It'll probably go free to play within a year. Seems like most MMOs do these days. They try to go with the old pricing model, only to find that most MMOs have a huge surge of temporary players at launch that want to try out the new kid on the block. Once the free trial period is over most of those players move on to the next big hype or back to a different game. Star Wars Old Republic was a perfect example. Huge, well known universe with Jedi light sabers, bounty hunters, space, you name it. It was backed by Bioware, Lucas Arts, and EA...pretty formidable trio. It was in development for several years. The game ended up having one of the largest population booms of any MMO at launch, but subscriptions quickly vaporized to less than half after the trials were up, and it only got worse. After several months of bleeding, and promises they wouldn't go F2P, Bioware broke down and made the switch to infuse new blood into the game.
In short, all the new MMOs figure they can at least make some development costs back with subs for the first year or so. That only goes so far though, as MMOs rarely can maintain that early base of initial subscribers. F2P is the thing now, as they give you options to spend your cash on trinkets in the game, but they also allow others to play that wouldn't otherwise throw money at the game. It helps keep populations up and keep servers active.
