Unless I'm mistaken, Falcon BMS is free after you purchase Falcon 4.0. Then the game development has been taken over by players. So yes, your friend would be biased against paying a subscription when he has an FTP maintained by players after MicroProse gave up the business.
All of this still reads like people trying to get Hitech to make an FTP so they can stop paying a subscription.
I think the point people are trying to make here isn't "I want to stop paying my subscription and fly my P-51D for free!" It's "There are so many other air combat games, and more specifically WW2 flight sim games, out there today that are either F2P, have a F2P aspect, or are a 1 time purchase why would any new players pay the sub for AH2 when there are all these cheaper options out there?"
No one here has said that they want the game to go F2P so they can fly their favorite plane without paying $15 a month. Our concerns are that the game is going to die because of the $15 a month subscription. New players get 2 weeks to try the game out and see if they like it and then that's it. They have to pay a subscription each month to keep playing. Only the most hardcore of WW2 buffs who can see the potential of AH2 will probably pay the sub. The casual gamer though that just wants to fly around and shoot stuff probably won't, and why would they? They could go get any one of the Il2 games for a 1 time purchase. They could get War Thunder for free. They can get DCS for free and buy the specific plane that they want for a 1 time purchase, and this game I have been playing a lot recently and have found to be just as fun (even more fun is some ways) as AH2.
The question people are asking here is whether or not a subscription based game is going to work anymore in this day and age where everything else is F2P or has F2P aspects.
Just as 1 example, Planetside 2. This game is an MMO kind of similar to AH2 in some ways and it's 100% F2P. You can download it and get all the content in the game without having to spend a dime. However the game does have a subscription aspect to it. If you like the game enough then you can become a subscriber and get some perks such as double XP on the last weekend of each month, special daily sales that give you a discount on all items in game, and several other perks that F2P players just don't get and won't get unless they subscribe as well. AH2 could do this, just not as extreme I think. Let F2P players have access to some of the higher ENY planes (P-40C and E, i-16, Pnzr 4F, B-25) and if they like the game and want to fly some of their favorite planes (P-51D, B-17, Tiger, etc) then they can start a subscription.
Of course, at the end of the day this is HT's game and he will decide on what AH2 is going to do. We're just having a discussion and throwing out possibilities for the game here.
