What games can you think of, that have done the change? I haven't been up to date with such things, but the shining examples usually given are Lord of the rings online and DDO. News of giant jumps in revenue, saving fading games and bringing them to glory. Both Turbine games. The problem is, that actually reading the news literally and looking in to things more closely I'm not convinced things are as rosy as the general population seems to think.

Take LOTRO for example. Game was doing ok, but was in serious decline when going F2P. Turbine reported their profits tripling and tons of new players playing the game. One article noted that: "Lord of the Rings Online's future is so bright, it's wearing shades these days." Good times were had by all. Look at LOTRO today. Server populations have decreased since going F2P and are starting to creep back to what they were before the change. The playing population is well below what EVE has for example. It certainly was a short term success and breathed life to a declining game, but there isn't anything to indicate a long term success.

As for DDO I haven't seen any info on it after the initial we boosted revenue by 500% by going F2P. The problem really is, that any positive news about these two games are old and don't have concrete numbers. 500% boost to jack **** isn't still good and all periferal news, the low number of servers, closed servers and people complaining about dead servers seem to suggest DDO has also been steadily losing ground. I couldn't find anything really concrete about it's current health though, but if it was doing crazy well the company would be shouting about it at every opportunity and the few servers remaining would be packed instead of some being practically dead. It's safe to say, that while it might not be a failure by any reasonable measure, it's also faiding in to irrelevance.

To conclued there is clear evidence that suggests, that going F2P provides a short term injection of extra money and players to your game, but I can't find any reason to suggest it's a succesful long term plan. Maybe someone else can think of a game, that has been able to maintain the population and revenue well beyond the initial bump. From my point of view it seems, that the revenue model doesn't make or break your game. How good your game is and how fast and well you're able to expand upon it seems to be a much more important in ensuring long term success for a game.