While The Elder Scrolls Online is expected to be a big hit whenever it is released in 2014, some fans are upset the game will require a monthly subscription rather than be a free-to-play game. One CEO of a major MMORPG studio recently defended Bethesda's decision to carry a monthly fee for The Elder Scrolls Online.

In a blog post for MMORPG, Ryan Dancey, CEO of developer behind Pathfinder Online, revealed that while it may seem popular to make recent MMO games free to play, most developers make the majority of their revenue by charging users monthly subscriptions.

"If we consider the MMOs that generate the most revenue in the Western market (North America, Europe, Russia, and Australia / New Zealand) a sizeable majority of the revenue being generated is in the form of monthly subscriptions," wrote Dancey. 

The CEO backed up his claims with a chart detailing revenue generated monthly by subscription MMO games such as Club Penguin, World of Warcraft, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Dancey concluded that these games make a huge amount of money from subscriptions, a total that's estimated to be much more than the revenue of free-to-play games.

"I believe that more than $100 million is being paid by subscribers every month in the Western MMORPG market...It's even harder to estimate how much revenue is being generated from microtransactions (MTX) but it is extremely difficult to imagine that the revenue even approaches 50 percent of the amount being paid as subscription fees. Half the subscription revenue is coming from World of Warcraft and Blizzard has just begun to dip its toe in the MTX revenue stream. MTX revenue will clearly increase over the next several years but until and unless there's a major shift in the market, it will remain a junior partner to subscriptions in terms of revenue generation," he wrote. 

While fans may enjoy not paying subscription fees to play a game, others enjoy the benefits that come with a monthly subscription. With the system clearly a money maker for developers, it looks as though subscription-based MMO games are not going away anytime in the near future.