MAG to Charge 99 Cents Per Month For Additional Soldier Slots

Last week, Zipper Interactive announced that they’d be “giving players the option to create and maintain multiple characters in the MAG universe.” MAG players everywhere grateful for the decision, since the ability to maintain only a single soldier per account is a cumbersome, annoying system. Today, however, Zipper told us about the giant asterisk attached to their previous promise: players will have to pay a dollar per month to keep extra soldier slots on their profiles.

“Gamers who log in this afternoon will discover two additional slots below their original default character. For $0.99 (US) per added slot, players can select the extra character they want to unlock and create a brand new persona,” they stated.

The perk? That while characters will only last for 30 days after your purchase, they’d still remain in the MAG servers until you decide to pay up again–they won’t just delete your soldiers.

“Don’t fret if you decide not to renew one or both of them immediately. Once your extra characters have been created, they reside safely dormant on the MAG server until activated for subscription once again.”

Could this move by Zipper be a sign of things to come in terms of online multiplayer games and subscriptions to them/paid features associated with those games? In any case it’ll be interesting to see how many people actually bite on this “offer,” and how many people will simply do the usual ‘delete the character you’re bored with and start a new one in a different faction’.