some profit for Fizzer, while encouraging players to subscribe..

I think most of the negative feedback we're getting is from people having lost somethat that was previously free.. imho, future players won't make a fuss about it, or in most instances probably won't realize there is anything to make a fuss about...